This isn’t the sort of book you love for the way the sentences are put together, or even the fundamental beauty of the plot. This is a fun story, but the beauty of it is the questions raised.

Jostein Gaarder was a philosophy teacher, and his other book Sophie’s World reads like your basic introductory philosophy course wrapped up in an Alice in Wonderland-style fantasy.

Title: The Solitaire Mystery: a novel about family and destiny
Author: Jostein Gaarder
LC Rating:

The Solitaire Mystery follows along similar lines, but it never gets didactic. The overwhelming theme here is oh what a beautiful and painful thing it is, to have a philosophically bent mind, and why the world will never be without jokers.

“It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw. He sees too deeply and too much.”

Not only is this a great book of questions, it’s a great book for re-affirming why it is that we ask these questions. The fantasy side of the story ultimately plays out as a beautiful allegory of humanity. I love this book because at no point does Gaarder try to set any kind of ultimate truth, (this is of course excluding the notion that people with philosophical inclinations are rare and lovely exeptions, but i just kind of take that as a given) he is content to set-up a story line where it is only natural to ask intriguing questions.

“Being interested in who people are and where the world comes from is such an enormously rare hobby, we are virtually the only ones doing it. Those of us who do this sort of thing live so far apart we’ve never even thought of forming our own society.”

If there is a failing here it is probably that the writing itself would be best stumbled upon at about fifteen years of age, when questions of the sort presented here are perhaps at their most painfully felt. However, this sometimes simplistic approach isn’t a critical fault, because it fits well with the subject matter.

“If our brain was simple enough for us to understand it, we would be so stupid we wouldn’t be able to understand it after all.”

Ultimately, the discriminating cognoscenti will find no real shockers or revelations in The Solitaire Mystery but what’s nice about this is the fact that you are reminded that there are others out there obsessed with these varieties of question, and the ideas, while sometimes simplistic, are presented again from a new and well thought out angle, and these kind of fundamental issues are the sort of thing that have to be considered time and time again as age and experience color our particular perspectives.

“people who are satisfied with what they know can never be philosphers.”

Both this and Sophie’s World are books that I would whole-heartedly recommend, but The Solitaire Mystery is my favorite and well, well worth the energy it takes to open it’s cover.

When I sat down to write this review, I typed out a few of my favorite bits from the book, everything in quotes above is from the text, what follows here are the quotes that I couldn’t quite fit into this exploration of my feelings about what I consider to be one hell of a good read.

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“We really ought to round up all the passengers,” he said, “and ask each and every one of them if they can tell us why they are living. Those who cannot answer, we simply throw overboard.”
“What about the children?” I asked.
“They pass the test with flying colors.”

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When you realize there is something you don’t understand then you’re generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.

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I sat thinking how terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as incredible as living. One day we suddenly take the fact that we exist for granted - and then, yes, then we don’t think about it anymore until we are about to leave the world again.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 14th, 2006 at 9:43 pm and is filed under indiscriminate, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.