Sophie vs. Theo

I've finished my last exam - the last one I'll ever have to do for this degree. Possibly the last one I'll ever have to do in my life. Unless I'm silly enough to to a driving test - which might be good for increasing the sum total of my knowledge - and learning is never a bad thing - but is not so environmentally sound. Especially not when such items as buses exist. I'll be a BSc soon! That sounds good!

So now I can return to the land of the living - or rather, the land of the blogging, because I'm too damn tired to do any of that "living" stuff right now. I can summon up the energy to breathe, keep my eyes open, and type. Just. I feel like the relaxing yoga stretches I tried to relieve exam stress have pulled not only a muscle, but my entire body. On the plus side, I can put both hands flat on the floor in front of me with my legs straight, and touching my toes is chicken feed. On the minus side... it hurts to walk. I am beginning to sympathise with old people. Speaking of old people, I hope I'll be one of those 60-year-old yoga practicioners who thinks nothing of putting one foot behind her head first thing in the morning. Right now I'm 22 and therefore don't experience first things on the mornings; I have first things in the afternoon instead.

Land of the living... I've cleaned Miranda's tank for the first time in weeks and regretted I didn't do it earlier, as there's nothing I enjoy more than seeing a young, healthy, stupid oranda try and swim into the filtration output. (Maybe I'm underestimating her and it's actually the fishy equivalent of a treadmill.) I'm going to polish the glass table in the conservatory; I managed to get vinegar all over it yesterday and it's dried into a smear. I'm going to tidy my room and arrange my books more like in the order I have to read them in. I'm going work out why iTunes has stopped talking to my iPod - I suspect a lover's tiff is what's stopping me from being able to listen to the Sweet Charity soundtrack on the bus.

And I can get back to talking about books!

So... back in 1998 or so, I bought Sophie's World. (Ten years ago! Time flies...) I loved it; the didacticism didn't weigh too heavily on the text, and I rather enjoyed the twist when Sophie finds out exactly who she and Alberto are (I didn't see it coming - but give an innocent 12-year-old a break). And it genuinely did make me a deeper thinker, I think - at least I hope. Because when it comes down to it all, "Why are we here?" is a damn good question. Even apparently silly questions, like "So why do all horses look the same?" still have interesting implications. So there is no such thing as a stupid question.

And I liked the characters. Sophie the everygirl - I think her age was captured perfectly, as she seemed awfully grown up and confident to the 12-year-old me, but ever so fifteen to the twenty-odd-year-old me (though I admit it did strike me as odd that she still had one best friend at 15). She grew up with the reader as the book went on. I kind of envied her all her pets, but even more I envied the teacher-student relationship with Alberto. I've always liked having older, wiser friends. I wanted a mentor. But I was quite content to have a proxy, fictional mentor in Alberto.

The story? Well, it's explicitly stated in the book that it's not so much a novel as a philosophy textbook - a statement I originally read with a hint of disappointment. I thought I'd been reading a novel, albeit one with a heavy emphasis on philosophy discussions. But now I realise I can't be wrong with my assessment - I think it's a novel. So it is. The setting is quite ordinary, just like Sophie, and barring the later portion of the book, nothing extraordinary happens apart from the friendship between a 38-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl. And that was fine by me too, because I could almost imagine the novel happening to someone just like me. Sophie was me - a Norwegian me with a mentor and a cat and a tortoise - and I identified with her, grew and learned with her.

So when I finished the book after a couple of days of dedicated reading (it's not small!), I was desperate for something else to read. Something in the same vein. I ploughed through the rest of Jostein Gaarder's books (and I can particularly recommend The Solitaire Mystery and The Ringmaster's Daughter). Still not enough. So was there another novel with a similar theme? Perhaps by a different author, treating a different subject...?

It seemed there was. Turn your eyes to the, um, volume to the right (I assure you that the back copy advertises the book as the superior cousin of Sophie's World. Ha!). My first rule for a book is that you shouldn't have to look at the cover 36497 times to check the spelling. OK, this isn't the writer's fault, but the fault of some cloth-eared translators who wouldn't know fluent prose if it bit them in the arse, but let's be fair. If Catherine Clement hadn't written this book, they'd have been out of a job, and although with their ear that would have been no bad thing, they've got to eat.

So this kid Theo gets a deadly disease - according to a google search it's some deadly aggressive leukaemia. I wouldn't know; I wasn't able to penetrate past the first couple of chapters. I was under the impression it was glandular fever, which, while debilitating, is hardly worthwhile of the fuss over it in the book. He's a geek with a particular interest in mythology and an inexplicably attractive appearance, which probably remains unsullied by the strangest form of leukaemia the world has ever known. He has a best friend, which occurrence I would also deem impossible given that he's a 14-year-old nerd. OK, a pretty nerd. We get it. Did I mention he's a sickly, attractive, delicate genius geek? I don't know, so I'll state it again! Just so you know you're meant to like this character! Instead of getting pissed off at his overprotective parents, or just a teensy bit jealous that his crazy harridan of an aunt is taking him on a round-the-world trip, damn the consequences, you're meant to like and sympathise with the nerdy sickly pretty boy... argh.

In an effort to stop getting pissed off by the ineptness of the writing and the fact that my mid-teenage years didn't involve a trip around the world (even if it did have the purpose of teaching me about world religions), I  flipped through the book. Now Theo doesn't have a character so much as a set of characteristics which have hopefully been hammered into your head, so it's not surprising he flips between childhood and almost-adulthood, and the fact that the host characters who tell him about the religions are cardboard cutouts - but it's a religion textbook, right? All this characterisation rubbish can go out of the window, and the plot, well, it can hang like a bedsheet held by two pegs on a washing line. I could almost accept this if reports (OK, Amazon reviews) had not indicated that the information presented was very often inaccurate. So the book fails at characterisation and at information. Let us hope that the denoument....

... no. Theo gets better, sorry to spoil it for you. There might have been a poignancy and poetry to the book if he had died, having come to a spiritual peace through his exploring of world religions, but he's now, apparently, no longer a sickly pretty nerdy boy. He's a healthy pretty nerdy boy. And he gets the girl - the best friend I mentioned before. The girl has been patiently waiting and worrying at home while Theo apparently has the time of his life. Blah. Maybe it's just my wanderlust mixed with jealousy speaking, but I'd want to be out there.

So who would like this book? It has three and a half stars on Amazon. So someone - many someones - likes it. But I'm hard-pressed to think: indiscriminate religious people who prefer anything to secular atheism? Umm... 14-year-olds who haven't read Sophie's World, and think this is as good as didactic lit. gets? Any other suggestions?

I was only reminded of this book because Amazon.de assumes that buying anything from them is license to sending the purchaser endless e-mails containing books that may prove interesting based on previous purchases. From Amazon.de, I have bought one book - Das wiedergefundene Licht (yup... And There Was Light, but in German this time). So apparently I will quite happily read German translations of spiritually-themed books by French authors - WRONG! I want books about resistance. Or the Second World War. Amazon - please use a different algorithm. Anyway, the latest offering included a book called Theos Zweite Reise - Theo's second journey, by Catherine Clement. Another world trip? Think of your carbon footprint, Theo! Apparently he is - this new one's about saving the planet. Now I'm all for some environmental awareness, but Christ Almighty - not through the medium of a Catherine Clement book! Please, Mme Clement. Write a pamphlet. Do not subject the world to Theo.