Book review of “The Schopenhauer Cure,” an historical novel by Irvin Yalom, 2005

The Schopenhauer Cure, an historical novel by Irvin Yalom

Exquisitely written with every word perfectly chosen, the book starts out stellar. Its contemplations about death upon main character Julius' diagnosis of cancer are beautiful (death is beautiful!), the university lecture hall scene is classic, the initial characterizations of Julius and Philip are striking.

Then, within alternating chapters, Yalom introduces a biography of Schopenhauer that kept me spellbound, a credit to Yalom’s expository prose. Even Yalom’s summaries of Schopenhauer’s philosophy are themselves pearls of wisdom. But as the group therapy chapters got longer and longer while the Schopenhauer chapters got shorter and shorter, my patience started wearing thin. I did learn a lot about the intentions and intricacies of group therapy, of which the author is an authority, but group therapy still little interests me.

The book was simply getting too long. Yalom or his editor realized as much, as the ending seems hastily written. Its conclusion was a total washout, with Philip turning warm and fuzzy, and Julius dying quickly and painlessly. I would much have preferred to have witnessed his death with the same detail that was devoted to his prognosis, which is to say, a cancerous death that was long and tortuous, more like reality. I dare say that the author must have grown as impatient to finish writing the book as was I in reading it.

What remains important is that I was inspired to pull from my bookshelves my dusty volumes of Schopenhauer and to poke my nose into them again. I once understood so much about life while reading The World as Will and Representation, a book that changed my life as it did Philip’s. But every evening when I closed the book, I reverted into the same old dummy head I always was.

I read The World during my youthful and impressionable twenties, so my memory may not serve me well, but I think that Yalom placed too much importance upon Schopenhauer’s pronouncement that the sexual impulse underlies all human motives. The chapter, “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love,” is indeed an important chapter in The World, but it is only one chapter among many dozens.

In any case, this book inspired me to also read Yalom’s When Nietzsche Wept. Stay tuned for my forthcoming review.

( Reviewed by Mark Mathew Braunstein www.MarkBraunstein.Org )