Quando la letteratura gioca con i numeri

The present paper has as it's theme the five tales of Florin Manolescu: “The Magician” (published in The Mystery of the Locked Room, Humanitas, 2009); “A Christmas Tale”, “A Scandal in Bucarest”; “The Serendipity” and “The Last Tale” (all published in The Mentalist, Cartea Românească, 2009). The subject of all these tales is constituted by the adventures of a very special protagonist: the cat Motaș, whose supernatural powers let him interact, as equals, with his “human” friend, Albert Jochemko, an astronomer. The present paper examines the first two of the tales of the “Motaș cycle”: “The Magician” and “A Christmas Tale”, in which some of the most interesting 20th century theories of mathematics and physics are used as the narrative frame within which take place the adventures of a book of Dimov, lost between the past and the future