The Organs of Sense is deeply rooted in the Western intellectual tradition, and prior knowledge of Leibniz’s optimistic worldview is helpful for appreciating the book’s satirical streak; it’s also helpful if you’ve read Candide. Sachs’ writing, however, aligns most closely to Thomas Bernhard’s, particularly in its listener-monologue structure. But don’t panic: Sachs—a semifinalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor—also has martini-dry wit and a fantastic sense of comic timing. Incremental repetition of key phrases heightens the overall absurdity ... Has Sachs written 'the best of all possible books,' as Leibniz himself might call it? In a literary landscape crying out for wit and intricacy, it’s hard to imagine how it could have been better.

... a delightful perversion of history ... After the zingers of Inherited Disorders, the novel reads like an elaborate shaggy dog joke. But the punch line is a good one, if you can hold out for it.

Sachs recognizes both the seriousness and the humor of the seventeenth-century provocation that man, like cheese, contains thinking multitudes. He resurrects the conventions of the earliest comic novels—Jonathan Swift’s satires of rationalism, Henry Fielding’s chatty, self-conscious narrators—to reveal that human thought is, fundamentally, absurd ... The Organs of Sense embeds the voices of its storytellers to create a universe of thought that seems at once bounded and infinite, composed of many alien points of view. The novel can speak in the gently parodic interjections of Leibniz’s translator, the goofy exclamations of the astronomer, the officious tones of a seventeenth-century emperor. It can simultaneously peer out, through the eye of the telescope, at the splendor of the heavens, and gaze in, at the refractions of its own manic thinking ... The novel, for Sachs, offers a mechanism for giving form to the immateriality of thought and feeling—the essential quality of being human that exceeds the singing, chomping, and blinking thingness of the body ... [a] twinkling and zany philosophical account ... Sachs makes you work for the privilege of sharing his derangements of thought ... For this reason, the novel is less a novel of ideas than it is a novel about the emotional, illogical, concealed, and self-duplicitous reasons why we grasp, and are grasped by, particular ideas at particular moments; how our histories and history writ large get twined together by forces not totally within our control or imagination; how whatever space is left for human determination must be claimed by a spectacularly, hilariously exaggerated effort of will.

Things can be perplexing at first, but once you realize what Sachs is up to, a certain rhythm and theme becomes explicit ... filled with delightful tales of palace intrigue, sibling rivalry, and extensive forays into empirical thought and logic. Deep philosophy is applied to nearly everything that pops up, including the eating of soup. Yet despite these heavy themes, Sachs applies a liberal does of clever humor throughout; nearly everyone is a charlatan in what might be the most lighthearted work about the history of science ever published ... Great fun and notable for its singular style, playful tone, and sense of economy (Sachs covers a huge amount of ground in just over 200 pages), this impressive debut is for fans of George Saunders and Vladimir Nabokov.

Note the coiled sentence structure, slightly parodic academic tone, and nested narration—all constant features of the novel. Leibniz’s every thought and action is mediated by a conjectural scrim, and the narrator sometimes draws on extant writings or other, more spurious, attributed language ... Sachs runs...perspectival recursions often, and while all are smart and some very funny, many only have the tone of being funny, and don’t really work. When they do, though, they follow an absurd and exuberant logical momentum and accrete surprising valences, like a cartoon snowball rolling downhill ... The Organs of Sense...turns out to be more than the sum of its parts. Sachs has written a misdirecting novel about the pleasures and perils of misdirection, and the contraption works exquisitely, proving that it is impossible to be a person on whom nothing is lost ... after uncountable moments of frustration, by the novel’s end, I was actually charmed to feel that I, like Leibniz, was the butt of some cosmic joke ... On the verge of throwing the book across the room, I would reach an unanticipated reprise or an incredible morsel of history or the end of a deftly completed feedback loop, cackle gleefully, and fall back in love.

... beguiling and utterly magical ... a riveting story about geopolitical scheming, warfare, and the reach of the Catholic League in the seventeenth century. At the novel’s beating heart, though, is a much more universal theme as Sachs considers father-son relationships and other complicated family dynamics that can make or break creative ambitions of all stripes ... Sprinkled with generous doses of philosophy, this gem of a novel, with a spectacular denouement, might make for labored reading initially, but ultimately, it’s an utterly immersive and transportive work of art.

... sublime ... Sachs demonstrates the difficulty of getting inside other people’s heads (literally and figuratively) and out of one’s own ... These transfixing, mordantly funny encounters with violent sons and hypochondriacal daughters stage the same dramas of revelation and concealment, reason and lunacy, doubt and faith, and influence and skepticism playing out between the astronomer and Leibniz. How it all comes together gives the book the feel of an intellectual thriller. Sachs’s talent is on full display in this brilliant work of visionary absurdism.

Mix Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon, add dashes of Liu Cixin and Isaac Asimov, and you’ll approach this lively novel of early science ... quietly humorous ... There’s a gentle goofiness at work in Sachs’ pages ... Yet there’s an elegant meditation at play, too, on how science is done, how political power can subvert it, and how we know the world around us, all impeccably written ... A pleasure to read, especially for the scientifically inclined.