The Solitaire Mystery (Bookcassette(r) Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful story
Review: After reading Sophie's World, I couldn't help but getting a second (and then a third...) book of Jostein Gaarder. He just writes in such an enchanting and skillful way, that he totally takes you inside his every novel, and you never want to come out again.

So happens with The Solitaire Mystery. It's got all of the characteristics that made Sophie's World a masterpiece: it starts out as a fairly simple story, then it tangles on another one or two intertwining stories, that evolve (as we go through them) parallel to the major story. It's got great (but controlled) imagination, and creates a beautiful atmosphere in the reader's mind, through the most successful description of places and events. Of course, all the stories come to become one at the end, and it ends almost as simply and nicely as it begun.

Overall, The Solitaire Mystery is a truly beautiful story. It's written in a simple but skilled manner, thus allowing it to be read any time of the day - it's a fast read too, since it manages to capture me and not let me go, something that very few books can do (to me!). So, here's another Gaarder classic!

Rating:
Summary: Post-modern fairytale
Review: The Solitaire Mystery follows a young boy, Hans Thomas, and his father on their way to find their runaway mother. Along the way, they encounter various people, each connected by a strange world long ago, leading ultimately to the unraveling of the mysterious pasts of Hans and his family.

The Solitaire Mystery explores the strange world of coincidences and determinism. It dabbles in the philosophy of consciousness, reminding one of Descartes's elegant statement, "Cogito ergo sum," except declared this time by a pack of living playing cards. While definitely surreal, Gaarder touches questions intrinsic in every culture in the world.

The only problem I had with this book was its story-within-story format. This made it somewhat difficult to follow, as it reached the point when Hans was reading a book about someone telling someone else a story told to him by another person.

However, despite the heady material The Solitaire Mystery utilizes, it still reads as light and whimsical. This is a fairytale a la Alice-in-Wonderland, but at the same time, deep and profound.

Rating:
Summary: A modern classic and an adult fairy tale
Review: The Solitaire Mystery is Jostein Gaarder's best book. (though arguably not his greatest, which is probably Sophie's World). 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. Jostein Gaarder took the theme of Alice in Wonderland to create an entirely new and modern story based around the cards - you'll never look at a playing-card in the same way again. Buy this for your entire family, even for your children or grandchildren. 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. A novel of ideas that is coherent and striking and memorable. I tried very hard to think of anything I didn't like or found substandard in this book, and... I just couldn't. It is perfection itself. Even rereadings are highly recommended. You discover the smallest details and nuances that passed unremarked the first time around, which link back and forward to past or future events, and only build up an even more coherent picture.