![]() ![]() He celebrates here his teacher, Frau Corkhill, who taught him German conversation but, more importantly, the art of conversation itself, and it’s worth noting here that although he clearly has a prodigious intellect, he is humble and keen to explain and share rather than to look good and clever. However, he pushed himself to start reading, first encyclopaedias and dictionaries and then history books and memoirs, then trying to teach himself how dialogue works by starting to read novels. ![]() ![]() Add this to an advanced and hugely detailed synaesthesia, and he has a rich interior life most of us could only begin to imagine. He could even think of poetry in numbers. The first chapter, “Finding my Voice”, is a fascinating account of Tammet’s early obsession with numbers – he saw them as a kind of language, and while this eventually led to him holding the world record for reciting the digits of Pi, it left him ostracised at school, as he knew no one would understand. Now living in France with his husband, his latest book is a very learned but also joyful and exploratory set of essays on everything from sign language to Icelandic naming conventions, via an Englishman at the Academie Francaise and much more. You may remember Tammet from his autism memoir, Born on a Blue Day, and his fascination with words and languages as well as numbers continues until the present day. ![]()
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