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The Organs of Sense
In 1666, an astronomer makes a prediction shared by no one else in the world: At the stroke of noon on June 30 of that year, a solar eclipse will cast all of Europe into total darkness for four seconds. This astronomer is rumored to be using the largest telescope ever built, but he is also known to be blind—both his eyes have been plucked out under mysterious circumstances. Is he mad? Or does he, despite this impairment, have an insight denied the other scholars of his day?
These questions intrigue the young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—not yet the world-renowned polymath who would go on to discover calculus, but a nineteen-year-old whose faith in reason is shaky at best. Leibniz sets off to investigate the astronomer’s claim, and in the three hours before the eclipse occurs—or fails to occur—the astronomer tells the scholar the story behind his strange prediction: a tale that ends up encompassing kings and princes, family squabbles, insanity, art, loss, and the horrors of war.
Acclaimed author Adam Ehrlich Sachs brings his unique comic and philosophical sensibilities to his first novel, The Organs of Sense, an intricate nested fable equating our inability to truly understand the world with our inability to understand our own messy families.
These questions intrigue the young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—not yet the world-renowned polymath who would go on to discover calculus, but a nineteen-year-old whose faith in reason is shaky at best. Leibniz sets off to investigate the astronomer’s claim, and in the three hours before the eclipse occurs—or fails to occur—the astronomer tells the scholar the story behind his strange prediction: a tale that ends up encompassing kings and princes, family squabbles, insanity, art, loss, and the horrors of war.
Acclaimed author Adam Ehrlich Sachs brings his unique comic and philosophical sensibilities to his first novel, The Organs of Sense, an intricate nested fable equating our inability to truly understand the world with our inability to understand our own messy families.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published May 21, 2019
68 people are currently reading
3455 people want to read
About the author
Adam Ehrlich Sachs
4 books112 followersAdam Ehrlich Sachs is the author of three books: Gretel and the Great War, The Organs of Sense, and Inherited Disorders. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, and Harper’s Magazine, and he was a finalist for the Believer Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin, and he lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 132 reviews
June 30, 2024
I have a pet theory that Bernhard—either directly or through W. G. Sebald, his glum disciple—is the hidden influence behind a huge swath, maybe the main swath, of contemporary fiction.
Adam Erlich Sachs -https://www.bookforum.com/interviews/...
The Organs of Sense is clearly Bernhard influenced but a novel that dials up the humour which critics often miss in the great author's work, and takes it to the realms of absurdity. As Sachs said in another interview (https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_featur...
The novel begins:
In an account sent to the Philosophical Transactions but for some reason never published there, or anywhere else, a young G. W. Leibniz, who throughout his life was an assiduous inquirer into miracles and other aberrations of nature, related the odd and troubling encounter he had with a certain astronomer who’d predicted that at noon on the last day of June 1666, the brightest time of day at nearly the brightest time of year, the Moon would pass very briefly, but very precisely, be-tween the Sun and the Earth, casting all of Europe for one instant in absolute darkness, “a darkness without equal in our history, but lasting no longer than four seconds,” the astronomer predicted, according to Leibniz, an eclipse that no other astronomer in Europe was predicting, and which, Leibniz explained, drew his notice in part because the astronomer in question, whose observations of the planets and the fixed stars were supposedly among the most accurate and the most precise ever made, superior to Tycho’s, was blind, and “not merely completely blind,” Leibniz wrote (in my translation from the Latin), “but in fact entirely without eyes.”
The plot tells, or rather tells of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz telling, a story of how he journeyed to a remote mountainside to find this astronomer, in order to determine whether he was sane based on both his assessment, after talking to him, and the observation of whether the forecast eclipse comes to pass - a digression follows on the various logical consequences of the different combinations of the assessment and the eclipse.
Leibniz arrives three hours before noon, and the novel consists of the conversation with the astronomer that follows. The astronomer is attempting to explain how he lost his sight and how he can still see the stars through his telescope, and indeed how he came into possession of an enormous telescope at such a remote location, an instrument he indeed claims to have invented ahead of the many other claimants.
His story digresses into an almost farcical tale of the court of Emperor Rudolf II from almost 60 years earlier, and one that leads to the Bernhardian trademark of nested layers of relayed stories, here one, as the author has noted (https://believermag.com/logger/an-int...) might be appropriately dubbed "telescopic".
A review from Nathan Knapp in Music and Literature: https://www.musicandliterature.org/re... explains how well how this is both is Bernhardian and is a unique work in its own right:
A wonderful book with much to say about 17th century rationalism, astronomy, logic, the Holy Roman Empire and more, but above all very funny. 4.5 stars
Adam Erlich Sachs -https://www.bookforum.com/interviews/...
The Organs of Sense is clearly Bernhard influenced but a novel that dials up the humour which critics often miss in the great author's work, and takes it to the realms of absurdity. As Sachs said in another interview (https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_featur...
I think that writing has to be funny, at least, in order to be Fiction with a capital F. (It’s necessary, if not sufficient.) There is a well-known process by which writers suck out the comedy of better authors, and then become more famous and better read than those better authors. I’m thinking of Sebald sucking out the comedy of Bernhard, leaving only the themes and the syntax, and then becoming more famous than Bernhard, and Coetzee sucking out the comedy of Beckett and becoming better read than Beckett. You take a great author, you suck out the comedy, and then because seriousness is so prized by critics, and comedy so misunderstood, you immediately become famous — it’s very straightforward. So the clear and present danger for me in the literary world is always too much seriousness, not too much comedy. The problem with serious writing is that it assumes there is something intrinsically meaningful about the world, which I think even bad comedy understands is totally mistaken.
The novel begins:
In an account sent to the Philosophical Transactions but for some reason never published there, or anywhere else, a young G. W. Leibniz, who throughout his life was an assiduous inquirer into miracles and other aberrations of nature, related the odd and troubling encounter he had with a certain astronomer who’d predicted that at noon on the last day of June 1666, the brightest time of day at nearly the brightest time of year, the Moon would pass very briefly, but very precisely, be-tween the Sun and the Earth, casting all of Europe for one instant in absolute darkness, “a darkness without equal in our history, but lasting no longer than four seconds,” the astronomer predicted, according to Leibniz, an eclipse that no other astronomer in Europe was predicting, and which, Leibniz explained, drew his notice in part because the astronomer in question, whose observations of the planets and the fixed stars were supposedly among the most accurate and the most precise ever made, superior to Tycho’s, was blind, and “not merely completely blind,” Leibniz wrote (in my translation from the Latin), “but in fact entirely without eyes.”
The plot tells, or rather tells of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz telling, a story of how he journeyed to a remote mountainside to find this astronomer, in order to determine whether he was sane based on both his assessment, after talking to him, and the observation of whether the forecast eclipse comes to pass - a digression follows on the various logical consequences of the different combinations of the assessment and the eclipse.
Leibniz arrives three hours before noon, and the novel consists of the conversation with the astronomer that follows. The astronomer is attempting to explain how he lost his sight and how he can still see the stars through his telescope, and indeed how he came into possession of an enormous telescope at such a remote location, an instrument he indeed claims to have invented ahead of the many other claimants.
His story digresses into an almost farcical tale of the court of Emperor Rudolf II from almost 60 years earlier, and one that leads to the Bernhardian trademark of nested layers of relayed stories, here one, as the author has noted (https://believermag.com/logger/an-int...) might be appropriately dubbed "telescopic".
A review from Nathan Knapp in Music and Literature: https://www.musicandliterature.org/re... explains how well how this is both is Bernhardian and is a unique work in its own right:
It’s Bernhard who is Sachs’s primary lodestar here, to much greater effect than some of the other Bernhard-influenced work that has finally (finally!) begun to appear, slinking in under the cover of darkness, talons bared, into the dead-fall-filled forest of the American novel. Which is not to say that The Organs of Sense is an imitation, though it does at times seem to imitate, mostly through its resolutely Bernhardian syntax, through its habit of stating that so-and-so-said, remarked so-and-so, reported so-and-so, a form that honestly ought to be named after the vituperative Austrian, who so adored syntactical collections of threes, as in vituperative, abusive, and malicious, or monstrous, atrocious, and egregious, which are all words one might apply to Bernhard’s technique of remorseless, pitiless, merciless, and occasionally even malignant prose, along with the serpentine sentences, tangled throughout both Bernhard’s corpus and Sachs’s Organs. Sachs, in interviews, has said he is sensitive on the subject of being influenced by Bernhard, while admitting same, and has even stated that he thinks Bernhard is the great unremarked influence on all contemporary fiction, an assertion I’m in total agreement with, providing one excepts most American fiction, which still runs in more or less the same channels of alternately dreary and ecstatic realism that it has since the salad days of Carver, Roth, Pynchon, and their various acolytes.
A wonderful book with much to say about 17th century rationalism, astronomy, logic, the Holy Roman Empire and more, but above all very funny. 4.5 stars
February 20, 2019
This was more of an experimental read or unconventional, if you prefer, and boy, did it not work for me. In fact, it should have had really added non in its title for a more accurate description. It was easy enough to get what the author was going for…an absurdist historical comedy, but…but it was mainly just absurd. The plot was like a one punch joke stretched out too long, it’s in fact quite difficult to adequately describe and since the book summary did the work, I’ll leave it at that. The comedy came from a sort of repetetiveness best demonstrated by the muffin man…Do you know the muffin man? The muffin man? The muffin man…etc. But with a more time appropriate vocabulary, so words like glockenspiel. It goes on and on in seemingly unending serpentine sentences, virtually paragraph and dialect free. Characters ramble on in meandering monologues. The book moves like a drunk and reads like a fugue state. I mean, objectively it is the sort of thing someone might enjoy, but at best it is very, very much an acquired taste. And otherwise it’s just a complete waste of time. An eclectic selection that didn’t pan out really. I don’t especially like the saying, but this one might have been too clever for its own good. Although it seems to have gotten great reviews everywhere. Thanks Netgalley.
March 18, 2019
I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway. The opinion expressed in this review is my own.
This book is completely absurd which is exactly it's purpose. If you are expecting something different, it's not in there. It's how the book was written and how it's supposed to be. It's not a book that everyone will fancy but I enjoyed it.
Have you ever wondered why it's so difficult to understand some people? This book covers the conversation between the blind astronomer and a philosopher/mathematician. There is much at stake regarding this conversation and the events predicted by the astronomer. The author does an amazing job of weaving it all together into an absurd story that is quite fantastic and not your average thriller, because it is that, above and beyond the humor. If you are a fan of Philosophy and the absurd, you will love this book.
This book is completely absurd which is exactly it's purpose. If you are expecting something different, it's not in there. It's how the book was written and how it's supposed to be. It's not a book that everyone will fancy but I enjoyed it.
Have you ever wondered why it's so difficult to understand some people? This book covers the conversation between the blind astronomer and a philosopher/mathematician. There is much at stake regarding this conversation and the events predicted by the astronomer. The author does an amazing job of weaving it all together into an absurd story that is quite fantastic and not your average thriller, because it is that, above and beyond the humor. If you are a fan of Philosophy and the absurd, you will love this book.
April 24, 2020
Quite popular in contemporary lit is to write in the tradition that goes from Kleist to Walser to Kafka to Bernhard. Adam Ehrlich Sachs does this. He does it well. Despite being a direct descendant of Bernhard, and admitting to it, he shares very little with W.G. Sebald and Teju Cole. Sachs holds up the tradition by way of absurdity, like a young Donald Antrim. His sentences are long and paragraphs last for pages, but the length is much more inline with Kafka than to Bernhard. So if you need to pee or grab a coffee or answer a call or file taxes, you don't have to worry about losing the cadence of a hundred page paragraph. There are breaks. On the other hand, Sachs prose has the rhythm of Bernhard's. The he said she said he said she saids, the I feel that you feel that I feel that he feels, and, of course, the refrain that acts as breath at the end of a long sentence.
With all these similarities you might ask "Why not just read Bernhard? Why not just read Kafka?" Well, for one, I think Sachs is funnier. Really, if you need one reason to read this, read it just to see that this style can get even funnier than the works of Kafka and Bernhard, but still be literary. If you need another reason, read it for the fresh perspective: Sachs isn't a writer manufactured in a college writing program. He comes from the world of science, more specifically, the history of science. Plus, he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. In the Organs of Sense, Sachs blends those two aspects of his life to give us an absurd meditation of solipsism set in the seventeenth century.
Sorry this is all over the place!
Here are some excerpts:
"Neither could've understood how the popping into being of a point of prettily twinkling luminosity overhead could bring to the imperial face such an expression of horror."
"That feeling of being in love is the feeling, Heinrich realized, of ones head being no longer equilibrated with the cosmos but being instead perilously albeit pleasurably out of equilibrium with it, overinflated with private associations that must at all costs be discharged, or pumped, into the head of the loved one."
Sachs forces his characters to find themselves in the kernels of other characters, to see their expressions on the expressions of others, resulting in a word entirely in their head, in a world that will go with them when they go, in a world of solipsism. Then, when his character's world seems most in them rather than outside of them, Sachs defies them not to crack skulls and get a look at the workings. Sachs defies his characters to live not knowing.
With all these similarities you might ask "Why not just read Bernhard? Why not just read Kafka?" Well, for one, I think Sachs is funnier. Really, if you need one reason to read this, read it just to see that this style can get even funnier than the works of Kafka and Bernhard, but still be literary. If you need another reason, read it for the fresh perspective: Sachs isn't a writer manufactured in a college writing program. He comes from the world of science, more specifically, the history of science. Plus, he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. In the Organs of Sense, Sachs blends those two aspects of his life to give us an absurd meditation of solipsism set in the seventeenth century.
Sorry this is all over the place!
Here are some excerpts:
"Neither could've understood how the popping into being of a point of prettily twinkling luminosity overhead could bring to the imperial face such an expression of horror."
"That feeling of being in love is the feeling, Heinrich realized, of ones head being no longer equilibrated with the cosmos but being instead perilously albeit pleasurably out of equilibrium with it, overinflated with private associations that must at all costs be discharged, or pumped, into the head of the loved one."
Sachs forces his characters to find themselves in the kernels of other characters, to see their expressions on the expressions of others, resulting in a word entirely in their head, in a world that will go with them when they go, in a world of solipsism. Then, when his character's world seems most in them rather than outside of them, Sachs defies them not to crack skulls and get a look at the workings. Sachs defies his characters to live not knowing.
January 29, 2020
This is, from the beginning, a delightful frolic through absurd philosophically circular syllogisms. Some readers will have little patience for the simple repetitious style of silly humor, but I loved it. In fact, if I were bedridden, and dependent on others to read to me, I would relish having someone read this very book to me. If they would dress in period costume and use ridiculous voices, all the better. Julia Child, Monty Python, Miss Piggy, whatever . . . surprise me! It's that preposterous at first, and well, for most of the book. There's not a lot of cohesion to the narrative until the very, very end.
The plot, if you can call it as such, must first increase to a laughable crescendo. This joyful ride picks up more characters as it goes along, each acting as a perpetual non-sequitor machine, everyone bouncing along, batting comparatives and superlatives back and forth like speech beach balls. Effectively, there are stories nesting within stories, and multiple interrupting oblivious soliloquies.
Unless I'm reading too much into it, I swear there are several swipes at the Age of Reason, and at some or all of the great logicians, scientists and thinkers: all of the astronomers, Descartes, and even a veiled swipe at Schrödinger's cat. Eventually, there is a big payoff. I was glad that I read 'til the end, though I still closed the book and asked myself "WTF did I just read?!?"
The plot, if you can call it as such, must first increase to a laughable crescendo. This joyful ride picks up more characters as it goes along, each acting as a perpetual non-sequitor machine, everyone bouncing along, batting comparatives and superlatives back and forth like speech beach balls. Effectively, there are stories nesting within stories, and multiple interrupting oblivious soliloquies.
Unless I'm reading too much into it, I swear there are several swipes at the Age of Reason, and at some or all of the great logicians, scientists and thinkers: all of the astronomers, Descartes, and even a veiled swipe at Schrödinger's cat. Eventually, there is a big payoff. I was glad that I read 'til the end, though I still closed the book and asked myself "WTF did I just read?!?"
January 2, 2020
Adam Ehrlich Sachs has some skills and for me the fun of this book was seeing how long he could sustain what he started. In answer, he took it quite a distance and although the ending may leave some unfulfilled, it was a pleasure to watch Sachs get as far as he did. He starts off with the philosopher, Leibniz, seeking to investigate in 1666 the prediction of an eclipse by a blind astronomer who is "not merely completely blind, but in fact entirely without eyes." From this hook, Sachs has Leibniz tell the rest of the story as related to him by the astronomer, who was employed by Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, who had an interest in science and mysticism, and so on. Sachs brings in more facts and fiction and thus develops a a fairly complex fractured fairy tale with the fun being in seeing how he can keep it all together as things get more and more preposterous. I enjoyed this and will look for more by the author but remind others once again that this novel is written in fun and the readers must be able to accept themselves as part of the joke.
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June 11, 2019I cannot rate this book. Of the 275 books that I have read since I joined Goodreads in 2013 this is the first book that I didn't finish. Actually, it's only the second book that I ever didn't finish as an adult. There was one in high school but that was over 40 years ago. It may sound strange to some people but I feel that if an author takes the time to find the right words for his/her book I as a reader have the responsibility to read every one of those words. So there are books that I trudged, slogged and forced myself to finish. I could not do that with The Organ of Sense. I should have realized something was wrong when I had to read the first page three times before I was able to get to the next one. Maybe I was tired because my mind kept wandering. The next day (fresh and wide awake) I started reading and made it to the end of chapter one but I could go no further. On the third day while reading (or rather trying to read) I again could not focus on what I was reading. Then it hit me. There was nothing wrong with me. It was the book! Why was I reading this when I couldn't stay focused and when I didn't enjoy what I was reading. I did not think it was funny. I didn't get the satire. Judging by the other reviews some people loved it. Not me. Can I give Mr. Sachs' book a negative rating if I didn't finish it? The run on sentences, segues and detours were begging for a GPS. A map. A navigator. Pebbles leading away from the mess and keeping me on the right path. I could not be bothered. This book was not that important. I owed this author nothing. I was wasting my time. There are so many other books to read and enjoy. So I just stopped reading this one.
November 27, 2022
Adam E. Sachs' "The Organs of Sense" is a funny, insane ride through what appears to be (in the story) the perfectly normal. While the story revolves around Gottfried seeking a blind astrologer who has predicted a solar eclipse, for me the story takes on a bigger picture. For me Adam has crafted a make-believe past that revolves around all the things that we spend entirely to much time think about/worrying about or put entirely way too much faith in.
The story while well paced and fast reading has a great cast of characters, from the sublime to the insane (or at the very least faking both sublime and insanity).
"The Organs of Sense" has a very real surreal feel to it (like looking at a Dali), you know it can't be real/true but you have this feeling that if it isn't it could be.
The story not only had me laughing out loud, but it is thought provoking as well. I would laugh out loud reading Assimov (laughter the only comparison intended), for his knack of turning science (present, past or future) upside down and reminding me not to take it too seriously.
Once again, this is entirely from my point of view "The Organs of Sense" is a sharp, absurd look at the world we take way too seriously and a reminder that we should ease off.
Thank you Adam and Goodreads for hosting the contest that won me this copy, that being said my review is an honest and unsolicited one ...
The story while well paced and fast reading has a great cast of characters, from the sublime to the insane (or at the very least faking both sublime and insanity).
"The Organs of Sense" has a very real surreal feel to it (like looking at a Dali), you know it can't be real/true but you have this feeling that if it isn't it could be.
The story not only had me laughing out loud, but it is thought provoking as well. I would laugh out loud reading Assimov (laughter the only comparison intended), for his knack of turning science (present, past or future) upside down and reminding me not to take it too seriously.
Once again, this is entirely from my point of view "The Organs of Sense" is a sharp, absurd look at the world we take way too seriously and a reminder that we should ease off.
Thank you Adam and Goodreads for hosting the contest that won me this copy, that being said my review is an honest and unsolicited one ...
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February 7, 2024I had to make a new shelf because of this book that I might have been more impressed with if I hadn’t read Mark Haber first and hadn’t been reading Ben Marcus currently. This had all the ingredients that, on paper, should have come together making me an ideal reader, the philosopher-as-character, the bernhardian humor and permutative combinations of structure. And, I’m not exactly sure why it didn’t. Maybe I don’t like philosophers as characters in fiction.
January 27, 2023
In an account posted to Goodreads, an app that has innumerable annoyances, not only conceptually, but also in its interface, in which he had thought about posting a unique review that was consummately astute, a young Jacob Gane decided to write what follows as a kind of ad hoc musing over wtf he just read that really did put a smile on his face, stirring his affections towards the form of the novel in a way no book had done in a while, instead of the unique review he deliberated about in his head in a white knuckle sort of way, but fearing the ineluctable sense that any review that tried to mimic the book’s form would come off as naval gazing or something much more pathologically inane, because how could, he thought, a stupid Goodreads review ever manage to ascend to Sachs’ visionary folktale, how could, he thought again, a cheeky attempt to concoct a review that paid homage to it ever do just or be respectful to what this great man had written or how could it be communicated in a way that did not feel like a litbro trope? Gane feeling no less saddened by how these types of people (he starting to be convinced that he was one of them) ruin writing fun things for fun things sake, wrote this instead:
“I want to read books like this all the time.
“Sachs manages to stick tirelessly true to form and style in this whimsical account of an account of an account! I can’t imagine writing a book with style resembling anything close to 17th century English but he does it so well and in such an entertaining way. Sachs takes one philosophical idea and creates a linear narrative even while he encircles around it in a nonlinear way. It feels like Sachs is trying to destroy his own novel through concentric philosophical musings that take on narrative form. Each new section of the book becomes so absurd and out of control that I began to doubt that the ending would be as satisfying as the narrative was preparing it to be, but somehow it landed SO WELL. Ah man idk what to say. It was just so freaking good. I finished the book and just sat staring at my roommate with the biggest smile on my face. I got teased for laughing out loud while reading this thing but iykyk.”
“I want to read books like this all the time.
“Sachs manages to stick tirelessly true to form and style in this whimsical account of an account of an account! I can’t imagine writing a book with style resembling anything close to 17th century English but he does it so well and in such an entertaining way. Sachs takes one philosophical idea and creates a linear narrative even while he encircles around it in a nonlinear way. It feels like Sachs is trying to destroy his own novel through concentric philosophical musings that take on narrative form. Each new section of the book becomes so absurd and out of control that I began to doubt that the ending would be as satisfying as the narrative was preparing it to be, but somehow it landed SO WELL. Ah man idk what to say. It was just so freaking good. I finished the book and just sat staring at my roommate with the biggest smile on my face. I got teased for laughing out loud while reading this thing but iykyk.”
November 24, 2019
I understand a blind old guy living by himself in the woods, with nothing but a telescope for company, might be longwinded when he had a visitor. But do I need to sit there for the entire time?
August 27, 2024
Without a doubt I love the darker side of literature. It’s also becoming apparent that I increasingly enjoy the absurd. Voltaire, Thomas Bernhard, Alasdair Gray, Thomas Pynchon and Mark Haber are all among my favourites. Now enter Adam Ehrlich Sachs.
It intrigues me that to be truly convincing when writing the absurd, surely a writer’s process must actually be highly logical, otherwise the result would simply be chaos? The literary skill involved in convincing readers that you’re completely bonkers, in fact must take quite the opposite. And I love this side of the literary arts. When done well, it’s so damned smart.
And this is done with excellence, in my opinion. ‘The Organs of Sense’ is a tale set in 17th century Eastern Europe about astrology, art, music, murder and madness. With clear nods to Thomas Bernhard and Franz Kafka, it is, needles to say, completely bonkers.
The tale centres around two characters. 19 yr old Gottfried Leibniz, who sets out to investigate claims of a solar eclipse made by an old-aged, completely blind astronomer (completely blind as in he literally no longer posses either of his eyes). So is this blind astronomer actually insane? Is he even an astronomer? How exactly is Leibniz gonna determine either of these things? And that’s the heart of this tale, solipsism. Can we ever truly know anything outside of our own heads and minds?
Sachs’ prose is exquisitely genius. Highly entertaining, charming and hilarious in places. If you’re a fan of any of the writers I’ve mentioned here, then I highly recommend Adam Ehrlich Sachs to you.
Currently he seems quite underrated, and I sincerely hope this soon changes as more literary fans discover his work. I recently read ‘Gretel and the Great War’, his latest book, which is also excellent and deserves more attention. I still have yet to track down his first book ‘Inherited Disorders’.
I’d urge you all to read him and spread the word!
It intrigues me that to be truly convincing when writing the absurd, surely a writer’s process must actually be highly logical, otherwise the result would simply be chaos? The literary skill involved in convincing readers that you’re completely bonkers, in fact must take quite the opposite. And I love this side of the literary arts. When done well, it’s so damned smart.
And this is done with excellence, in my opinion. ‘The Organs of Sense’ is a tale set in 17th century Eastern Europe about astrology, art, music, murder and madness. With clear nods to Thomas Bernhard and Franz Kafka, it is, needles to say, completely bonkers.
The tale centres around two characters. 19 yr old Gottfried Leibniz, who sets out to investigate claims of a solar eclipse made by an old-aged, completely blind astronomer (completely blind as in he literally no longer posses either of his eyes). So is this blind astronomer actually insane? Is he even an astronomer? How exactly is Leibniz gonna determine either of these things? And that’s the heart of this tale, solipsism. Can we ever truly know anything outside of our own heads and minds?
Sachs’ prose is exquisitely genius. Highly entertaining, charming and hilarious in places. If you’re a fan of any of the writers I’ve mentioned here, then I highly recommend Adam Ehrlich Sachs to you.
Currently he seems quite underrated, and I sincerely hope this soon changes as more literary fans discover his work. I recently read ‘Gretel and the Great War’, his latest book, which is also excellent and deserves more attention. I still have yet to track down his first book ‘Inherited Disorders’.
I’d urge you all to read him and spread the word!
April 22, 2019
via my blog: https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/
But he could not stop. He felt he had a “compulsion to look,” to look closer and closer, “a looking-closer-and-closer compulsion.” What (he wondered) would it take to stop looking, “to look this closely, and no closer? Through such and such a magnification, and no higher?”
Certainly the strangest book I’ve read this year, and in fact last year. We are told that G. W. Leibniz, who was throughout his life “an assiduous inquirer into miracles and other aberrations of nature” is on a mission. It seems fitting he would want to uncover the truth behind an astronomer’s peculiar prediction. The German philosopher, mathematician, and logician, is on a quest to reveal whether or not a blind astronomer could possibly be able to study the stars so accurately as to have predicted an eclipse at noon and on the last day of 1666, that will leave all of Europe in complete and total darkness. This man’s prediction is made more shocking by the fact that he has empty sockets where his eyes should be, can you get any blinder? Sure, he has been ‘rumored’ to have built the most power telescope of the times but powerful or not, one still needs eyes to peer into telescopes, no?
Leibniz intends to remain at the observatory long enough to test the man’s reason (sanity) and if the eclipse happens he is certainly an astronomer if it doesn’t it means nothing because astronomers can be wrong. So begins the stories the old shriveled man tells Leibniz, and he discusses how one must “truly see”, what could a man with empty eye sockets know about seeing? Well, with his trusty instrument (the telescope) he has seen a lot! A lot, I tell you! And he demands of Leibniz that he “prove that I cannot see what I claim to see”, we have a conundrum tangled in philosophy and history. How did the old man lose his eyes anyway? What is truth? How do you get into someone’s head to determine what they are experiencing, what their truth is? Words, can words reveal what is in another’s head? Mere words?
Can one go through life without the ‘belief in other people?’ The astronomer tells Leibniz that what he means will become clear, I think most readers will try to grasp at the silliness and science but clarity may not be easy! Maybe a lot of readers are more like the astronomer’s father who wasn’t interested in the sky, and cannot be tangled in knots because they just don’t care to ponder. The play on faith as what we devote our existence to is evident in the astronomer’s father’s inventions…a box is just a box is a box, no matter how we decorate it, it will not open the cosmos to us. Be you a surface dweller or a plunger of depths, does it matter where we put our faith? Does madness await us all either way, what is sanitized madness? How does an Emperor, art , or an automaton head lead to the astronomer losing his eyes so that he can truly see?
This was a dizzying book. It takes a ‘discerning mind’ if you’re going to be a thinker and one must lose the eyes that deceive us even if that’s a straight plunge into ‘philosophical torment.’ This is meant to be amusing, I think it’s more scientific/philosopher’s humor and it is easy to get lost. What do we really understand about our the world or each other, whether we’re filled with genius or disinterested in anything beyond the surface? It’s okay if you can’t engage with the witty humor and philosophy within, you can always gaze at the cool book cover with your actual eyes!
Publication Date: May 21, 2019
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
But he could not stop. He felt he had a “compulsion to look,” to look closer and closer, “a looking-closer-and-closer compulsion.” What (he wondered) would it take to stop looking, “to look this closely, and no closer? Through such and such a magnification, and no higher?”
Certainly the strangest book I’ve read this year, and in fact last year. We are told that G. W. Leibniz, who was throughout his life “an assiduous inquirer into miracles and other aberrations of nature” is on a mission. It seems fitting he would want to uncover the truth behind an astronomer’s peculiar prediction. The German philosopher, mathematician, and logician, is on a quest to reveal whether or not a blind astronomer could possibly be able to study the stars so accurately as to have predicted an eclipse at noon and on the last day of 1666, that will leave all of Europe in complete and total darkness. This man’s prediction is made more shocking by the fact that he has empty sockets where his eyes should be, can you get any blinder? Sure, he has been ‘rumored’ to have built the most power telescope of the times but powerful or not, one still needs eyes to peer into telescopes, no?
Leibniz intends to remain at the observatory long enough to test the man’s reason (sanity) and if the eclipse happens he is certainly an astronomer if it doesn’t it means nothing because astronomers can be wrong. So begins the stories the old shriveled man tells Leibniz, and he discusses how one must “truly see”, what could a man with empty eye sockets know about seeing? Well, with his trusty instrument (the telescope) he has seen a lot! A lot, I tell you! And he demands of Leibniz that he “prove that I cannot see what I claim to see”, we have a conundrum tangled in philosophy and history. How did the old man lose his eyes anyway? What is truth? How do you get into someone’s head to determine what they are experiencing, what their truth is? Words, can words reveal what is in another’s head? Mere words?
Can one go through life without the ‘belief in other people?’ The astronomer tells Leibniz that what he means will become clear, I think most readers will try to grasp at the silliness and science but clarity may not be easy! Maybe a lot of readers are more like the astronomer’s father who wasn’t interested in the sky, and cannot be tangled in knots because they just don’t care to ponder. The play on faith as what we devote our existence to is evident in the astronomer’s father’s inventions…a box is just a box is a box, no matter how we decorate it, it will not open the cosmos to us. Be you a surface dweller or a plunger of depths, does it matter where we put our faith? Does madness await us all either way, what is sanitized madness? How does an Emperor, art , or an automaton head lead to the astronomer losing his eyes so that he can truly see?
This was a dizzying book. It takes a ‘discerning mind’ if you’re going to be a thinker and one must lose the eyes that deceive us even if that’s a straight plunge into ‘philosophical torment.’ This is meant to be amusing, I think it’s more scientific/philosopher’s humor and it is easy to get lost. What do we really understand about our the world or each other, whether we’re filled with genius or disinterested in anything beyond the surface? It’s okay if you can’t engage with the witty humor and philosophy within, you can always gaze at the cool book cover with your actual eyes!
Publication Date: May 21, 2019
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
March 15, 2019
The Organs of Sense from Adam Ehrlich Sachs surprised me a bit by just how much it actually made me think beyond the humor and the (sometimes misappropriated) philosophy. And it did this without being a difficult or convoluted read.
This novel is definitely one of those that will turn some people off. Just ignore the ones who make it sound like the book is flawed, that just means they didn't get it. The ones who point out why they didn't like it (as compared to making it sound like it was all about the book itself and not the dynamic of reader and book) are the ones you might want to pay attention to. Yes, there is repetition, but not a lot and not beyond what is needed to make a point. Maybe repeating a form of "said so and so to so and so as reported by so and so." Some concepts are repeated as well, but usually to illustrate that they can be understood differently depending on context and/or desired outcome. If someone just saw repetition as repetition, they simply didn't follow the story or the thinking very well.
If you like to read a bit of an absurdist take on philosophical thought taken to some unusual extremes, this will appeal to you. Thinking, or over-thinking, in the abstract about very real phenomena such as family relationships, sanity/insanity, sensitive/insensitive, and so many other things. If you pause and think about why a section made you chuckle you'll likely (hopefully?) find yourself thinking about what might be a realistic explanation for whatever the situation or idea was. This is actually a sneaky way to generate some "philosophical" thinking.
I highly recommend this but at the same time I don't know how to categorize who might or might not enjoy it. I read the description and was immediately interested in reading it. I'm not sure what it appealed to in my case so I can't say very well what it might appeal to in yours.
Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads First Reads.
This novel is definitely one of those that will turn some people off. Just ignore the ones who make it sound like the book is flawed, that just means they didn't get it. The ones who point out why they didn't like it (as compared to making it sound like it was all about the book itself and not the dynamic of reader and book) are the ones you might want to pay attention to. Yes, there is repetition, but not a lot and not beyond what is needed to make a point. Maybe repeating a form of "said so and so to so and so as reported by so and so." Some concepts are repeated as well, but usually to illustrate that they can be understood differently depending on context and/or desired outcome. If someone just saw repetition as repetition, they simply didn't follow the story or the thinking very well.
If you like to read a bit of an absurdist take on philosophical thought taken to some unusual extremes, this will appeal to you. Thinking, or over-thinking, in the abstract about very real phenomena such as family relationships, sanity/insanity, sensitive/insensitive, and so many other things. If you pause and think about why a section made you chuckle you'll likely (hopefully?) find yourself thinking about what might be a realistic explanation for whatever the situation or idea was. This is actually a sneaky way to generate some "philosophical" thinking.
I highly recommend this but at the same time I don't know how to categorize who might or might not enjoy it. I read the description and was immediately interested in reading it. I'm not sure what it appealed to in my case so I can't say very well what it might appeal to in yours.
Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads First Reads.
May 25, 2019
The perfect comedy for fans of Thomas Bernhard.
June 18, 2019
This was interesting, but after being billed as hilarious, I felt pretty disappointed. Like, I may have chuckled a few times.... But I also feel like it was trying to be too smart for itself.
May 3, 2019
Ci sono teorie filosofiche che ogni tanto diventano le protagoniste di interi romanzi, a volte in modo dichiarato, com’è il caso di Wittgenstein su Wittgenstein's Mistress di David Markson, altre più oblique: il solito Wittgenstein è presente in filigrana su The Broom of the System di Wallace, come su End Zone di DeLillo e allo stesso DeLillo è accaduto spesso di toccare filosofia del linguaggio, il realismo australiano e la teoria delle descrizioni definite, The Flame Alphabet di Ben Marcus è costruito attorno alla teoria degli atti linguistici di Austin e Searle, e The Moviegoer di Walker Percy attorno a una versione di seconda mano dell’esistenzialismo (sull’influenza del positivismo logico sulla letteratura americana del secondo novecento si veda Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1945-1975 di Michael LeMahieu (Oxford University Press, 2016). THE ORIGIN OF SENSE di Adam Ehrlich Sachs lo fa con Leibniz, e anzi, usa un inedito Leibniz come protagonista e fulcro narrativo di tutto il romanzo. Siamo nel 1666 e un bizzarro astronomo non vedente prevede un’eclissi speciale per il 30 giugno, utilizzando il più grande cannocchiale esistente. Si apre un romanzo filosofico che mette in luce la grandezza di un filosofo che manualisticamente viene ingiustamente schiacciato tra l’Eta Cartesiana e l’empirismo di Hume. In realtà Leibniz non fu solo il filosofo delle monadi e inventore—insieme a Newton—del calcolo infinitesimale, ma anche bibliotecario e grande diplomatico organizzatore di conoscenze, che forse per primo cercò di sistematizzare anche tutti quei saperi non accademici, pratici e artigianali, fu ideatore di una nuova fisica “dinamica” contro la meccanica di newton, fu precursore di una versione praticabile dell’epistemologia kantiana, fu soprattutto uno dei primi a interessarsi dei nuovi strumenti capaci di dare una diversa e più approfondita percezione del mondo esterno: cannocchiale e microscopio. A proposito del microscopio avrà a scrivere in una lettera “preferisco un Leeuwenhoek che mi dice ciò che vede a un cartesiano che mi dice ciò che pensa. È infatti necessario coniugare i ragionamenti con le osservazioni.” (Sull’eclettismo di Leibniz si veda invece Arlecchino e il microscopio. Saggio sulla filosofia naturale di Leibniz di Alessandro Becchi). Adam Ehrlich Sachs si inventa una fantomatica eclissi prevista da chi non può vedere, e sfocia in una serie di considerazioni su esperienza, ragione, fede, conoscenza e altri temi filosofici. Come spesso accade con questo genere di libri, purtroppo la parte teorica finisce per sovrastare l’impianto romanzesco, e “The Origin of Sense” finisce per essere un romanzo per appassionati, ma è anche una buona occasione per rivalutare una delle menti più importanti della tradizione scientifica e filosofica occidentale.
June 25, 2024
Everything feels like a variation of a comparison of dichotomies, even if really trivial (like youre alive, or youre dead, and if youre not dead then youre alive and so on — always repeated).
I enjoyed the idea of the organic vs mechanic, but it also felt silly. God is considered a creator, so why would something organic not be something mechanical too? It’s the same. The triviality of many of the ‘dichotomies’ seems like it does give the book some humor though, but at the cost of rambling.
Its written from the perspective of a narrator, who is reading an account of a journalist, who has journaled about their experience talking to an old astronomer, and the astronomer is telling them a story, which contains other smaller stories. Theres a lot of “X writes this” and “Y says that” and it can get confusing of who said what. But i dont think it matters much and u can just ignore it and read. By the end of the book the weight of the literary fruff and long sentences is much lighter, plus the plot is more interesting to make up for it.
Unfortunately, the first part of the story is still depressingly heavy since ur just waiting for the good stuff. From a user experience standpoint, this isnt great writing. It uses fanciness and clauses within clauses to make up for plot and to make the story longer. I am curious why the writer chose the perspective and the writing style, since i dont know if its benefit outweighs its trudging effect. And since the sentences are so dense and long, it does not make for a portable read. U can’t really pause without completely losing track of the story. Its a pain. (Also a shame since the book is so portable sized, plus it cld still be even shorter)
2.5 for writing. But 3 for content.
I enjoyed the idea of the organic vs mechanic, but it also felt silly. God is considered a creator, so why would something organic not be something mechanical too? It’s the same. The triviality of many of the ‘dichotomies’ seems like it does give the book some humor though, but at the cost of rambling.
Its written from the perspective of a narrator, who is reading an account of a journalist, who has journaled about their experience talking to an old astronomer, and the astronomer is telling them a story, which contains other smaller stories. Theres a lot of “X writes this” and “Y says that” and it can get confusing of who said what. But i dont think it matters much and u can just ignore it and read. By the end of the book the weight of the literary fruff and long sentences is much lighter, plus the plot is more interesting to make up for it.
Unfortunately, the first part of the story is still depressingly heavy since ur just waiting for the good stuff. From a user experience standpoint, this isnt great writing. It uses fanciness and clauses within clauses to make up for plot and to make the story longer. I am curious why the writer chose the perspective and the writing style, since i dont know if its benefit outweighs its trudging effect. And since the sentences are so dense and long, it does not make for a portable read. U can’t really pause without completely losing track of the story. Its a pain. (Also a shame since the book is so portable sized, plus it cld still be even shorter)
2.5 for writing. But 3 for content.
August 5, 2025
Written in a style satirizing the run-on-sentence-filled babblings of seventeenth-century thinkers, Sachs' novel is unlike any modern literature I've read. Morbidly humorous and delightfully odd, this is a sort of philosophical allegory for a new age. If the teenage version of you enjoyed tearing through your A.P. English course's reading list, especially the works by Machiavelli and Plato, put this on your grown-up required reading list. This one's for you, for the readers who once mused over whether it is better to be feared or to be loved (you could argue that this book explores that concept). This is a profound tragicomic work of historical fiction which seamlessly weds science with absurdity but also which ponders whether the two have ever been separate. I laughed, cried, and grimaced... at every single page.
July 10, 2019
Smart and funny. Maybe a little full of itself but it’s all worth it in the end.
July 7, 2019
What a kooky book!!!
September 30, 2024
Pretty interesting how a blind astronomer can give such profound visuals. This was a fun read but definitely had me lost at times
May 23, 2019
This is an amazing book. I loved Adam Ehrlich Sach's Inherited Disorders so much and have been looking forward to his first novel. Turns out: it's great! Let's start by listing a stream of adjectives: funny, weird, brilliant, philosophical, magical, provocative, clever, and sad.
I hate talking about "plot" and "characters" and for the most part won't, but from a pure book perspective, I loved the plot and I loved the characters. Such quirky but endearing figures populate this story, with a present and past timeline slowly progressing to both a moment of truth and an impending rush of danger.
Philosophically, it's about the unknowableness of anything outside of our own head, and the unknowableness of even that. A kind of fictional exploration of Descartes, perhaps. Time and time again the book obsesses over the quest for understanding externalities and escaping the confines of a single mind, sometimes quite literally. The entire astronomical quest is, itself, a form of this, but it also crops up again and again: an actual head statue, the fear that nothing is distinct from anything else (hard to explain), trying to define sanity, the concept of bloodlines and inheritance. It's everywhere. In a way, the very concept of a book fits within itself in a meta-level, with it's frames-within-frames. I feel like there's so much going on that I need to reread the book and map it out further some day.
And there's a lot of layers to this question. It's about how we relate to other people, how we process scientific learning, how we make sense of our place in the world. Of course, you don't really need added layers to feel the depth of one of the most profound philosophical questions ever posed.
The book is funny and weird in a similar way to Sachs' first collection. Perhaps not as regularly laugh out loud funny, though I definitely did laugh out loud many times. He has a way of swirling around a topic over and over, repeating phrases to the point of hilarity. It's a blending of comedy and philosophy and futility to an excess, pushing the reader's boundaries in a way that few can do.
Such artful writing, such a thought-provoking experience, such a pleasure to read.
I hate talking about "plot" and "characters" and for the most part won't, but from a pure book perspective, I loved the plot and I loved the characters. Such quirky but endearing figures populate this story, with a present and past timeline slowly progressing to both a moment of truth and an impending rush of danger.
Philosophically, it's about the unknowableness of anything outside of our own head, and the unknowableness of even that. A kind of fictional exploration of Descartes, perhaps. Time and time again the book obsesses over the quest for understanding externalities and escaping the confines of a single mind, sometimes quite literally. The entire astronomical quest is, itself, a form of this, but it also crops up again and again: an actual head statue, the fear that nothing is distinct from anything else (hard to explain), trying to define sanity, the concept of bloodlines and inheritance. It's everywhere. In a way, the very concept of a book fits within itself in a meta-level, with it's frames-within-frames. I feel like there's so much going on that I need to reread the book and map it out further some day.
And there's a lot of layers to this question. It's about how we relate to other people, how we process scientific learning, how we make sense of our place in the world. Of course, you don't really need added layers to feel the depth of one of the most profound philosophical questions ever posed.
The book is funny and weird in a similar way to Sachs' first collection. Perhaps not as regularly laugh out loud funny, though I definitely did laugh out loud many times. He has a way of swirling around a topic over and over, repeating phrases to the point of hilarity. It's a blending of comedy and philosophy and futility to an excess, pushing the reader's boundaries in a way that few can do.
Such artful writing, such a thought-provoking experience, such a pleasure to read.
June 4, 2019
It took me quite a while to wade through this book. The first few attempts, I thought maybe I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to read something I apparently needed to concentrate on. But by the third attempt, I realized maybe it was the book and not that I was too tired to read it. I found the book to be nonsensical rambling, reminiscent of listening to someone high on drugs having what they believe is an “intelligent conversation”. This book was a huge miss for me.
April 8, 2021
Couldn't finish which rarely happens to me. Truly awful.
January 28, 2020
Fun mix of Thomas Bernhard's style, absurdity, and the torment of knowledge.
July 23, 2023
Anyone who says they thought this book was trying too hard to be funny was wrong. You just don't like the sense of humour (absurdism : see the tv show 'arrested development'). It's supposed to be weird and stupid!! It was right up my alley and I really enjoyed it. The actual writing was kind of hard to follow at times. The sentences went on and on and on for paragraphs and seemed to be never ending, but it also created its charm. The unconventionality of it definitely tied together the whole work, it matched its content perfectly even if it could often be exhausting. As for the actual story, I really like the way it was told in 'mouth to mouth to mouth' way. Again, it sometimes made it hard to follow, but it was definitely original. I loved the philosophical themes and the pondering of how one's family issues can develop one's character and how they follow a person forever, no matter how removed and detached they may believe themselves to be from said family or said family issues. Although this novel is definitely not for everyone, I recommend for people to read it simply for the experience of it.
October 20, 2020
I have read many strange novels, and I have enjoyed and/or appreciated many of them. But this may be the strangest of all. In addition to its exceptionally strange premise--the famous 17th-century philosopher Leibniz as a young man visits a reclusive, blind, Bohemian astronomer (think about that: a blind astronomer observing the sky through his telescope) who has predicted a total solar eclipse not anticipated by any other reputable astronomers. The premise, and the way it’s reported, leads to awkwardness, though it’s apparently intentional; e.g., “Everything, in short, was the same, he felt, Heinrich told the astronomer/confessor, reported Leibniz” (159). I like this summary of what the novel is about from a reviewer for the New York Review of Books: “The novel, for Sachs [with training as a historian of science], offers a mechanism for giving form to the immateriality of thought and feeling—the essential quality of being human that exceeds the singing, chomping, and blinking thingness of the body ... [a] twinkling and zany philosophical account ... Sachs makes you work for the privilege of sharing his derangements of thought ... For this reason, the novel is less a novel of ideas than it is a novel about the emotional, illogical, concealed, and self-duplicitous reasons why we grasp, and are grasped by, particular ideas at particular moments; how our histories and history writ large get twined together by forces not totally within our control or imagination; how whatever space is left for human determination must be claimed by a spectacularly, hilariously exaggerated effort of will.” But just to give you a sense of how broadly the novel ranges, consider this very different summary from the reviewer for Booklist: “, , , a riveting story about geopolitical scheming, warfare, and the reach of the Catholic League in the seventeenth century. At the novel’s beating heart, though, is a much more universal theme as Sachs considers father-son relationships and other complicated family dynamics that can make or break creative ambitions of all stripes ... Sprinkled with generous doses of philosophy, this gem of a novel, with a spectacular denouement, might make for labored reading initially, but ultimately, it’s an utterly immersive and transportive work of art.” Just one more, briefly. The Publishers Weekly reviewer called it a “brilliant work of visionary absurdism.” Readers should be warned, though: This is not an easy read. Even apart from the awkwardness mentioned above in relation to the style of reporting the story--not to mention that much of the novel is about trying to recognize sanity or insanity in its various characters--it is replete with strange, convoluted sentences like the following: “The interesting thing is that I weep most not when I ponder my feelings for my father but when I ponder my father’s feelings for his cap, or his feelings for his box. Not my feelings for him nor his feelings for me, not his feelings for my mother or my mother’s feelings for him--though all of these feelings like all family feelings were present--but rather his feelings for his cap and his feelings for his box, as well as my mother’s feelings for his cap, for she was always trying to keep that cap clean for him even in the years he wasn’t wearing it, that black cap my father loved so much collected dust like crazy and it’s not too much to say that my mother, who was actually an extremely literate and intelligent woman, the daughter of a renowned jurist and humanist from Regensburg, wound up locked in a life-long battle with the dust-collecting-qualities of my father’s black velvet cap. It is not the relationship between subjects and subjects that makes one weep most but the relationships between subjects and objects, that’s insufficiently understood” (60). Or this: “The astronomer would be granted, first, an annual salary of so many thalers; second, stewardship of the Imperial Observatory, including the Castle Workshop, Castle Library, and Castle Laboratory, and carte blanche use, “within reason,” of the treasury for the making of his tubes, a “carte blanche” and a “within reason” that obviously--as the astronomer was later to realize--each annulled the other, for if “carte blanche” meant anything at all, “within reason” obviously meant nothing at all, “within reason” obviously meant nothing at all, and vice versa, “within reason” meaning something meant “carte blanche” meant nothing, not to mention that if he was indeed bound by reason, who knew what reason meant, if it meant by his own reason or by the Court Chamberlain’s reason or by some kind of shared reason, if such a thing existed, that is, perhaps his rights to the treasury, extended only so far as the boundary set by common sense, a probably purposeful ambiguity that would only intensify the Court Chamberlain’s power over him, with finally dire consequences; and third, he was granted for his living quarters a state residence no less impressive than the Viennese mansion in which he’d been born” (80). Or: “It is in dealing with the nonsensical, he noted, that we must be most rigorous, for sense itself is always by definition quite rigorous, the requisite rigor has already been provided by reason working hand in hand with reality, it is precisely by its stiffness and structure that we identify it as sense, if it’s very stiff and very structured we tend to say: That is, or makes, sense, whereas nonsense must be structured and stiffened from without, i.e., given form, which is why writing the Emperor’s horoscope, insofar as it entailed writing an absolutely nonsensical document, was no easy task, it was harder even than his scientific labor of the night before, a fact which, the astronomer added, might have suggested to him now what he realized only much later--namely, that there was something awry with his science” (82). And so on. And many paragraphs go on for pages. If you enjoy the challenge of navigating sentences, like these, you’ll undoubtedly enjoy this novel; if not, it’s probably not for you.
March 27, 2022
I truly enjoyed this story, though it may be difficult for some due to the writing style that includes really long paragraphs and an interweaving on a lot of different philosophical concepts, yet dear reader, just flow with it like the stream of consciousness the author is portraying and you will be rewarded with a rich, hilarious, and downright ridiculously fun story with some dark and eerie bits thrown in for your entertainment.
The story is the tale of Gottfried Leibniz, the famous philosopher, going to the top of the alps in search of a blind astronomer who has predicted an eclipse when no one else has. He makes it and the astronomer shares his tale of how he came to be where he is with no eyes of the course of the few remaining hours before the coming eclipse.
What a tale! Recommended for those that like post-modern storytelling, history of astronomy, science and philosophy, and intellectual humor. Not for everyone, but definitely for some!
The story is the tale of Gottfried Leibniz, the famous philosopher, going to the top of the alps in search of a blind astronomer who has predicted an eclipse when no one else has. He makes it and the astronomer shares his tale of how he came to be where he is with no eyes of the course of the few remaining hours before the coming eclipse.
What a tale! Recommended for those that like post-modern storytelling, history of astronomy, science and philosophy, and intellectual humor. Not for everyone, but definitely for some!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 132 reviews