An original, if sometimes unfocused, debut novel about war and human cruelty

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	• Schopenhauer's Telescope: A Novel Gerald Donovan Counterpoint, 2004 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Read this now.

When I first read this book in autumn of 2003, I was struck by how relevant it seemed to the issues of the time. As months and finally a year passed, its passages came back to me again and again, with greater force each time. It was as though the real world outside this novel was warping to meet the dark setting of the fiction.

Read this book, and go back and read again the accounts of torture at Abu Ghraib. Read this book, and seek out the stories of those who lived through the torments of Saddam's Iraq. Or just turn on CNN (better yet, Fox News), mute the sound, and read this book. This novel could be the critical comment to any real-time story of power and cruelty. There is no shortage of such stories now.

I gave this book only four out of five stars because I've shared it with friends who are less interested in poetry than I am, and they have found it a fairly slow read. That was not my experience, but it might be yours.

Above its obvious parallels to a world at war, this book's more lasting value is its presentation of two characters who are at odds with each other, and at each other's mercy. I didn't see a protagonist and an antagonist in this story: I saw two central characters (and a surrounding world) with nothing left to win. When our differences are the only things that define us, all that was once of value is lost to us. The battle against one another is all we have left, and even that is worthless.

Read this book, red staters and blue staters, and try to figure out which side of the ditch you're on. Try to figure out who's right and who's wrong, and about what, and why any of it matters. I won't guarantee that you'll see yourself or anyone you know in these pages; chances are that you won't. But there may be a time when a scene from this book will come back to you, throwing its odd light on a world that few of us have looked at clearly in a long time.

Happy New Year to Amazonians everywhere. Let's be kinder to each other in 2005.

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An original, if sometimes unfocused, debut novel about war and human cruelty

When war comes to a small European town, the aftermath of the invasion and the town's occupation finds two men in a field on a cold and snowing day with soldiers and citizens milling about in the distance waiting for something to happen. That something seems to a grave being dug by "the baker" (and narrator) while the "the teacher" stands around watching. Throughout the narrative the two men discuss philosophy and the nature of human cruelty throughout human history from Genghis Kahn to Nazi Germany - all while "the baker" digs his hole. Eventually, the discussion comes around to the role that each man has played in the recent violence.

At times, this book is brilliant. To begin a brief chapter titled *Winter*, Donovan writes: "One thing you learn about deep cold, it has a cousin called silence that follows it in the door whenever it comes to visit. Even the strike of a shovel against stone doesn't long survive cold. Nothing does. Your breath is caught and frozen in flight, your speech splits open a second out of the throat, your words break in the cocoon of your sentences." But, at other times, the story looses focus and the narrator goes off on tangents a bit too far afield to fully fit with the story at hand.

Even with its faults, this book is worth the energy invested in its reading and there are real insights to be gleamed from its pages.

>>>>>>>

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"...the enemy never quite goes away"

First of all, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Donovan at an Irish Studies conference five weeks ago. He explained that the novel tackles the question of betrayal and loyalty when faced suddenly with life or death. What would you do, he wondered, if a brutal army invaded your town and, in the course of a few hours, took control? If they offered you the chance to survive if you collaborated, and pointed out your neighbors to the enemy, would you do it? The novel that explores this conflict had just been optioned for a screenplay. I told him that this very novel happened to be on my list of novels "to read next." He asked me, when I read it, to think about how it could be transferred from print to screen. My observations, therefore, issue from a different vantage point than the previous ten reviews posted here.

Samples of the prose, a précis of the plot, and reactions to the philosophically ruminative and historically enriched dialogue between the Baker and the Schoolteacher are all noted by fellow reviews. How inert, or how lively, is this snowy afternoon's exchange of ideas, emotions, and tension? Donovan's book reminds me-- as with stories from many modern and contemporary Irish writers-- more of Central European than, say British or American, fiction. (I have also reviewed on Amazon a novel that I read immediately prior: Donovan's newest novel, "Julius Winsor," that shares with "Schopenhauer's Telescope" a wintry climate, flinty characters, and a reduction of emotion and ideas to a life-and-death struggle as grief battles with revenge.) Donovan delves on intellectual pursuits, existential meditations, and spiritual longing. The wishes of the protagonist and antagonist-- and without revealing the end of the narrative's arc it can still be admitted that these positions fluctuate-- may not be fulfilled over the space of this November 25th. In this, realism provides a bleak slab of a frozen foundation, a terrible fate in flight from which aspirations roam and towards which horrors are impelled to return. So, how dramatically promising is this novel of ideas?

Potentially, the digressions into the Baker's playful defense of his goods from the assaults of Mrs. Policeman, the re-creation of the Shoemaker's testimony, and the mock screenplay and acting-out of the "You Are There" scenarios of the Mongol invasions by Genghis Khan seem, if digressive from the core plot on the page, most theatrically adaptable. The chilling fairy tale of Mathilde and Torson, the discourse on the epistemology of "holes," or the re-telling of the battle at Wounded Knee, however, may simply remain distractions. The brutal rendering of the WW2 bombing of Dresden graphically darkens earlier chapters of this intentionally somewhat disjointed and fragmented narrative. "The people prayed to God and the Devil answered." The torments of thousands of Germans serve as an epitaph for this novel's own pawns caught up in a war between neighbors and nationalities that individuals cannot resist-- at least if they wish to remain alive.

Their testimonies, as victims educated from their own readings of accounts from centuries of barbarity, may work better for a monologue, as that which perhaps the author himself (as he notes in closing) had heard from a survivor of the German firestorm, but within a cinematic dramatization I assume fewer of such raw memories will be included.

The book shifts in its illustration of the nightmare of history which traps those who cannot awaken. But, such intelligent speculation rarely lasts long within a conventional film that rejects documentary for at least the appearance of drama. "My Dinner with Andre," "Decalogue" (the original!) "Mindwalk," "Swept Away": few movies succeed and few viewers prefer those that dare to enter the realm of the mind, or reenact the verbal (as opposed to the military or diplomatic or superhero) showdown of opposing ideologies. Contrary to some of the blurbs on the jacket, I find little of the despairing wit of Flann O'Brien here, but I do agree that Kafkaesque shadows loom. Sun Tzu, David Hume, Matthew Paris, John Locke, and King Leopold's minions provide credited context. Beckett, Bernhard, Danilo Kis, Klima, Camus offer subtler comparisons: after these formidable line-ups, Donovan follows with his ambitious tale. In his novel, there is nearly no action, rather a staged set-piece: digger and interrogator, the captive and the coerced, in the hole and on its rim.

There are two brief chapters that, each in two pages, forcefully present evidence that the author's three books of poetry that preceded Donovan's debut novel endured in the language he uses. His fiction and his verse distill varied and arcane learning. While this penchant in Donovan's novels allows him arguably too much room at times for his expositions, amid the frequent digressions, he creates here a couple of passages of a couple of paragraphs each that merit particular acclaim. One reduces all that Molly Bloom articulated in the long closing of "Ulysses" to a powerful expression of what women really want but what men cannot give. The other passage, and this perhaps may entice Hollywood's special effects, sums up neatly and messily what would be the final thoughts and demands from we earthlings if an asteroid was about to pulverize our planet. The compression in these sections I think works better than what in other chapters takes many digressive (albeit often informative and lively for the kind of reader who will choose ST) pages to reveal about the frailty and the boasts of humans trapped within impassive forces.

Ultimately, perhaps better to ponder here such long evocations of pedagogical futility and personal fidelity, and the challenges that survival vs. friendship present those faced with sudden necessity to choose their life over their loyalties, their self-preservation rather than their presumed patriotism or assumed allegiance. As with "Julius Winsor," the core of Donovan's tale could have generated a longish short story rather than a short novel. For both his novels, this formal distinction is crucial. Some readers will welcome the extended forays into reenactments and recollections. Others will impatiently await a return to the central conflict. On screen, perhaps more bombs, more guns, more noise, more shenanigans, more playfulness in the self-consciously awkward "characters" that the two interlocutors take on. This role-playing aspect, in the novel, works sporadically. It may, however, succeed better if fleshed out by competent actors!

The two main characters deepen and their interior selves emerge as the novel progresses over the course of the afternoon, but it remains difficult for me, as a reader, to fully believe in their frequent lapses into dutiful student and hectoring teacher, eager lecturer and skeptical matriculator. Donovan's tone shifts about, and while this uneasiness may be versimilitude for the disturbance both characters feel-- as the reader learns may be for different reasons than were earlier suggested-- it does jar the placement of weighty ultimatums and recurring dangers that, as the novel ponders, threaten our fragile bodies and deluded souls. It appears as if the comic element, in the existentialist tradition of many of his influences, grapples uncertainly-- given the latitude offered a novelist rather than an essayist-- with the conventionally saturnine ideologues who inform Donovan's speculations. Again, this narrative displacement may be pro forma for serious European-inspired fiction, but in transferring this to characters that tumble, leap, and hiss rather than dig, chat, and shiver, the screenplay may have to sacrifice the depth that Donovan strives to excavate as he digs into the shattered European past.

It would be a shame if "Schopenhauer's Telescope" is retracted on screen into distortion of Donovan's grave intentions-- or ground down for a shallower, more superficial in both senses of the word, presentation. I applaud the potential exposure of ST by a film and trust that it will do justice to its source. This novel, while it remains ultimately and perhaps intentionally unstable, deserves attention for the erudition, energy, and emotion it extracts from a cold, isolated, and bitter scenario.

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Evil in history from both ends of the telescope

Gerard Donovan's debut novel "Schopenhauer's Telescope (ST)" is an impressive literary work of fiction that was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Set somewhere unidentified in Eastern Europe, the smell of death, destruction and ethnic cleansing permeates the air from its opening pages. You know something evil is about to happen and shortly - the chapters are structured by the hours of a day - but you don't know why and to whom. Donovan keeps you guessing till the very end.

The novel pans out as a stagy two man dialogue about the history of evil in world civilisation. Throughout the ages, evil has been perpetrated and justified in the name of religion, trade, even progress, but what remains are the ashes of human suffering and destruction that gets lost in the annals of recorded history. The telescope of the book's title, a metaphor of great power and resonance, peered into from back to front gives a totally different view of the living truth of history.

The baker and the schoolteacher. One commands the other to dig a trench in the icy winds out in the wintry open. Who's doing what to whom. We can only guess. The baker's knowledge of life is defined and circumscribed by his craft and his instinct to survive . He has no soul. The schoolteacher is a learned man but he has experienced love and suffers for it. As the hours lapse and time inevitably runs out, something does happen and we will know why.

ST is an incredibly moving piece of work of surprising depth and maturity. It is a thinking man's novel that raises many thought provoking issues about evil, life and love. One of best new novels I have read this year.

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Wonderful, yet different

I bought this book over a year ago and didn't get around to reading it until this Thanksgiving. I'm glad I did! What a great novel! Donovan draws you in from the first page and doesn't let go. The story is so much more than a tale of a war-stricken country. It dives deep into the complex nature of humans. The concept of Schopenhauer's Telescope is new to me (you dont' find out what Schopenhauer's Telescope is until 2/3 into the book), but is something that will not escape me anytime soon. This book will make you think about, reflect upon, and thoughtfullly consider many topics that don't come up in day to day conversation. The book itself is like a diary, with the author revealing a dark secret every few pages. Highly recommended to all.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

In an unnamed European village, in the middle of a civil war, one man digs while another watches over him. Slowly, they begin to talk. Over the course of the afternoon, as the snow falls and truckloads of villagers are corralled in the next field, we discover why they are there--not just who they are but also how sinister events in the country have led them to be separated by a deepening grave, and why the history of civilization is inseparable from the history of mass violence. Beautifully written, with a poet's eye for detail coupled with a chilling and compelling narrative drive, Schopenhauer's Telescope is current in the best sense--no thin allegory of today's conflicts, but a remarkable attempt to make art out of the brutality of life.

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