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Title: The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch, Paul Vincent ISBN: 0-14-023937-5 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.53 (45 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The best I read in years
Comment: In an absolute mindblowing tour through theology, politics, ethics, science and the meaning of friendship, Mulisch unfolds the story of two friends, their shared love, and a child that might be the child of any one of the two, who is destined to fulfill the purpose celestial powers have decided upon. The pretty strong hints that connect this book to Goethe's Faust, tell you what this book is: hugely ambitious, but highly succesful in meeting that ambition, and a classic that ranks right up there with the best the world literature had to offer in the last couple of hundred years or so. A must read.
Rating: 5
Summary: Very well-written and intensely intriguing. A must-read!
Comment: The Discovery of Heaven is indeed one of the best works of fiction I have ever read, with an intricately fashioned plot, and characters that come to life, making you wish that you could share in the friendship that exists between Max Delius and Onno Quist. The story guides you on a quest throughout Europe, eventually leading you to one of the greatest treasures mankind will ever know. It presents scenarios that inspire love, hate, sorrow, joy, and a multitude of others that draw you in from page one! Being a theologian, it was difficult, if not angersome, to come to terms with several of the religious aspects of the novel, but that's what great literature does--it inspires emotion. This book exceeds that goal. After reading this novel--and I hope you do lest you miss out on one of the greatest masterpieces of the century--you will have found that The Discovery of Heaven is truly the discovery of a lifetime.
Rating: 5
Summary: Extraordinary fiction from the Netherlands
Comment: DISCOVERY OF HEAVEN. Full appreciation of this novel may require a firm grasp of the difference between what is ambiguous and what is absurd. The book is about the interplay between the two and how they are mediated to the consciousness by meaning. That is, the novel asks us whether we want to stress the reality of madness or the madness of reality. Onno and Max are bosom friends and Onno takes up with Ada after Max destroys his own relationship with her by some words of amazing crudeness. Ada's pregnancy is clothed in doubt as to which of the two men is the father of the extraordinarily beautiful child born while she is in a coma following an auto accident. Max is the scientist-astronomer while Onno is the linguist paleographer. They and their conversations are brilliant if never quite serious. Quinten, Ada's child, is brought up by Max and Ada's mother, Sophia. These two have a sexual liaison lacking in several of the features that would make it an affair. After failing in politics and in linguistics, Onno drops out of life and ordinary reality and disappears, while Max finds something like an answer to the question of the origin of the universe and then gets zapped into eternity by a meteorite. Quinten goes on the archetypal quest for his father, (is Onno really his father?) which is the symbolic quest for God or the idea of God. His mother, in a coma seventeen years and a living sign of death, is nearly unknown to him. Symbolically he turns his back on "mother nature," on the corruption of nature from which new life springs in never ending cycles, and he undertakes the search for meaning.
Those of us who think our prime obligation in life is to grow progressively out of the ignorance into which we were born sometimes ask ourselves if the seemingly endless task is really worth it. Our ignorant associates and rellies seem to be no less "happy" than we whose main thrust is the acquisition of culture. But every now and then we receive a surprise reward for our efforts, like when we read a novel grounded solidly in ideas, culture, science, art, spirituality, one whose plot contains a wealth of examples of ambiguity or absurdity.
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Title: The Assault by Harry Mulisch ISBN: 0394744209 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 12 March, 1986 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Siegfried by Harry Mulisch, Paul Vincent ISBN: 0670032530 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 23 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: The Procedure by Harry Mulisch, Paul Vincent ISBN: 0142001279 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: October, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Last Call by Harry Mulisch, Adrienne Dixon, Paul Vincent ISBN: 0140156011 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1991 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom, Ina Rilke ISBN: 015600254X Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: January, 1996 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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