The Philosopher as Sugar Daddy

Jostein Gaarder
Sofie világa: Regény a filozófia történetérõl,
Tr. by Adrienne Szölõssi,
Budapest: Pesti Szalon Könyvkiadó, 1995. 577 pp.
 (English edition: Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy,
Tr. by Paulette Moller,
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994)

 


The Norwegian author's world-famous novel revolves around the following plot: Sophie Amundsen, whose fifteenth birthday is a few weeks away, receives two mysterious letters in the mail. Each envelope contains a slip of paper with just one question. "Who are you?", reads the first missive; "How did the world come to be?", reads the second. The naive young girl is jolted into the recognition of how little everyday experience can offer by way of an answer to these questions. Not surprisingly, the experience leaves her defenseless, and receptive to philosophical reflection. Her tutor is Alberto Knox, "a middle-aged man with dark hair and a little pointed beard" (p. 1351), who crops up from nowhere, and hounds Sophie through the entire history of philosophy from Thales to Jean-Paul Sartre within the space of a month. Initially, it's a "correspondence course": the discourses on the Presocratics, Plato and Aristotle are left in Sophie's mailbox in large manila envelopes, along with a video cassette on Athenian architecture. Once they get to medieval philosophy, however, Alberto holds the lectures in person.

 About halfway through the book, we learn that what we've been reading so far is a novel within a novel. The story of Sophie and Alberto's philosophical trysts was invented as a present for his daughter Hilde's fifteenth birthday by Albert Möller Knag, a Norwegian major stationed with the UN forces in the Lebanon. Sophie and Alberto, however, aware that they are only figments of Major Knag's imagination, try to break out of the fiction. Their success is equivocal, at best: though they manage to outwit their creator and escape from the plot, at the end of the book we see them wandering as lost spirits, immortal but unable to make contact with the flesh and blood characters of the novel, save perhaps Hilde, who senses their presence.

 It is an exercise in futility to look for analogies or correlations between the didactic plane&emdash;Alberto's philosophy course&emdash;and the narrative. The one is totally independent of the other.

 [...]

 Gaarder's real purpose is obscured by his clumsy style, and must remain a mystery. It is symptomatic, however, that the fifteen- year-old Sophie's philosophical education in the novel is, in effect, the story of her loss of innocence.

 Finally a point on which we have no quarrel with the author: loss of innocence it is.

Kornél Steiger


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