Stumbling Onto Great Ideas at A Book Sale

                                 

 By Pronoy Sarkar | Tuesday, August 19, 2014 - Off the Shelf

 Sometimes, being impulsive pays handsomely. This particular lesson began while visiting a small independent book publisher during one of their seasonal discounted book sales. Their entire outfit is quite small—the size of a banker’s living room in Nebraska, perhaps—and in order for the staff to not be inconvenienced by overflowing stacks of books, they routinely invite the public to buy whatever extra copies they have at heavily slashed prices. 
Dollar bins, free periodicals, that sort of thing. Book sales of this sort drive me mad. I look for dimes in my sock, quarters behind my ear, in my ear, etc. I take what I can, often choosing based on a word or an idea expressed on the back cover. I often make no choice at all—just pure impulse, a mechanical grab and drop. And that’s how I found The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat, by Stephen Lukes. 

The novel can be understood, quite simply, as a philosophical novel. That is, a novel of ideas. But there is no chief definition of the philosophical novel, at least none that are agreeable among scholars, and tracing the history of the novel, it is not easily collapsible into neat categories. We can see Plato’s dialogues as examples of the philosophical novel, as are, more recently, the works of David Foster Wallace or Robert Musil. There is also disagreement among novelists and philosophers as to whether the disciplines are complimentary or at odds; can a novelist also be a philosopher? Can a philosopher possibly be a good storyteller? 
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