Few Norwegian writers have achieved such worldwide name recognition as Jostein Gaarder. His novel Sofies verden: roman om filosofiens historie (1991; translated as Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy, 1994) ranked as a number-one best-seller for three years in Gaarder's home country and achieved similar status in almost all of the forty-eight languages into which it has been translated. In 1995 this story of a girl named Sofie Amundsen, who is taken on a whirlwind adventure in search of the meaning of life, was the best-selling fiction book in the world. Because of this success--and despite the protagonist's young age of fifteen--Gaarder has been compared to contemporary writers such as John Le Carré and Umberto Eco.

Gaarder's international popularity differs from that of other Norwegian writers because of the breadth of his readership. Often described as a writer of children's fiction--despite the complexity of his novels--Gaarder has...