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A review by scottjbaxter
The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch
This is a big book (900+ pgs in my translation) that takes big ideas seriously I will confess to occasionally getting lost, but there were many passages worth pondering and memorizing, like this one:
People returning from a journey carry the distances they have traveled with them like outspread wings—until they put the key in their front door. Then the wings fold up, and they are home again, as though in the center of an impassable steel ring on the horizon. The moment they close the door behind them, they can no longer imagine they have ever been away.
Or this one:
But their unending stream of theories, jokes, observations, and anecdotes was not their real conversation: that took place beneath these, without words, and it was about themselves. Sometimes it became visible in a roundabout way, like when in the past North Sea fishermen located a school of herring from its silvery reflection against the clouds.
Mulisch has written a big book with big ideas. If you enjoyed Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum or enjoy history, philosophy and related topics then The Discovery of Heaven may be a book for you.
I’m sure I missed a lot not knowing too much Dutch history — the Hapsburgs, the House of Orange, the Spanish empire are all things I had to learn about on my own because they were not covered in my high school or university courses.
I didn’t quite understand the narrator’s fascination with Fidel Castro’s Cuba — to me it was and continues to be an authoritarian police state that happens to have warm weather. And the conspiracy with the supposed Ten Commandments ending in Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock was odd at best.
As I said, a big book that takes ideas seriously.
Tell me in the comments:
Have you read any Mulisch?
What’s the last long book you were impressed by?
People returning from a journey carry the distances they have traveled with them like outspread wings—until they put the key in their front door. Then the wings fold up, and they are home again, as though in the center of an impassable steel ring on the horizon. The moment they close the door behind them, they can no longer imagine they have ever been away.
Or this one:
But their unending stream of theories, jokes, observations, and anecdotes was not their real conversation: that took place beneath these, without words, and it was about themselves. Sometimes it became visible in a roundabout way, like when in the past North Sea fishermen located a school of herring from its silvery reflection against the clouds.
Mulisch has written a big book with big ideas. If you enjoyed Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum or enjoy history, philosophy and related topics then The Discovery of Heaven may be a book for you.
I’m sure I missed a lot not knowing too much Dutch history — the Hapsburgs, the House of Orange, the Spanish empire are all things I had to learn about on my own because they were not covered in my high school or university courses.
I didn’t quite understand the narrator’s fascination with Fidel Castro’s Cuba — to me it was and continues to be an authoritarian police state that happens to have warm weather. And the conspiracy with the supposed Ten Commandments ending in Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock was odd at best.
As I said, a big book that takes ideas seriously.
Tell me in the comments:
Have you read any Mulisch?
What’s the last long book you were impressed by?