Conversation with Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel (Writings From An Unbound Europe)

From Publishers Weekly At the deathbed of 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, "you," a kind of theoretical interlocutor, notices a teardrop on the dead man's cheek—of which his spirit then denies the existence. Thus begins Macedonian novelist Smilevski's fourth novel (his first translated into English), which uses Spinoza's work as a way into his scantily documented life. In order "[t]o understand my contempt for tears," Spinoza goes on to tell his life story: the early death of his mother, his rejection of all romance, the books he wrote and the ideas he cultivated—it's a life free from emotion or desire, lived according to his ideals. At the end, the interlocutor demands a retelling, one told by the Spinoza "who knew what despair and sorrow really meant"—and gets it. Not only does Smilevski fulfill the difficult task of explaining Spinoza's dense ideas, dropping sly references to Darwin and Kundera into 17th-century Dutch life but he makes a hidden life wonderfully manifest. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Product Description Prizing ideas above all else, radical thinker Baruch Spinoza left little behind in the way of personal facts and furnishings. But what of the tug of necessity, the urgings of the flesh, to which this genius philosopher (and grinder of lenses) might have been no more immune than the next man-or the next character, as Baruch Spinoza becomes in this intriguing novel by the remarkable young Macedonian author Goce Smilevski.Smilevski's novel brings the thinker Spinoza and his inner life into conversation with the outer, all-too-real facts of his life and his day--from his connection to the Jewish community of Amsterdam, his excommunication in 1656, and the emergence of his philosophical system to his troubling feelings for his fourteen-year-old Latin teacher Clara Maria van den Enden and later his disciple Johannes Casearius. From this conversation there emerges a compelling and complex portrait of the life of an idea--and of a man who tries to live that idea. Review "A young heir to Gunter Grass and Jose Saramago, Smilevski might be the newest of a rare thing--a living European novelist with a message for the future of his continent, with an imagination borne against inheritance with such force that even Spinoza might have approved." -- Forward "Not only does Smilevski fulfill the difficult task of explaining Spinoza's dense ideas, dropping sly references to Darwin and Kundera into 17th-century Dutch life, but he makes a hidden life wonderfully manifest." --European Jewish Press"Through this extraordinary literary expedition, [Smilevski] gives the Spinoza 'hologram,' usually projected onto the pages of historic-philosophical studies, his peculiar double—a man of flesh and blood who paradoxically shares his lonely universe with all those existing, or to exist, similar to him."—Ana Dimishkovska, Macedonian P.E.N. Review About the Author Goce Smilevski was born in Skopje, Macedonia, in 1975 and is the author of three novels. In 2002, Conversation with Spinoza won the Macedonia National Novel of the Year Award.Filip Korženski is an English teacher and professional translator who lives and works in his native Skopje, Macedonia.