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Si nunca te has interesado en la Filosofía, te aseguro que este libro clavara esta palabra en tu mente. Esto, sobretodo, si eres de aquellos que temen los libros textuales y formuleros. Pero si has incursionado en alguna corriente filosófica con alguna profundidad, no mires este libro deseando analizar lo que seguramente ya sabes de la corriente que deseas, porque es seguro que sabes mas que lo que aquí se presenta. Pero, como quiera que sea, como sucede con cualquier libro, siempre tendrás algo que aprender de el.
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So happens with The Solitaire Mystery. It's got all of the characteristics that made Sophie's World a masterpiece: it starts out as a fairly simple story, then it tangles on another one or two intertwining stories, that evolve (as we go through them) parallel to the major story. It's got great (but controlled) imagination, and creates a beautiful atmosphere in the reader's mind, through the most successful description of places and events. Of course, all the stories come to become one at the end, and it ends almost as simply and nicely as it begun.
Overall, The Solitaire Mystery is a truly beautiful story. It's written in a simple but skilled manner, thus allowing it to be read any time of the day - it's a fast read too, since it manages to capture me and not let me go, something that very few books can do (to me!). So, here's another Gaarder classic!
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This story is about a boy named Hans Thomas who left with his father to Athens looking for his mother that eight years before had left home trying to find herself. In his way to Greece a midget gave him a magnifying glass and then the baker of a town named Dorf gave him a very tiny book inside a bun. This book has the story of his family curse and make him realized what's his destiny and solve the mystery of why his mother run away to Athens.
With this story the author wants to show the readers how wonderful and amazing life is. Just the fact of being alive is powerful and impressive. The human beings had being able to create an incredible world full of technologies that make life more comfortable and easy, but they haven't being able to realize neither how complex and organized nature and life are, nor the answer for the most basic questions like who are we? Where do we come from? How did we just appear on earth? Is there more live outside this planet?
There are just a few that maybe don't have the answers for these questions, but these questions are in their minds all the time, they are awake, they open their eyes and astonished they admire even the most little and insignificant thing. And those few are the jokers of the packs, "the ones who see too much and too deep".
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The fantasy tale makes this an easy read but the lessons learned are definitely not child's play. "An answer is always the stretch of road tha's behind you. Only a quetion can point the way forward". Simple but nontheless true words of wisdom.
In the story, Gaarder explains the fundamental...... things can be so alike that they are different. You and me could be alike but the experiences we share each day are different and no 2 days are ordinary 'cause they are diffrent.
Read Gaarder - he makes you think and reflect on the fundamental things we may too occupied with our daily lives to think about.
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The story is told in an interesting way so if you read the book directly whilst ignoring the blurb on the book then you'll be confused whilst reading the very first page. "Dear Camilla," it starts. From this you can tell it's in the format of a letter. The story itself which is explained in the letter is about eight year old Joe who is about to become a big brother. The letter is written when Joe is now an 'uncle' and he writes to his niece, Camilla (his baby brother's daughter) about his experience the day his little brother (Camilla's father) was born. Whilst Joe parents are at the hospital waiting for the new baby to arrive and Joe has to stay home alone until his aunt comes. When looking outside the window Joe spots a tiny little boy hanging upside down in an apply tree in the garden. This little boy does not have any features that can be called human but both he and Joe are very alike. Mika has accidently fallen out of his spaceship and needs to go back home but he has so much he wants to know about planet earth. Joe explains everything to him about how dinosaurs roamed the earth and what a telephone is aswell as teaching Mika how to fish too. And the Mika tells Joe about his home. Mika is from Eljo, where babies hatch out of eggs and how the water in Eljo got so polluted that there is no longer any water or mammals. They talk about a lot of things and learn a great deal from each other. About how questions are more precious than answers and why gravity doesn't exist on every planet.
"Hello? Is Anybody There?" is the perfect book to read to your children etc and a wonderful book to give as a presant to anyone. Anyone over the age of 7 should find this book interesting to read. It's in the style of "The Little Prince" and has conversations that remind you of "Alice in Wonderland". I certainly enjoyed it by the end of the book-do give it a go.
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The next moment, here was a small boy hanging in the apple tree. "Who are you?" he asked.
"My name's Joe," I said.
"And I'm Mika. Why are you standing upside down?" I couldn't help laughing. He suddenly stuck a thumb into his mouth and began to suck it like a baby. Maybe he was embarrassed.
"You're the one who's upside down," I said. Mika pulled the thumb out of his mouth, and all his fingers began to wave. "When two people meet," he said, "and one is upside down, it isn't always easy to tell which of them is the right way up."
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Gaarder says he discovered the letter in 1995 while shopping in an antique bookstore in Buenos Aires, Argentina and agreed to purchase it from the owner for a little more than $12,000 even though it was uncertain at the time as to its authenticity. Following an examination of the letter's style, terminology and grammar, however, Gaarder says he became convinced it could have only originated in medieval days.
The letter, titled the Codex Floriae, if indeed genuine, represents a major historical find. Over the centuries, very little has come to light regarding the lover of St. Augustine and their son Adeodatus. We do know that they lived together for several years in North Africa and Italy before Augustine's conversion into the Christian faith. Previously, all that has been known about Floria Aemilia has been derived from Augustine's own writings, chiefly his famous autobiographical Confessions.
In That Same Flower, however, Floria Aemilia writes candidly of her relationship with Augustine and of her feelings about his conversion. At times she corroborates what Augustine, himself has written and portrays him as a man prone to attacks of anguish and confusion. The major part of the letter, however, is dedicated to a bitter denouncement of Augustine's decision to separate forever from both Aemilia and their son. Aemilia, it is clear does not share Augustine's faith in a God that "desires above all that man should live in abstinence...I have no faith in such a God."
Augustine, himself, suffered deep sorrow over his decision to part from Aemilia. In his Confessions, he laments, "The woman I lived with was not permitted to stay at my side...My heart, which was deeply attached to her, was pierced, and wounded so that it bled...My wound, inflicted when my relationship with the woman I lived with was brought to an end, would not heal either."
Augustine's pain, however, pales in comparison to the anguish that surges forth from Aemilia's writings. Her distress is convincing and compelling and we feel the enormity of her pain. The victim of Augustine's conversion, Aemilia expresses her heartbreak most eloquently in her letter. "My heart," she says, suffered the same hurt...for we were two souls torn from each other...because you loved the salvation of your own soul more than you loved me."
Augustine's mother, Monica was one of the factors that led to the end of Aemilia's relationship with Augustine. Monica, described as a willful and ambitious woman, by Aemilia, and one who opposed her, banished Aemilia from the household and arranged for what she assumed would be a more suitable engagement for Augustine. Rightfully expecting Augustine to come to her defense, Aemilia was crushed and defeated when he refused to do so, even though he later withdrew from the engagement.
Augustine, however, also refused to return to the one woman he truly loved. Convinced that eternal damnation could only be avoided by a total renouncement of the pleasures of the body, he withdrew from all physical pleasure, including the company of Aemilia.
Aemilia, herself, has no sympathy for Augustine's views. Instead, she views them with the utmost contempt, having no faith in a God who places the existential and spiritual worth of a man over that of a woman. "I don't believe in a God," she writes, "who lays waste to a woman's life in order to save a man's soul."
Aemilia also writes much of the medieval "theologians and Platonists" who were the influential players in Augustine's intellectual and spiritual development. Their ideas, she says, transformed Augustine from a man living a carefree existence into a God-fearing mortifier of his own flesh. Aemilia denounces these men as ruling within a "dark labyrinth" and swears that Augustine was misguided by them.
Scored with the basic theme of Augustine's anti-materialism and aversion to bodily appetites, Aemilia accuses him of carrying his denial of physical gratification to extremes, regarding everything from eating nutritious food to listening to an enjoyable piece of music as a sin against God.
And, in his Confessions, Augustine writes that the sense of hearing "offers its perilous enticements" and that "I still find satisfaction in the melodies to which your words give life and should when they are sung artistically by a fine voice...So I sin in this without noticing; but after I feel it is sin."
After reading Aemilia's letter, it is difficult to put complete faith in Augustine's self-righteous insensitivity to natural human desires, especially when one considers his weaknesses and imperfections and the severe background of his religious convictions.
Aemilia shared this disbelief and Augustine's conversion failed to convince her about the necessity of "despising this life, and about how good it is to die." It did, however, remind her of the priceless value she, herself, placed of the here-and-now. She comes to the conclusion that "it must be human arrogance to reject this life--with all its earthly joys--in favor of an existence which is, perhaps, merely an abstraction...We must first live...then we can philosophize."
We must learn to embrace both the fruits and the beauty of our own humanity and to cherish and nurture our existence during our short and precious time here on earth. This is Floria Aemilia's message to the world; the message that she went to great lengths to nurture and preserve in the letter that became That Same Flower.
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I think it is genuine. Gaarder is not the kind of man to lie about this. With all his footnotes and even a referance to his Latin teacher at "Katta", I think he is telling the truth about how he found Codex Floriae.
Read this book! It is a beautiful lovestory, and a great introduction to the philosophical questions around St. Augustine.
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It will make you integrate with Christmas ambiance and spirit, and really make you feel very... "christmassy"! At the same time, its quite entertaining and simplistic style makes it readable during any time of the day. If it grips you as it did me, you could read it overnight, although I preferred to read one chapter each day of December, as the book is designed.
Overall, if you're looking for a simple and yet clever Christmas story, for you or your kid(s), this is the one!
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Is the story just a fantasy story, or is Elisabet a real girl, doing a real travel?
The Christmas Story tells us about all this, and alot more. For our family it is a must every Christmas. Not all kids want to listen to it every year, but mother will keep on reading it as long as her eyes allows her :-)
Britt Arnhild Lindland
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Through A Glass Darkly is a touching and moving story about a young girl who is about to die. Cecila and Ariel are amusing and interesting characters who manage to present death in a touching way without being trite. It also will keep you thinking about several philosophical and theological issues, which Jostein Gaardner has covered in an open and simple manner.
Through A Glass Darkly is written simply but manages to convey powerful messages about life, death, God and the universe. It will keep you thinking, but keep the tissues near. It's sad but touching.
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However, the story surrounding the correspondence course is not that well written, in my opinion. This is not a work of an author who wishes to tell a story, to relate to mankind etc. The story is in a sense skilfully developed, but that is not enough to create a really, really good read. I think that Gaarder fails to create trustworthy characters. The reader does not identify with them (at least I did not, and I had the same problem with Das Kartengesheimnis). There is also in some places a strange lack of empathy between the characters.
That Gaarder does not write that good fiction, in my opinion, does not mean that this is not a very good book, and I still recommend it.
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'Sophie's World' is at its worst when it pretends to be the sort of novel you would read purely for entertainment. That's because it starts out as a very good novel but finishes as a very bad one. Early on it catches your interest with an intriguing mystery and efficient classical narrative. Then about half way through, the author reveals his hand and ruins the plot. We are left with just another bit of post-modern ironic detachment or some such gimmick. From then on the fate of the characters ceases to matter, and as a novel it's all downhill from there on.
The book is at its best when it sticks to what Gaarder does best: lecturing on philosophy. This is where the fictive elements work best - by providing a character to voice the questions in our own heads. The author shows a good gra!sp of what will make sense to an uninformed reader, and provides a gentle ramble through a couple of dozen centuries of human thought that will help most people's understanding of the world in which we live.
That is not to say that Gaarder dispatches all periods in history with equal aplomb. His dealing with the metaphysical and ontological abstractions (jargon-free equivalent = world of ideas) of ancient Greece and the middle ages is exemplary. He manages to explain the more-or-less-unexplainable in terms of the easily-understood, in a way that more school texts should copy. Even the prickly thickets of 20th century existentialism yield up some of their unappetizing secrets under his patient hand.
Gaarder is least successful in dealing with creeds that go beyond pure ideas and involve a challenge to behaviour and lifestyle. His treatment of Marxism (which is not so much about ideas as it is about action) is shallow. His survey of Christianity (which is not about! ideas at all, but entirely about relationships) is derisory.
Amazon's warehouses contain better novels (for a first-class Scandinavian novel of ideas, try "Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow") and better introductions to philosophy (e.g. Alain de Botton's 'Consolations of Philosophy'). In the end, however, 'Sophie's World' is surprisingly successful as a hybrid - it makes learning fun and deserves to be read.
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