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David Wilson

'I don't think you realise how little money means before you are really rich, you know?'

Jostein Gaarder in a 1995 interview on the American radio station NPR

Jostein Gaarder assumed nobody would read it. When his Norwegian publishers originally agreed to print it, he actually wrote a letter thanking them for publishing such an 'uncommercial book'.

In fact, the book in question, Sophie's World, proved about as 'uncommercial' as sex, becoming one of the cult sensations of the 1990s.

A whirlwind of spin-offs followed. Sophie's World was made into a movie, a musical, a board game, a CD-Rom and just about everything else you care to name except a theme park for thinkers.

Translated into 45 languages, the book supposedly charmed everyone from Cuba's minister of culture to Marxist Kurdish guerillas. It was the world's best-selling fiction book in 1995. There were around 20 million copies in print at last count.

Not bad for what amounted to a philosophy primer and critique of New Age claptrap dressed up as a novel. Not bad for a humble philosophy teacher with a weakness for Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who lived in a barrel.

Gaarder was born in 1952 in Oslo, Norway, the son of a headmaster and a children's books author. He read Scandinavian languages and theology at the University of Oslo and began to write after his 1974 marriage, contributing to several textbooks on philosophy and theology. His fiction debut, The Diagnosis And Other Stories was published in 1986 later followed by The Solitaire Mystery, which bagged both the Norwegian Literary Critics' Award and the Ministry of Cultural and Scientific Affairs Literary Prize.

Then came the phenomenal success of Sophie's World. 'We were suddenly earning piles of money . . . and we had no personal use for it,' he has said.

This exasperating problem, however, enabled him to become a full-time writer and to try to save the world through founding the US$100,000 (HK$790,000) Sophie Prize in 1997. Given yearly to a green do-gooder, the prize attests that Gaarder is that rare thing in the vain and venal world of publishing - a nice guy.

Work in English translation: Sophie's World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994); The Christmas Mystery (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996); The Solitaire Mystery (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996); Hello? Is Anybody There? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998); That Same Flower (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998); Through A Glass, Darkly (Phoenix, 1998); The Frog Castle (Dolphin, 1999); Maya (Phoenix House, 2000); The Ringmaster's Daughter (Weidenfeld, 2002).

Subplot: Unless you have the patience of Gaarder's beloved classical barrel hermit Diogenes, opt for a book other than Sophie's World. For a best-seller, it is surprisingly heavy going.

The American critic Beverly Mireles commented that the reader must 'wade through almost 150 pages before the mystery beings to take shape, and, to be blunt, for the novel to register anything truly interesting. More troubling is the occasionally patronising, always lecturing, method in which the philosophy is imparted.'

Another American critic, Richard Gehr, was even more scathing, branding the book 'a philosophical Ikea, whose clean lines and slick marketing offer a one-size-fits-all cosiness masking the bitter ideological rivalries and utter radicalism' that mark the history of philosophy.

A better bet is That Same Flower, aka Vita Brevis, the thin but interesting 1998 book that buried the suspicion that Gaarder was a one-hit wonder. It takes the form of a letter to St Augustine, the tortured soul best known for the lewd one-liner 'give me chastity, but not yet'. The 'author' is the mysterious Floria Aemilia: the lover Augustine dumped in favour of celibacy. Augustine's asceticism no doubt strikes a chord in the saintly Scandinavian.



Jostein Gaarder