Manil Suri: The City of Devi was a mathematically impossible novel
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That was what math professor Manil Suri concluded after looking over his charts and notes in the midst of writing his new novel, The City of Devi. But then he realized that, with all logical possibilities exhausted, he was free, writes Manil Suri in The Daily Beast.
In September, 2009, while on a four-week writing retreat at the Ucross Colony in Clearmont, Wyoming, I came to a startling realization. The novel, The City of Devi, that I’d started nine years ago was hopeless—I needed to abandon it. No matter how I proceeded, I would not be able to tie up its myriad strands. I even had a mathematical proof of this fact!
