Please, Mr Einstein

It's a lazy Tuesday off and I'm sitting reading - no, enjoying - a delightful book. It's Please, Mr Einstein by Jean-Claude Carriere.

I can't say very much about the content of the book yet - I'm only up to page 18, but the experience is taking me back to the 70s and 80s and books like Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid! That was a postmodern book written before everyone was talking about postmodern books.

Do you remember that spine-tingling experience of beginning to read about a favourite subject (in Hofstader's case, physics and artificial intelligence) only to find that rather than it being about physics, it's not even about thinking about physics - it's about thinking about thinking about physics?

And to cap it off, all the time I'm reading it I'm simultaneously thinking about how and why the author, here Carrerie, wrote the things he did.

For example, take pages 12-13. The girl has just asked Einstein why he chose to see her instead of the more likely candidates who were already in the waiting room when she arrived. It seems it was because she is a girl (he likes girls), but also because her presence reassured him that the human race still exists in the 21st century (Einstein has been dead for 50 years). This leads to a question of whether he is afraid that his part in the development of the atomic bomb meant he would be held responsible if the race had been wiped out?

"But responsible to whom?" she asks. "If humanity had disappeared, who would be left to blame you for it?"

"No one, you're right. But all the same ..."

Then ensues a discussion about how the young can't conceive of the concept of nothingness, entirely skipping over the question that immediately occurs to theologians like you and me, that there might still be someone to hold him responsible!

I do hope Carrerie will find his way back to such concerns further into the book, but even if he doesn't, I am enjoying what I am finding.