The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Schopenhauser's Telescope, by Gerard Donovan
reviewed by Mark Tursi

Gerard Donovan. Schopenhauer’s Telescope. Counterpoint, 2003. 306 pp. $25.00.

Gerard Donovan’s debut novel intertwines dense philosophical ruminations with simple conversational dialogue in a story that reveals humankind’s potential for love as well as our potential for evil. Through debates, allegories, fairy tales, moral anecdotes, intellectual jousts, and even a short “screenplay,” Donovan’s narrative depicts a self-conscious and often morose examination of the human condition. He explores the horrific actions of various historical figures as well as the potential insidiousness hidden within the neighbor next door. The title of the book springs from an odd suggestion by Arthur Schopenhauer, stated here by one of the characters in the novel: “to gain perspective on any problem, we should travel fifty odd years into the future and invert a telescope, look through the wrong end . . . at ourselves as we are, and make decisions with the benefit of hindsight.” This peculiar obsession with perception, time, human behavior, and, ultimately, ethics and morality is what colors Donovan’s novel. The story involves mostly dialogue between two characters—a history teacher and a baker—in a small, unnamed northern European village during a civil war. The two characters discuss a long history of human cruelty throughout the world, from the horrible mass slaughters of Genghis Khan’s army to King Leopold’s sponsoring of African genocide in the 1890s to the fires of Dresden. While conversing, the baker digs a hole that is clearly a grave intended for one of the men and possibly many more. This view from Donovan’s “telescope” is bleak and sparse. As readers we are forced to imagine the vast horrors humankind has inflicted from antiquity to the twentieth century. However, it is the almost intimate exchange between the two main characters that ultimately becomes the most striking and often startling part of the book.