March 21, 2003

The Mind-Body Problem, Rebecca Goldstein

A modern Middlemarch, consciously so; the narrator is a philosopher manqué, and conscious of most of what she thinks. She still actively makes mistakes, and the self-reflection has more quips than angst, so this is definitely a funny novel and possibly a deep one.

It's also an academic-midlife-crisis novel, and a nonobservant-Jew novel, and a Bildungsroman, but I liked the Eliot-and-philosophy best. I don't know anything about philosophy, so you should assume that the philosophizing is undergraduate. For instance, our heroine's Mr. Casaubon is a mathematician: it is not surprising that he is a 'working Platonist', someone who thinks abstractions are more real than matter. This in turn is a setup for his holding some of Plato's odder beliefs (though not the ones I would have guessed, if asked to do so).

ISBN: 0-14-017245-9 So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.).

And thus wrote others:
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