Briefly Noted Book Reviews - The New Yorker

The Infinity Machine, by Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin). Demis Hassabis long dreamed of building a machine powerful enough to untangle science’s greatest mysteries. In 2010, at the age of thirty-four, he co-founded the A.I. startup DeepMind to pursue this vision. Since then, the company’s creations have solved painfully difficult problems in fields from mathematics to computational biology. One of its programs produced a solution to the so-called protein-folding problem, representing a dramatic advance in the science of drug discovery and bringing Hassabis a Nobel Prize. Mallaby, a longtime financial journalist, is a nimble storyteller, and his portrait of one of the single-minded personalities plunging the world into an uncertain future is also an engaging drama of discovery.

If This Be Magic, by Daniel Hahn (Knopf). This rich and often funny book, by a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, and French, investigates one of literature’s most challenging endeavors: replacing every word in a Shakespeare play with words from another language while having the result remain the Bard. Through interviews with translators and side-by-side comparisons of text, Hahn examines the many problems that translators face. (In Italian, for instance, far fewer common words are monosyllabic than in English, so a translated Shakespeare risks growing much longer than the original.) While exploring questions about ambiguity, order, pronouns, and even the use of A.I., Hahn’s study of literary translation widens into a reflection on the broader mysteries of language.

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Illustration by Henri Campeã

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While We Were Waiting, by Katherine Nouri Hughes (Delphinium). In this harrowing novel, two families pass long, uncertain hours in the waiting rooms of a Manhattan hospital. A venture capitalist who assesses risk for a living is helpless as his wife, beset by preeclampsia, is rushed to an emergency delivery. Nearby sits a family of Chaldean Christians exiled from Iraq—an anxious archeologist, his pregnant radiologist wife, and his imperious mother, who bought a bulletproof Maybach to transport her daughter-in-law to the hospital for the delivery. Hughes, an American writer of Iraqi and Irish descent, has an acute ear for the half spoken, whether in a doctor’s clipped bulletins or a husband’s misfired word. The novel dwells in the porous hours of waiting—the interstices in which, as the title suggests, life accrues.

Coyoteland, by Vanessa Hua (Flatiron). A sheltered, moneyed community in the Bay Area stalked by a bold coyote is the backdrop of this tautly woven novel. El Nido’s residents live overlapping lives: Jin, a struggling software engineer, helps Chinese investors flip houses—a scheme he tries to hide from his family. Meanwhile, his next-door neighbors, the Belles, are conducting not-quite-legal surveillance of the neighborhood via intelligent cameras; they see everything, except their daughter’s rapidly worsening eating disorder. At school, Jin’s oldest daughter, Jane, teams up with a Black classmate, one of few, to expose their neighbors’ prejudices and pretenses. When these schemes come to a head at a consequential house party, the fallout brings damage all around.

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