Word: gaarder
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...about time we started seeing girls as the stars of adventure stories, which is why it's been such a pleasure to see the recent surge in books featuring young girls as such heroes. Consider, for example, Jostein Gaarder's erudite epic Sophie's World or Philip Pullman's Carnegie Award-winning fantasy The Golden Compass. Both of these books feature young women as the epic heroes of their own journeys of exploration and education, both were first released in Europe and both have a thing about Scandinavia and snow. Brian Hall's new coming-of-age epic, The Saskiad...
...amazement of its Norwegian author, Jostein Gaarder, 42, Sophie's World, subtitled A Novel About the History of Philosophy, has become a runaway hit practically everywhere it has appeared. In the author's homeland, it has been on the best-seller lists for nearly four years. The novel has been published in 30 countries, including China, Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea. Late last month Farrar, Straus & Giroux issued an English version in the U.S. (403 pages; $19). Despite reviews that were mixed at best, the first edition of 50,000 copies sold out in less than two weeks...
...Gaarder, who is married and the father of two sons ages 10 and 18, teaches at a high school in Oslo. He wrote Sophie's World to fill a gap. Stores were full of New Age pap and other mystical mush, but there were no books that would introduce young people to serious philosophy. By trying to blend fantasy with head-cracking summaries of deep thought, Gaarder feared that he had "sat down between two stools. But I was mistaken. Sophie's World fell on top of all the stools...
Still, Sophie's World may not be for everyone. The characters are half- dimensional, the plot creaks, and Gaarder's prose (or the translation by Paulette Moller) has a distinct flavor of bark. As fiction, Sophie's World deserves no better than a D+. But as a precis of great thought, Gaarder's tour de force rates a solid...
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