Conversation with Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel [Paperback]

When a publisher of Croatian edition told me: They don't make them like this anymore." I nodded politely while at the same time automatically disregarding that comment. You know, publisher talk. According to them, every new book is just another masterpiece waiting to be discovered. Sometime after that I actually started to read Conversations..." and now I can second that opinion - they really don't make them like this anymore, at least not in Croatia. So, naturally, you ask yourself why? what's so special about that one? And, slowly processing the information, you realize that this here is uncompromising book, which doesn't treat its readers nicely i.e. it doesn't provide them with cheap pleasures but instead forces them to think, to collaborate on the novel. While many of the books out there are just telling the story, providing you with everything you need, this one is really just showing...showing possibilities, re-imagining the life of a secluded philosopher which was banished from Jewish community in 17th century most probably because of nature of his teachings. Smilevski writes with passion. He weaves an intimate conversation in which we hear from ultra-rationalist Spinoza, one obsessed with his teachings, one who leads a life of the mind and on the other hand, in second part of the book, we hear from more humane Spinoza, Spinoza filled with fears, passions, regrets and loneliness. Smilevski doesn't write about 17th century Netherlands, he uses that setting just for the background, his main interest lies in discovery of a character. He writes about struggle of the mind and the body, of living according to one's own teachings and living as a civilized animal. Warm empathy and cold ratio. Between them, constant struggle for truth. But question remains, what do we do after we have found the truth. After glimpsing on infinity, what else remains?

This book isn't a philosophy book though there is philosophy inside its covers. This is the book for those who remember what great fiction, great writing, looks like. It is slow, full of melancholy, as Smilevski himself said, full of that romanticist sentiment that has been banished from books in our time. And yet, it is not pathetic, it is not difficult to grasp, it is not modernistic experiment that boggles your mind. It almost looks like that you're actually there, conversing with Spinoza, sharing your thoughts and listening to thoughts of the Other. It builds a world full of words, it builds it out of words and doesn't stop to look if this will bore its reader. You know, there's a cliché, picture that has been used over and over again in which we see the reader sitting in his study, laid back and comfy, reading the book while snow falls outside. Maybe it's a cliché but it perfectly describes ideal environment for this book. This isn't the book you read on public transport or on the beach somewhere, this is it the book to which you have to give some of your own time, give it some of your own thoughts, and it'll give back to you accordingly. And what more can we ask from literature?

Baruch Spinoza is one of the best known 17th century thinkers, as his philosophy of secularism was far ahead of his time. This book aims to create the world at the time through conversations with Baruch and through depiction of the meanders of his life.

His community was of Spanish/Portuguese Jews who fled to Holland. There we know that Baruch was excomungated from the Jewish community, but it is not clear why. Baruch's philophy empashized pure reason as a way to achieve salvation, and not the major religions of the time. His questioning of the existence of a deity were too much for his time, and the book presents such occurences by imagining such a situation.

This is an interesting book, but I am not sure this would be a good intro duction to Spinoza. There is too much that the book takes for granted that the reader knows; this book is recommended to those familiar with Spinoza's philosophy and wanting a better feel for what it must have been like at the time to hold such thoughts. Not for the beginner.

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