Publishers Weekly
★ 03/04/2019
In his sublime first novel (following the story collection Inherited Disorders), which recalls the nested monologues of Thomas Bernhard and the cerebral farces of Donald Antrim, Sachs demonstrates the difficulty of getting inside other people’s heads (literally and figuratively) and out of one’s own. In 1666, a young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—the philosopher who invented calculus—treks to the Bohemian mountains to “rigorously but surreptitiously assess” the sanity of an eyeless, unnamed astronomer who is predicting an impending eclipse. Should the blind recluse’s prediction come to pass, Leibniz reasons, it would leave “the laws of optics in a shambles... and the human eye in a state of disgrace.” In the hours leading up to the expected eclipse, the astronomer, whose father was Emperor Maximilian’s Imperial Sculptor (and the fabricator of an ingenious mechanical head), tells Leibniz his story. As a young man still in possession of his sight, he became Emperor Rudolf’s Imperial Astronomer in Prague, commissioning ever longer telescopes, an “astral tube” whose exorbitant cost “seemed to spell the end of the Holy Roman Empire.” The astronomer also recounts his entanglements with the Hapsburgs, “a dead and damned family,” all of whom were mad or feigning madness. These transfixing, mordantly funny encounters with violent sons and hypochondriacal daughters stage the same dramas of revelation and concealment, reason and lunacy, doubt and faith, and influence and skepticism playing out between the astronomer and Leibniz. How it all comes together gives the book the feel of an intellectual thriller. Sachs’s talent is on full display in this brilliant work of visionary absurdism. (May)
From the Publisher
"A delightful perversion of history." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Somewhere at the intersection of sober science, historical pastiche and lunatic parable . . . [The Organs of Sense] is brilliant, weird, and profound, telling truths about the modern condition that most novelists today have forgotten, or never knew." —Adam Kirsch, Tablet
"I’ve decided instead to come right out and say of The Organs of Sense, the debut novel by Adam Erlich Sachs: it’s extremely—perhaps even deafeningly—good. Further still, I’d call it one of the best books published in 2019." —Nathan Knapp, Music and Literature
"In his sublime first novel . . . which recalls the nested monologues of Thomas Bernhard and the cerebral farces of Donald Antrim, [Adam Ehrlich] Sachs demonstrates the difficulty of getting inside other people’s heads (literally and figuratively) and out of one’s own . . . How it all comes together gives the book the feel of an intellectual thriller. Sachs’s talent is on full display in this brilliant work of visionary absurdism." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Sachs confidently fictionalizes history, infusing the process of scientific discovery with dark absurdity." —The New Yorker
"The Organs of Sense embeds the voices of its storytellers to create a universe of thought that seems at once bounded and infinite, composed of many alien points of view... It can simultaneously peer out, through the eye of the telescope, at the splendor of the heavens, and gaze in, at the refractions of its own manic thinking . . . by telling us the story of the blind astronomer, The Organs of Sense shows how the rationalist project may have been spurred by the blindest and most irrational impulse: love." —Merve Emre, The New York Review of Books
"This impressive debut is for fans of George Saunders and Vladimir Nabokov . . . [it is] filled with delightful tales of palace intrigue, sibling rivalry, and extensive forays into empirical thought and logic. Deep philosophy is applied to nearly everything that pops up, including the eating of soup." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Beguiling and utterly magical . . . a riveting story about geopolitical scheming, warfare, and the reach of the Catholic League in the seventeenth century. At the novel’s beating heart, though, is a much more universal theme as Sachs considers father-son relationships and other complicated family dynamics that can make or break creative ambitions of all stripes . . . Sprinkled with generous doses of philosophy, this gem of a novel, with a spectacular denouement, might make for labored reading initially, but ultimately, it’s an utterly immersive and transportive work of art." —Poornima Apte, Booklist (starred review)
"Adam Ehrlich Sachs's The Organs of Sense is layers-deep. At its core it's a story of a 1666 encounter between a young Gottfried Leibniz and a blind astronomer who makes the unlikely prediction of a solar eclipse . . . It is at once a pitch-perfect send-up of an overwrought philosophical tract and a philosophical tract in its own right—meaty, hilarious, and a brilliant examination of intangible and utterly human mysteries." —Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed News
"This tale of wit and science . . . is a crazy quilt of alchemical fable, family drama and shaggy dog saga . . . [Sachs] has martini-dry wit and a fantastic sense of comic timing . . . In a literary landscape crying out for wit and intricacy . . . [The Organs of Sense is] highly recommended." —Leigh Anne Focareta, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"A madcap, ingenious fable that booms with endless jokes and riffs about the nature of consciousness, The Organs of Sense is yet another dazzling, high-wire performance from our modern-day Kleist, Adam Ehrlich Sachs." —Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs
"Mix Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon, add dashes of Liu Cixin and Isaac Asimov, and you’ll approach this lively novel of early science . . . impeccably written." —Kirkus Reviews
"At once erudite and comic, The Organs of Sense is an absurd and beautifully finessed pseudo-historical novel which deftly circles around a dark core." —Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World and A Collapse of Horses
"This is the funniest and most original novel I've read in a very long time, a madcap blend of philosophical malpractice and byzantine palace intrigue. It's like what might happen if Helen DeWitt attempted a revisionist seventeenth-century historical novel, or if W. G. Sebald had gone insane. In other words, there's nothing else like it. Read it and see!" —Andrew Martin, author of Early Work
Kirkus Reviews
2019-02-28
Mix Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon, add dashes of Liu Cixin and Isaac Asimov, and you'll approach this lively novel of early science.
Being an astronomer in the days before high-powered telescopes were developed was not an easy job, especially for the sightless but productive astronomer at the center of Sachs' (Inherited Disorders, 2016) literate, quietly humorous historical novel. The astronomer in question, who, notes protagonist Gottfried Leibniz—yes, that Leibniz, polymathic philosopher and inventor of calculus—is "in fact entirely without eyes," has predicted, to the very moment, that at noon on the last day of June 1666 a profound solar eclipse will plunge all Europe into temporary darkness. Given that no other astronomer has arrived at this forecast, Leibniz is intrigued, and off he goes to find the astronomer and gauge whether he is truly blind and truly not off his rocker: "So, if he is sane, and he has not detected me, then this is not a performance, and either he really sees, or he thinks he really sees." Given that the year 1666 has been an ugly one of plague and war and anti-scientific purges, there's plenty of reason not to want to see. The astronomer has much to say about such things, spinning intricate tales, some of them increasingly improbable. There's a gentle goofiness at work in Sachs' pages, as when he constructs a syllogism about the relative movements of thinkers and nonthinkers, concluding that "if you look very closely at a nonthinker and a true thinker you'll notice that they're actually standing still in completely different ways," and when a prince reasons that in order to call a dog a dog, the thing has to love us, whereas "before that point we call it a wolf." Yet there's an elegant meditation at play, too, on how science is done, how political power can subvert it (in the astronomer's case, in the form of onerous taxes), and how we know the world around us, all impeccably written.
A pleasure to read, especially for the scientifically inclined.
