The hypotenuse and romance novels (by L. Sepúlveda)

It seems to me that there are few novels like Un viejo que leía novelas de amor (An Old Man Who Reads Love Novels) to relieve confinement for a while. The adventures of Antonio José Bolívar Proaño in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the trail of a man-eating jaguar have enough evocative power to take one out of the narrow confines of one’s home and transport one to the boundless densities of the Amazon jungle. Its author, the Chilean writer and “profoundly red” Luis Sepúlveda, was exiled from Chile after spending more than two years in Pinochet’s prisons, and after a life of adventure and travel, he settled in Gijón (Asturias, Spain) at the end of the 1990s, where he died on last April 16 from coronavirus.

Antonio José Bolívar’s adventures also included mathematics. When, as an old man, he tried to refine his preferences as a reader, Antonio José Bolívar tried his hand at geometry books before realising that love novels were his thing. His experience with right-angled triangles was not pleasant, but he found an unusual and portentous use for mathematics: as an escape valve for bad moods. “When reviewing geometry texts, he wondered if it was really worthwhile to know how to read”, Sepúlveda tells us about the old man, “and from those books he kept a long sentence that he would say in moments of bad mood: ‘The hypotenuse is the side opposite the right angle in a right triangle’. A phrase that later caused astonishment among the inhabitants of El Idilio, and they received it as an absurd tongue twister or an unquestionable abjuration”.

2 Comments

  1. Enredada en la atención tan diversa al alumnado ( el repetidor, el que necesita adaptación, y el que quiere aprender ) apenas he sacado tiempo y he tenido mente para la lectura. Sin embargo este es libro que he podido acabar y ¡ disfrutar!

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