A brilliant mathematician mistreated by Einstein, the adventures of Alexander the Great, the sentimental dissolution of the USSR according to Haratischwili and other books of the week

“You will abstain from any relationship with me, unless necessary for social reasons,” Albert Einstein communicated in 1914 to his first wife, Mileva Maric.

A message in which she intended for her to give up spending time with him at home and taking trips together.

And also that she agreed to wash his clothes, prepare three meals a day and clean his room and office (which only he would use).

The future Nobel Prize winner had fallen in love with his cousin Elsa Löwenthal - they would end up marrying in 1919 - and he thought of turning his then partner, whom he met in 1896 (they married in 1903), into his maid. he.

Milena Einstein was already a brilliant mathematician, who contributed her knowledge to develop the theories of the revolutionary physicist, and decided to abandon Einstein and move to Zurich with her children and the scientist's commitment to provide an economic amount for their education and maintenance.

All this is told in

a story in which Slavenka Drakulic tells the terrible life circumstances of an extraordinary woman to whom perhaps the history of science has not given sufficient recognition.

Another notable title of the week is

by Nino Haratischwili, a narrative by the Georgian author with the decline of the Soviet republics, in the confusing years of the dissolution of the USSR, in the background.

Dina, Nene, Ira and Keto, the protagonists, are 14 years old and live in Tbilisi.

And the author, based in Germany, contrasts the memory of that time of happiness in full adolescent innocence with the historical earthquake that shook her country.

30 years later, three of them meet in an exhibition in Brussels in front of a photo of those times taken by the fourth, Dina, who died two decades earlier, and hand in hand with the image the reader enters “the tunnel that leads to a story of pain, frustration, violence, betrayal, but also of permanence: that of friendship and that of the value of art,” according to the writer Leonardo Padura in his review of the novel.

In addition, Babelia critics have also reviewed titles this week such as

by Inaba Mayumi, a novel of connection with nature with the pause and delicacy typical of Japanese literature;

in which Jordi Soler mixes Greek and Mexican mythologies to confront two forms of power: beauty and terror;

a set of almost connected stories by the Catalan Gemma Ruiz Palà in which there is no lack of emotion or fine irony;

or the volume entitled

, prepared by Carlos García Gual and which brings together two stories about the Macedonian conqueror, one,

by the author known as Pseudo Callisthenes—because it was initially attributed to the historian Callisthenes, a contemporary of the king—and another,

of unknown authorship, since it is a compendium of traditional texts collected by tradition.

Finally, two essays stand out:

by Pablo Bustinduy and Jorge Lago;

and

, in which 'The Economist' correspondent Michael Reid describes the political, social and economic scene with an intelligent and neutral look combined with the intellectual passion of the traveler in love with his pilgrimage.

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