The Solitaire Mystery

The author of 'The Solitaire Mystery' is better known for [b:Sophie's World|10959|Sophie's World|Jostein Gaarder|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1343459906l/10959._SY75_.jpg|4432325], a famous novel that I began as a teenager then quickly abandoned. I can't remember why, as I was hardly a picky reader then. I read a 700 page memoir by Chairman Mao's personal doctor, for goodness sake. (It's called [b:The Private Life of Chairman Mao|775647|The Private Life of Chairman Mao|Li Zhisui|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320537867l/775647._SY75_.jpg|761685].) After reading 'The Solitaire Mystery', however, I got an inkling. I will say this for it, 'The Solitaire show more Mystery' kept my mind off the apocalyptic state of the world for a few hours, and I am thankful. Unfortunately the form this distraction took was annoyance. The plot contains four or five stories nested within stories, except they're actually all the same story, with a heavy-handed moral about being aware of how amazing life is. Alcoholic deadbeat dads feature heavily, while the few women are beautiful, mysterious, and totally lacking any personality. The deck of cards conceit is fun at first, yet rapidly becomes tiresome through overuse. 'Jokers' are praised with exhausting sincerity, which is unfortunate as recent cinema has really ruined that as an epithet. In short, 'The Solitaire Mystery' felt like being regaled with an endlessly looping anecdote by a slightly drunk man who thinks he's a radical thinker. A quote from the Daily Telegraph describes it as, 'Intellectually arresting, emotionally uplifting'. Instead I found myself intellectually and emotionally irritated.

The lesson here is that my brain needs books so I don't have to listen to my anxious thoughts, and quality is a secondary consideration at a time of closed libraries. Thus I am grateful that this book was lent to me. It also made me eager to get back to the turgid bafflement of [b:Gravity's Rainbow|415|Gravity's Rainbow|Thomas Pynchon|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414969925l/415._SY75_.jpg|866393], which is at least hardcore weird. show less

I prefer this one over Jostein Gaarder's more popular Sophie's World. It's not even close in my opinion; The Solitaire Mystery is clearly better, with a lot more storytelling and a lot less philosophizing. Sophie's World was like, "Are we in school? Because this feels like a lecture." Solitaire lets its hair down, giving the characters and narration room to breathe.

12-year-old Hans-Thomas is on a journey across the European continent, accompanying his father to Greece where they intend to locate and bring home their wife and mother who left some years prior. At the start it's unclear why she left. Along the way Hans-Thomas acquires a magnifying glass from an enigmatic gas station attendant and a tiny story book hidden inside a sticky show more bun from a similarly enigmatic baker. The tiny book houses a tale about a hidden island, a mysterious rainbow soda and a deck of playing cards that comes alive. And although Hans-Thomas doesn't realize it yet, it also holds a secret for him. show less

This novel, which was published in Norway before "Sophie's World", is another offbeat, delightful ontology masquerading as an ingeniously constructed fairy tale. It tells the story of the 12-year-old Hans Thomas, who is driving with his father from Norway to Greece in a quest to retrieve his errant mother.

I was captivated by the twin storyline of Hans Thomas who left Norway with his philosophical father in search of his mother who had "went out into the world to find herself"; and that of Baker Hans, Albert Klages whose mother died when he was a child, Ludwig the German soldier and Frode who found himself stranded on an island with nothing but a pack of cards for company. This is a story-within-a-story in which fantasy and reality, the show more past and present, are brilliant mixed. Encapsulated is the advice that we should all try to be "jokers" in order to appreciate what is in front of us. "A joker is a little fool who is different from everyone else. He's not a club, diamond, heart, or spade. He's not an eight or a nine, a king or a jack. He is an outsider. He is placed in the same pack as the other cards, but he doesn't belong there. Therefore, he can be removed without anybody missing him."

Very few books make one want to sit down and re-read them all through again after the first reading, but this is one of them. It is deceptively simple, yet the ideas are so striking that you can't work out why nobody ever pointed them out before. As the story progresses, the themes of the essence of being, of God's role in the world, destiny and the joy of being alive or of the beauty of the world resonate in both stories. "Our lives are part of a unique adventure. Nevertheless, most of us think that the world is 'normal' and are constantly hunting for something abnormal. But that is just because we don't realise the world is a mystery. As for myself, I felt completely different. I saw the world as an amazing dream. I was hunting for some kind of explanation of how everything fitted together."

Gaarder, a former philosophy teacher in Norway, concentrates on these aspects of philosophy, using both stories to illustrate his themes and intrigue his reader. At one point -- during their visit to Athens -- I was reminded of a theme utilized by a lot of authors (e.g. Gaiman) to explain the intertwining of religion and the passing of time: "But in a way they were in the world, as long as people believed in them. People see what they believe - the world didn't grow old or frayed at the edges until people started to doubt."

Once you've read it you'll wonder why you never read it before. A classic plot, yet such a very new one. Simple yet incredibly complex, yet an intelligent child could understand it. "It's because the world has become a habit. Nobody would believe in the world if they hadn't spent years getting used to it. We have seen everything so many times before that we take reality for granted." A novel of ideas that is coherent and striking and memorable.

Book Details:

Title The Solitaire Mystery
Author Jostein Gaarder
Reviewed By Purplycookie show less

Jostein Gaarder builds wonderful worlds where magic meets mystical and the philosophical. But this isn't the fantastic part. The fantastic comes in when you realize how well this world fits in with our own. When one character's exposure to all manner of fantastic sights and tastes leads to, 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, you know that Gaarder is absolutely trying to teach you about a little bit more than the possibility of fate and destiny.

Gaardner weaves together an incredibly clever tale. This is at first a story of a father and son on a journey together in search of the mother that left them years earlier. Along the way, they take a show more detour and young Hans Thomas comes into possession of a magnifying glass and a tiny book where the story within a story starts. Within the pages of this tiny book, a tale of fate, the Solitaire Mystery and Hans Thomas's destiny await. Shades of Gaardner's better-known Sophie's World are all over this book, but this story is far more accessible. show less

For nearly four decades I've had a hand-coloured aquatint by the Romantic artist Paul Sandby (after an original by William Pars). Dated 1780, it depicts The Temple of Sunium, the ruins of which still lie at the last cape every sailor sees sailing south from Athens. It's not a very distinguished print, and I don’t know why I particularly liked it then, but I now treasure it for its classical associations: the site from which King Aegeus threw himself into the sea when he thought that his son Theseus had been killed by the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth, and a place of worship dedicated to Poseidon, Greek god of the ocean and of earthquakes.

I was reminded of this picture at a highpoint of The Solitaire Mystery, when Hans Thomas and show more his father hope to finally see his mother Anita, who left them back in Norway many years before in order 'to find herself'. After a journey in an old Fiat from Norway via Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the Adriatic, Delphi and Athens, father and son learn that the mother can be found at a photo-shoot in the temple at Sounion. Why she has left them, why they have sought her after many years of waiting, and what then turns out to be the eventual outcome, all this forms the frame of the story, a metaphor for the philosophical quest that Hans Thomas and his father are simultaneously engaged in on their transcontinental trip. Published a year before the best-selling Sophie’s World, this novel shares some of the same philosophical curiosity but somehow lacks the spark that makes it a great book, an omission that I find hard to put my finger on.

Gaarder’s narrative relies on the device of stories-within-stories, and concerns several lifetimes over some two centuries. Besides Hans Thomas and his ex-seaman father, the principal characters are Frode, who disappeared at sea in 1790, a baker called Hans who gets shipwrecked in 1842, Albert Klages who is an orphan from Dorf in Switzerland, and a German soldier called Ludwig who has an affair with a Norwegian woman before the end of the Second World War and is presumed dead on the Eastern Front. How these several lives interact, overlap and influence each other is a strand in the novel which is often confusing, I suspect deliberately so. These links are compounded by The Solitaire Mystery being part of a genre in literature where there is a fantastic overlay to everyday life. In The Solitaire Mystery this largely concerns the recurrent theme of a pack of fifty-two playing cards with the addition of a Joker.

There may be echoes of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in Gaarder’s concept of cards existing as living individuals, and of Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies in that the narrative seems to rely on a playing card sequence (Tarot cards in the case of Calvino’s novella) to determine the course of the action. Gaarder, however, has used his cards to different effect: for example, they are introduced partly to demarcate the passing of days, months, seasons and years as a kind of universal calendar, with the Joker representing the extra day added in a leap year. The Great Year of fifty-two calendar years also has significance in the scheme of things, marking both an end and a beginning. I suspect the fact that the author was born in the fifty-second year of the twentieth century may have a bearing on his obsession with the numerology of playing cards.

As with many magic realism novels, the psychological aspects mingle freely with the fantastic, leaving lingering after-images long after the novel has been read. The recurrent motifs of sticky bun and fizzy drink may represent mere sustenance, or may have a religious significance; the special drink called Rainbow Fizz may refer to the father’s alcoholism or to one being so drunk with the sensation of living that one can become desensitised to the real wonders of life, the universe and everything. The names that authors choose for places and people can take on a higher meaning (Hans Thomas notes that his missing mother’s name, Anita, is nearly a palindrome of the Greek word for Athens, where they are searching for her); or they may merely be coincidence (the Swiss village Dorf, which in German merely means ‘village’, is virtually a palindrome of Frode, ‘clever’ or ‘wise’ in Scandinavian languages); on the other hand, Gaarder may just choose names that appeal to him (a 20th-century philosopher and graphologist Ludwig Klages seems to have inspired the names of the German soldier Ludwig and his mentor Albert Klages). The more you dig, the more you uncover, which may be what Gaarder is trying to say about philosophy generally.

While this is an imaginative novel, bubbling over with mental pictures and ideas, I was not entirely convinced by the attempted meld of realism and fantasy; I would, however, be a little poorer for not having read it. An added bonus is the inclusion of Hilda Kramer’s illustrations for the chapter headings, both reminiscent of 19th-century engravings and notable for subtly including what look like fingerprint whorls for line shading. I can’t speak for the accuracy of Sarah Jane Hails’ translation, but it certainly flowed naturally, capturing some of the phraseology and vocabulary that you might expect from the putative twelve-year-old narrator. If only all youngsters on the cusp of adolescence could have such insight; if only everyone had chances to ponder the inter-relatedness of things, as I did with an old aquatint and a sailor’s yarn.

http://calmgrove.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/solitaire/ show less

Hm. Even though I have a lot to say about this and so should have written this review immediately, I'm glad I didn't. The more I let ideas from and about it percolate in my head, the less I like the story.

I didn't realize it was by the author of Sophie's World, which I did not like (well, admit, did not finish) years ago. If I had, I would not have picked this up.

In some ways this reminds me of In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente, with the otherworldly tales within tales vibe and structure.
In some ways it reminds me of The Neverending Story, with the child hero in a book that is marketed as much to adults as to children, and the fantastical philosophical metaphorical metaphysical world.

Fans of either might enjoy this. I was a show more fan of Valente's when I read it a few months ago, but it's fading in my memory and I have a less than rosy memory of it. I don't care for Ende's 'masterpiece' much at all.

The philosophy was rather childish, and all mixed up with science and self-help cliches: those three kinds of thought are distinct and should not be jumbled together if one is trying to communicate effectively about any of them. The most prominent theme as that everyone needs to wake up & truly live & understand how wonderful the world is -- but the child spends almost the whole trip reading a book, and he and his dad are on this trip to retrieve 'Mommy,' who, for all we know, is more alive in Greece on her own than she was with her family in Norway.

And what's up with Mommy? Gaarder (like just about any other philosopher) doesn't care what women think about. We have no idea why Mommy abandoned the family. Other females in the story are a few mere tokens. I guess it's true that most women are busy with more pragmatic concerns and it does tend to be the men who can spare the time to think deep thoughts about where we come from and what is our purpose. I know my purpose is to nurture my family, for example, and if I get a chance to smell some roses as I go along, that's enough.

I did manage to finish it, even though the structure and language (translation?) prevented me from immersing myself in it and so it took too long. So I guess it's not a terrible book. But I'm not recommending it.

It would be good for book groups. I know I have questions. I don't care about them, but they are discuss-able. show less

The sandcastle isn't the most important thing. What is most important is the image of the sandcastle which the child had pictured before it started to build. Why do you think the child knocks the castle down as soon as it is finished?

A story of shipwrecked sailors, playing cards and calendars, of soldiers and bakers, of missing parents and alcoholic fathers, of grandfathers and grandsons re-united, of dwarves and jokers, of goldfish and rainbow fizz. It took me a while to get into this philosophical novel from the author of "Sophie's World", but once I did I found it fascinating.