EDIT: I am not very good at running a blog, and somehow books get shuffled around in terms of publication order on here. Although I ended up writing the review much later, I read this well before the human shitstain that is Elon Musk did a Nazi salute to the American people, prompting me to think ‘oh, so this is back in fashion. Exactly what we needed.’ Had I read this after that event, it might have affected my reading to have paid more attention to the Rosenberg sections. Just a thought.
I like Spinoza. This is despite me repeated inability to read The Ethics. Philosophy is hard. But I like him because he is a person who stood for principles and stuck with them, no matter how inconvenient. In these days, this is a pretty important lesson to remember.
If I hadn’t been convinced of that before, this book pushed the idea further.
That being said, it is a weird book.
The book consists of two interwoven narratives, one which follows Alfred Rosenberg (a nazi whom I must confess I was unfamiliar with) and Baruch Spinoza. Rosenberg is at the very beginning of the novel tasked by his school masters to come to appreciate and understand Spinoza because his very German hero Goethe was massively influenced by Spinoza. The Spinoza narrative follows the philosopher from just before he is excommunicated by the Jewish community for his heretical views on the divine, and through a friendship that blooms in the aftermath of that event. Spinoza (and here we go back to my admiration for him) is fueled solely on his reason, and everything else must conform to it. Rosenberg feels that there are things greater than reason (largely his belief in blood purity of his race) and ultimately goes to the gallows for his beliefs.
It wasn’t a great book from a writing point of view, and I say this despite the fact that I wanted to like it. It really felt like all the characters spoke with the same voice, and that the author was unable to give the characters enough flourish to make them stand out on the page. As well, the book was dialogue heavy, and despite the conversations being interesting, the author again did not do much to make the reading enjoyable. There were times when I though the whole thing might have been better off written as a play. It almost felt like there was little to no setting, just characters having conversations.
I think I can be easily forgiven for getting to the end of this book and finding that I only really gave a shit about the Spinoza parts, and kinda wishing that Rosenberg can go fuck himself. I don’t think the author was attempting to get us to sympathize with Rosenberg, but there is only so much a reader can take of reading a man struggle in his pandering to Adolf Hitler before their eyes glaze over and their brains start to think about what they are gonna cook for dinner tonight.
Rosenberg hangs at the end, but I suppose most of us knew that was coming. Good. Fuck him.
Failures in Polymathy 