Jostein Gaarder

Writer

• Born: August 8, 1952
• Place of Birth: Oslo, Norway

Biography

Jostein Gaarder first came to the attention of American readers when, in 1994, Sophie’s World was translated into English. Sofies verden had been on Norway’s best seller list for four years and, despite mixed reviews in the United States, its original press run of fifty thousand copies sold out in ten days. The book, written for children and young adults, was subsequently published in thirty countries, including China, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and the Netherlands.

Gaarden lived in Oslo with his wife and two sons. He was a secondary school teacher of philosophy for eleven years. In Sophie’s World, he draws on this background to present a brief overview of philosophy from ancient Greece to modern times. Along with this informative overview, he weaves a compelling mystery that focuses on fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen, who receives two unsigned letters, each posing a philosophical question: “Who are you?” and “Where did the world come from?” The mystery involves a character named Hilde Moller Knag. Along with these two letters, Sophie receives a mysterious postcard addressed to Hilde that wishes her a happy birthday. Gaarder unfolds the Hilde mystery slowly and eventually resolves it. He uses letters as vehicles in much of his writing and often includes the full texts of letters within his stories.

In much of his writing, Gaarder covers huge expanses of time and space. Sophie’s World is no exception. In The Christmas Mystery (1992), opening the compartments of an advent calendar takes Joachim from the present back to the time of the birth of Jesus. Each compartment in the calendar constitutes a chapter in the story of a young girl named Elisabet who disappeared from Joachim’s Norwegian village. Elements in this story remind one of Antoine du Saint-Exupéry’s title character in Le Petit Prince (1943), and these elements are further developed in Gaarder’s later novel, Hello? Is Anybody There? (1996). In this novel, a letter to a young girl named Camilla from her Uncle Joe deals with the birth of Camilla’s new sibling. After the birth, Camilla observes a falling star that turns into Mika, a boy from another planet. Much of this novel is patently instructive. Uncle Joe teaches the boy things that every boy should know: the taste of apples, the history of dinosaurs, and the difference between mammals and nonvertebrates.

In all of his writing, Gaarder never ceases to be the teacher that he was for eleven years. Although his stories cannot be called didactic in any narrow sense, they are consistently instructive. Imbedded in his mysteries, which accelerate the pace of his stories, are definite lessons that he thinks his young readers should be taught. In Sophie’s World and in his later books, he presents lessons that, in the hands of more specialized authors, might be too obscure for young people to understand easily. His 2001 novel The Ringmaster's Daughter utilizes the literary technique of telling smaller stories within the larger story to convey the plot, which revolves around a man who has spent his life selling stories to struggling writers. In The Castle in the Pyrenees (2008), he returns to the epistolary format to explore the weighty theme of spirituality versus science as well as other philosophical issues, such as life and death.

In the twenty-first century, Gaarder began to take a more involved and adamanat stance regarding the issues of climate change and global warming. In addition to speaking publicly about his view that each generation is responsible for leaving Earth in the same shape that had been enjoyed by the generation before, he has also contributed essays to publications such as the Huffington Post sharing this perspective. His devotion to this cause led inevitably to the subject of his next novel, titled The World According to Anna (2015). For the first time, critics accused Gaarder of sacrificing plot for the sake of mainly sermonizing regarding the danger of ignoring climate change as the main character, Anna, travels through time and receives a stern scolding from her great-granddaughter due to the devastation of the planet.

His 2016 novel, An Unreliable Man, which was translated into English in 2018, follows a lonely divorced man as he attempts to find some kind of lasting human relationships.

Bibliography

Derbyshire, Jonathan. "A Return to Wonder." New Statesman 21 Feb. 2011: 40–42. Print.

Gaarder, Jostein. "The Ethics of the Future." Huffington Post, 16 Nov. 2015, www.huffpost.com/entry/ethics-future‗b‗8576266. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Liu, Max. "The World According to Anna by Jostein Gaarder; Translated by Don Bartlett, Book Review." Independent, 25 Nov. 2015, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-world-according-to-anna-by-jostein-gaarder-translated-by-don-bartlett-book-review-a6749206.html. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Mattin, David. "Sophie's World Author Turns from Philosophy to Climate Change." The National, 14 Mar. 2011, www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/books/sophie-s-world-author-turns-from-philosophy-to-climate-change-1.432265. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

"'An Unreliable Man' by Jostein Gaarder." The Vince Review, 8 June 2020, vincereview.blogspot.com/2020/02/an-unreliable-man-by-jostein-gaarder.html. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.

Ziolkowski, Theodore. "Philosophy into Fiction." American Scholar 66.4 (1997): 547–61. Print.