CAFÉ DE SOPHIA

Alsadah’s novel charts a teenager’s journey of discovery through the intellectual magic of Socratic dialogue.

In the preface to this philosophical novel, the author says he was inspired by the works of Plato and views Plato’s use of reasoned dialogue as the best method of intellectual inquiry. The book’s lead, 16-year-old Nate River, finds himself on a journey of discovery after wandering into the Café de Sophia in Paris, where a small group of regulars use the Socratic method to interrogate the basic questions of human experience. The group’s leader, nicknamed Plato, leads the curious teenager through a series of questions that shifts Nate’s perspective on life. Each session begins with a series of fundamental questions pertaining to, for example, the nature of knowledge, the characteristics of justice and equality, and even how to know the difference between right and wrong. Then the group carefully considers various facets of each topic, defining key terms with precision and discarding any concepts that are irrational or false. Nate, exhilarated by the caliber of the discussions, slowly develops intellectual skills that prompt new worlds of thought (“The conversation opened my eyes to the wide possibilities of words and their meanings and that I should know exactly what a word means before using it”). Alsadah adeptly covers issues of great importance—the nature of love, the impact of personality traits, and the application of logic to daily life. The format used here, in which an older group of kind and intellectually curious adults helps a young man to see the world clearly and rationally, makes heady concepts accessible to a wide audience. Drawing on an extraordinarily wide range of philosophical, religious, and literary ideas, ranging from Pythagoras to Hermes Trismegistus, Alsadah has produced a work both engaging and substantive.

A smart, carefully constructed philosophical novel.