Life’s Big Questions : Jostein Gaarder’s novel explores the universal wonder of youth. And a lot more.

OSLO —  As a boy, author Jostein Gaarder would stare into the clear Norwegian night and ask his father the sort of existential questions that eventually pique the curiosity of most youngsters: What is behind the stars? What came before the universe? How can something be created from nothing?

He plied his mother with more of life’s riddles: Why do cows have calves and not, say, puppies or kittens? Or--and this one really puzzled him--how is it that when you run to the bus while thinking of something else, your feet know to keep moving?

Gaarder scarcely remembers his besieged parents’ answers, but that is of little consequence since the questions themselves became the driving force of his life. In university, Gaarder learned that he had been asking many of the same questions Socrates and Plato posed. Then, as a high school philosophy teacher, he came to realize just how universal his youthful wonder was.

Gaarder sat down in the spring of 1990 to write a philosophy book for teen-agers. He begged his wife’s forgiveness in advance for what he felt would be an important work but certainly not one that would bring fame and fortune to the family.

He needn’t have apologized.

“Sophie’s World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy” has been a phenomenal success, topping bestseller lists in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and, above all, Germany, where it appears in both the youth and adult sections of bookstores and has sold more than 400,000 copies.

Gaarder’s book--his fourth--will appear in the United States this month with a first printing of 50,000 copies (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). It is being likened to Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” for its surprising popularity. Similarly, it has been called philosophy’s answer to British physicist Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time.”

“Sophie’s World” is a history of Western, mainly European, thought, beginning with Nordic mythology and Greek philosophy and running through Locke and Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Darwin and Freud, all wrapped into a compelling mystery novel whose main character is a 14-year-old Norwegian girl named Sophie.

And it all starts with two questions anonymously delivered to Sophie’s rural mailbox: Who are you? Where does the world come from?

“The universe is a great mystery,” Gaarder said during an interview. “I am really more interested in questions than in giving answers. Where did the world come from? The question has an answer, even though I cannot get to it. It is a good question. It is like a crime that has not been solved. There is an answer, even if police do not know it.”

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Gaarder, 42, is a wiry man who shares an infectious enthusiasm for his subject with the principal male character of his book. The questions in Sophie’s mailbox have come from a bearded philosophy teacher who, like Gaarder, battles tirelessly against that worst of all modern ills, indifference.

“My concern is that you do not grow up to be one of those people who take the world for granted, Sophie dear,” the philosophy teacher writes to the girl in one of his early lessons.

Gaarder likens a child’s natural curiosity to a baby’s innate ability to swim. Parents must throw their offspring into the pool or face years of nose-plugs and swimming lessons, he said metaphorically; they must push and prod their children’s natural curiosity.

“To wonder about life is not something we learn, it is something we forget,” Gaarder said.

For all those teen-agers looking for their place in the world--and the world’s place in the universe--Sophie’s Alice-in-Wonderland encounter with philosophy is a good place to begin.

Sophie’s philosophy teacher identifies himself as Alberto Knox. He soon appears in person, and sometimes in costume, to give engaging lessons in which Knox draws on Gaarder’s 10 years of teaching experience to provide concrete examples of complicated philosophical ideas: Lego blocks to illustrate Democritus’ theory of atoms and rose-colored glasses to demonstrate Kant’s views on perception.

At every step, Knox identifies the questions the philosopher is asking--their project, he calls it--before delving into their answers.

An unlikely ensemble of characters make their appearance in the book--Plato and Little Red Riding Hood in the same manuscript?--and the deeper Sophie dives into philosophy, the more her mother suspects that she must be on drugs or up to no good with this older man.

Sophie and Alberto soon begin to suspect that they all are characters in someone else’s book--a book within Gaarder’s book--and they attempt to escape the author, raising some of the most fundamental questions about God and free will.

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Alternating between coffee and Coca-Cola in the Biblotek Bar of Oslo’s old Bristol Hotel, Gaarder said that although he is surprised by his book’s success, he thinks he understands its appeal now. After the fall of communism, whole countries are starting from scratch, looking to build new societies and a new belief system. They are asking very basic, philosophical questions.

“When I was a student in the ‘70s, we didn’t ask questions. We were hiding behind ideology. The only question was, are you a Marxist or not? Today people ask existential questions.

“When (former Soviet President Mikhail) Gorbachev talked about perestroika and starting everything anew, he said the Western world also needs perestroika and he was right. People have a vague feeling that something is wrong. . . . It is important for them to know our common roots and history. If we don’t know exactly where we are going, it may be important to know where we are coming from,” he said.

Gaarder is not a devotee of a single philosophical school, although he admits that way back when he discovered the German Romantics and the pantheistic approach to philosophy, “they made my heart beat a little quicker.” He said he subscribes to the Christian morals on which he was raised, but when pushed on whether he believes Jesus was God, he will answer only that that is a very good question.

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Good questions. Gaarder starts from the premise that even teen-age jocks subject to raging hormones and intense peer pressure eventually sit back alone at night in a silent room and ask the eternal questions: Who am I? Why must we die?

The father of sons ages 18 and 10, he wanted to write a textbook for just such youths. He started out in a deep, didactic voice--”Human beings have always asked existential questions . . . “--but threw it away when the idea of Sophie came to him.

He made Sophie a girl because as far back as the ancient Greeks wisdom was a female concept, and because his own experience as a high school and adult education teacher was that, in general, women are more curious, more inquisitive, than men.

“For many women, it is very important to try to understand something. For men, it is very important to be understood,” Gaarder said.

And girls especially are responding to his book, sending letters by the bagful to say that they had felt alone and alienated, even a little mad, wondering “Who am I?” but that now they realize that they have been asking philosophical questions as old as humanity itself.

Gaarder also hears from adults who say they find that a mystery novel wrapped around philosophical ideas makes an elite subject more accessible.

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If Gaarder was compelled to write “Sophie’s World” by what he perceived to be a teen-age need, he also was pushed into the endeavor by his own slightly obsessive distaste for New Age and Occult “industries.”

He describes going into bookstores with shelf after shelf of the so-called alternative philosophies, but not a single volume of the classics--a phenomenon he describes as simply perverted.

There are no shortcuts to real philosophical insights, he said, and no need for them if one is truly curious.

“Suppose I pick up a newspaper and read that there is intelligent life on another planet and that they live in cement boxes 18 stories in the sky. I would say OK, but first it must occur to us that New York is such a place. The real world is the mystery, not whether there are aliens in outer space. I am such an alien,” Gaarder said.

Such thinking may go over well in Germany, land of self-examination, but what about in America? Will philosophy sell in the instant-gratification capital of the world? Do Americans care that the roots of their Constitution are in John Locke?

Gaarder wonders too. He has been to the United States only once and does not know Americans very well. But he is hopeful his book will have an impact on youth everywhere. Noting that the whole prospect of a successful novel on the history of philosophy originally seemed impossible, Gaarder recalls a story about Isaac Newton, who kept a horseshoe over his door for good luck.

“Do you really believe this brings you luck?” a friend of Newton’s is said to have asked.

“No,” Newton answered, “but I’m told it works anyway.”