timmyjimi

Last Spring, before returning from Norway, I got started on a book that I had intended to read for some time.  It had come along with me from the States, though I could have just as easily purchased a copy in the original language while abroad.  When he published Sophie’s World in 1994, Jostein Gaarder, a former philosophy teacher, was already an award-winning Norwegian author.  Since then, his book has been translated into over fifty languages, become a New York Times Bestseller, and achieved the top spot on bestseller lists throughout Europe.

The book is subtitled “A Novel About the History of Philosophy.”  Oddly enough, the story takes place in a small Norwegian town and centers around the philosophical escapades of a young teenager named Sophie, who begins to question the nature of her existence when she receives an anonymous letter posing two questions: “Who are you?” and “Where does the world come from?”  While it is difficult for Sophie to decide which is more mysterious – the unidentified sender or the questions themselves – she soon finds herself attempting to answer the age-old questions of the universe with the help of a new philosophy teacher.

Sophie and her teacher begin in the Garden of Eden and continue through the Norse myths until they meet the great philosophers of ancient Greece: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.  Next comes the clash of Hellenism with the rapid rise and radical propositions of Christianity, followed by the Middle Ages, the Rennaissance, and the Baroque periods.  As they enter the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the modern era, Sophie’s lessons become directly focused on thinkers of the day like Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Kierkrgaard, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, and Sartre.

While interacting with her philosophy teacher, Sophie also starts to receive a series of curious postcards addressed to a girl named Hilde, whose existence increasingly seems to mirror her own in some sort of parallel universe.  As Sophie applies her lessons in philosophy, she closes in on the true identity, not only of Hilde, but also herself and the world in which she lives.

Because I am a slow reader, what initially deterred me from reading the book was it’s sheer size: five hundred pages that lasted me through most of the Summer.  But because Gaarder takes the brilliant approach of telling his story through the mind of a young student, the broad progression of philosophical thought is presented in a way that makes it both entertaining and easy to follow.  Granted, I appreciate the novel’s setting more than the average reader and concede that a more academic survey of philosophy may harmlessly omit specific Scandinavian influences.  As this is the limit to Gaarder’s personal bias, however, he is to be applauded.  One notable exception is his assumption of evolutionary theory in the final chapters, but this is not enough to detract from the utility of his book as an accessible reference manual of philosophical history.  In fact, I have already revisited chapters of the book to recall a particular subject, and I look forward to rereading Sophie’s World in full.