Artemis's Reviews > The Discovery of Heaven

This book has been charged by others with the criticism of being “intellectual masturbation”. Whenever a book is criticized for being an exercise of “intellectual masturbation” you know it has the potential to be either really incredible at best or obnoxious at worst. But it baffles me that people would use that classification as primarily negative. This is because people mistakenly attribute normative negative content to “intellectual masturbation” when, of course, it is only negative when it is poorly done - successful intellectual masturbation is (in my opinion) synonymous with “great literature” - and perhaps with all great thought. Even when the term is taken at face value - i.e. to gesture at a work that has an element of intellectual frivolity to it - I fail to see why this would be something negative, if done correctly. Obviously frivolity is itself a question-begging term; but granting that there can be intellectual pontification that is indeed frivolous, it in any case serves as wonderful reading (or viewing, or listening) material.

This book is the fruit of wonderful intellectual masturbation (the same term that so many of its negative reviewers have used to disparage it). It is incredibly ambitious, and in my opinion it wonderfully realizes its ambition. Not perfectly, as true perfection can only be gestured at in the realm of potentiality, but intelligently and playfully and creatively, which is probably better than perfectly.
The book raises - explicitly, through dialogue or internal monologue - more philosophical questions than I think any other book I’ve read (raising does not equal answering, of course). The success of this enterprise, which so often lands as cliche or as unsophisticated in other books, is probably due in large part to the writing of the two protagonists who raise the questions. The dialogue between Onno and Max is delightful and thought provoking, and moreover unique. And their relationship - platonic love in both the correct and the colloquial sense - is wonder-ful.
The gamut of topics that this book covers - existence, meaning, religion, heaven, the Holocaust, philosophy, music, modern art, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, math, architecture (and these are merely the topics that are given serious attention, many more are sprinkled into the 750 pages) - is staggering and fascinating. I gained thoughtful and entertaining insight into every one of them.

This book is simultaneously metaphysical and light-hearted, ontological and amusing. Perhaps those are the types of combinations that cause other readers to balk and render a work intellectual masturbation. But if you ask me, that’s simply another wonderful combination, befit to characterize the aforementioned ones :)