Finally finished Sophie's World (good timing, given this is the last blog I have to do on the topic). I enjoyed that the story really started moving. I disliked that the author thought he needed absurdist teenage sex and car crashes to reach the climax1. I also disliked Alberto's explanation of why escaped2 fictional characters could pass through things: as beings of pure soul, they are more solid that everything else.
Being more solid doesn't reduce the solidity of other objects. The metaphor he used, about being able to walk through mist because we're more solid than it, is bullshit. We don't go through mist because we're more solid, we go through mist because it isn't solid.
Hell, with the exception of somethings being denser than others3, I don't think one solid can be more solid than another solid. There are thick liquids, which can be difficult to get through, but that doesn't make them solid. It makes them thick liquids (BTW, mist is a very not thick liquid, so we pass through it without noticing resistance).
Also, what was the deal with Sophie just barely interacting them Hilde? Did Major not notice being smacked in the face with a wrench because he was padded by rabbit fur? Or is Hilde just insane, and thinks Sophie exists, and imagined that a bug biting her was Sophie?
And how did Sophie and Alberto get the boat lose? They said the rope didn't budge, no matter how hard they tried, but evidently, it eventually budged enough for tight knots to come undone AND for the boat to have a little push-off speed. Jostein Gaarder needs to learn consistency.
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1 Freud could have a field day with that...
2 Seeing as how what seems to be every fictional character ever lives somewhere in the world, why did Alberto and Sophie have to work so hard to "escape?"
3 The writer, maybe?
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