Full Description
Part love story, part moral treatise, part theatre of the absurd, this brilliant first novel is an examination of the complexity of the human spirit, for readers of Knut Hamsun, Bernhard Schlink, and Paul Auster. In an unnamed European village, in the middle of a civil war, one man digs while another watches over him. Slowly, they begin to talk. Over the course of the afternoon, as snow falls and truckloads of villagers are corralled in the next field, we discover why they are there--not just who they are but also how sinister events in the country have led them to be separated by a deepening grave, and why the history of civilization is inseparable from the history of mass violence. Beautifully written, with a poet's eye for detail coupled with a chilling and compelling narrative drive, Schopenhauer's Telescope is current in the best sense--no thin allegory of Bosnia or Kosovo but a remarkable attempt to make art out of the brutality of life.
