The Organs of Sense -

Adam Ehrlich Sachs

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2019

240 páginas

8h 0m

ISBN-13: 9780374227371

A lunatic tale about the seach for truth—both cosmic and personal
“A Harvard-trained intellect with the timing of a borscht belt comedian” (Publishers Weekly), the acclaimed humorist Adam Ehrlich Sachs brings his unique comic and philosophical sensibilities to his first novel, The Organs of Sense, an intricate nested fable equating our inability to truly understand the world with our inability to understand our families.

In 1666, an astronomer makes a prediction shared by no one else in the world: at the stroke of noon on June 30 of that year, a solar eclipse will cast all of Europe into total darkness for four seconds. This astronomer is rumored to be using the largest telescope ever built, but he is also known to be blind—both of his eyes were plucked out under mysterious circumstances. Is he mad? Or does he, despite this impairment, have an insight denied the other scholars of his day?

These questions intrigue the young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—not yet the world-renowned polymath who would go on to discover calculus but a nineteen-year-old whose faith in reason is shaky at best. Leibniz sets off to investigate the astronomer’s claim, and in the three hours before the eclipse occurs—or fails to occur—the astronomer tells the scholar the story behind his strange prediction: a tale that ends up encompassing kings and princes, family squabbles, insanity, art, loss, and the horrors of war.

Resenhas (8)

3 (Bom)

Quando li o enredo me interessei na hora: a história do misterioso astrônomo cego que previu um eclipse chega aos ouvidos de Leibniz (filósofo e matemático alemão que realmente existiu) e ele resolve ir ao encontro do astrônomo para conhecer sua história e checar sua sanidade. 

Dividido em 4 grandes capítulos, quando terminei o segundo tive muita vontade de parar de ler, foi quase... tem um humor que não faz meu tipo, partes enroladas e que não me interessavam... mas eu queria saber como o astrônomo ficou cego e se o eclipse iria acontecer. E para minha sorte, a partir do terceiro capítulo a história flui. Valeu a pena terminar... Além dos assuntos da loucura e da ciência, fala sobre o que pode acontecer quando exageramos ao voltar nossa atenção, recursos e energia para “as estrelas” e esquecemos dos assuntos que realmente importam.