Schopenhauer's Telescope

Schopenhauer's Telescope by Gerard Donovan, my 8th novel of the year. It's almost 300 pages of text on about 6 hours' worth of conversation between two unnamed men, a village teacher and a village baker, as they both stand in the middle of a snow-covered field in their enemy-occupied hometown in the midst of civil war in winter.

The baker is busy digging. He has been hand-picked by the enemy forces to dig a mass grave. Like a traitor who has betrayed his own townsfolk and is now facilitating the entry of the enemy, the teacher smokes and watches by the side as the baker sweats it out in the hole. And as the baker shovels away at sand, stone and snow, he engages the teacher in topics of war and history, violence and bloodshed, philosophy and science, morality and immorality. They discuss Genghis Khan whose troops killed almost a fifth of the world's known population in the early 1200s and King Leopold of Belgium who killed some ten million Africans in the 1890s. And as they speak, trucks roll by and stop alongside the field, unloading their human cargo - nervous villagers rounded up by enemy troops. By sundown, the mass grave is ready. Time for execution. There is the sound of rapid gunfire, and one of the two men collapses in a bloody, riddled heap inside the freshly dug grave. The other villagers follow him in. The traitor walks off with the enemy soldiers.

My favourite line from the book: "[A person] learns that future is behind and the past in front, rather than the other way around, because he can't see the future with his eyes. But the past is visible because it has happened, so it's in front."

Morbid as it is, the book is nonetheless written in a very engaging style. And very philosophical. But at some points of the story, it appears to depart from the realm of reality, with both men behaving in ways that are not quite believable given the frigid, wartime scenario. I rate the book 3.5/5.

And what's Schopenhauer's telescope? Well, Schopenhauer is a philosopher from the 19th century. He proposed that in order to gain perspective of our problems, we should travel some 50 years into the future and then look down a telescope in the opposite way, back at ourselves as we are now, and then make decisions based on the benefit of hindsight. An interesting proposition. Towards the end of the book, both men used Schopenhauer's telescope to see how the history books will record the part each of them played in the grim events on that sombre winter's day.