Manny’s Reviews > Zio Albert e i buchi neri > Status Update

*Ciao... hm..." Abbassò lo sguardo sul foglio che teneva davanti a sé. "Gedanken. Un nome davvero insolito. Come si pronuncia? Con 'gh' come 'ghepardo', o con 'g' come 'gelato'?"

Aha! Uncle Albert doesn't wear socks. I suspected as much.

Well, in that case I guess I can stop worrying about the nature of his relationship with his niece. If you can't trust Einstein to behave appropriately towards a much younger woman, who can you trust?

Chapter 4. The one where Uncle Albert is explaining that gravitational fields can be thought of as depressions in a soft surface and his sparky teen niece says it's like her parents' uncomfortable mattress and Uncle Albert invites her to consider the case where there are a larger number of bodies in the bed and the metaphor kind of gets out of control.

Did anyone else notice that the heroine of this 1991 novel is a bright teen called Gedanken, German for "thought", who has an uncle called Albert that teaches her physics in a magical-realist way, while the heroine of Jostein Gaarder's 1991 novel Sofies verden is a bright teen called Sofie, Greek for "wisdom", who has a father called Albert that teaches her philosophy in a magical-realist way?