Author: Caroline Coleman O’Neill

Publisher: Bradman and Holman Publishers, 2005.

ISBN: 080543089-X

The following review was contributeed by: John Walsh & CLICK TO VIEW John Walsh's Reviews

The personal lives of great philosophers and thinkers are very difficult to recreate. Did they spend all their time musing on the great themes of life, the universe and everything or were more prosaic and mundane matters uppermost in their minds? Where should the balance be drawn between entertaining the reader by providing details of the great one’s private life and educating the reader about the profundity of the great one’s thought? This is a particularly complex balancing trick in the case of Soren Kierkegaard because of the slippery nature of the body of his work, with its multiple personalities and its deliberate evasions behind personal issues and affairs. However, many of the details of his life are known to the extent that, in Loving Soren, Caroline Coleman O’Neill’s charming evocation of the real life love affair between Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen, to whom he was engaged before breaking off the relationship, a coherent and believable narrative emerges.

Set mostly in Copenhagen where the protagonists live, the young Regine, who meets Kierkegaard at the age of fifteen, is the central figure and the author wisely focuses on her spiritual and temporal growth as the driving force of the plot. Kierkegaard is initially contrasted with Fritz Schlegel, the staid and reliable civil servant whom we know Regine is fated to marry. By contrast, Kierkegaard is energetic, enervating, occasionally outrageous and definitely attractive to the teenaged girl. She diagnoses him as suffering from depression, which condition she has endured already as it was one to which her father was also susceptible. She steels herself to cope with the ups and downs that must inevitably ensue. Yet behind the melancholia, the egotism and the wit that flow from Kierkegaard in equal measure, there is still a shadowy unknown which is hinted at and not fully explained. Has he been stalking her from a very young age, positioning himself outside the house where she attends piano lessons on a weekly basis? Are their occasional meetings deliberately orchestrated or the result of coincidence in what is a comparatively small circle of decent society? Does he engineer the usurpation of his one time friend Schlegel?

Those who already know how the story must be resolved will not need further information on what happens and those who do not may prefer to encounter the various twists and turns for themselves. This is on the whole a very pleasant novel veering a little more towards the romantic than the intellectual but with important ideas to express about spirituality and the role of love. There is the occasional modern Americanism which jars with the otherwise well-realised sense of time and place but this is not a huge problem. Recommended.

John Walsh, Shinawatra International University, July 2005