“I don’t know how to write a 300-page Aristotelian drama.”

Non-exhaustive list of words that Adam Ehrlich Sachs finds inherently funny:
Apparatus
Goatherd
Dumpling
Blood bowl
Many-mirrored box
Zither

Some words, it is true, are very funny. “Astral tube” conjures an altogether more humorous image than “telescope.” “Glockenspiel” is somewhat difficult to utter with serious intent, and the difficulty compounds the more it is uttered. As for proper nouns, “the Habsburg Empire” has just a touch of ridiculousness, as do the names Greta, Heinrich, and Gottfried.

Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of The Organs of Sense, a novel (May, FSG), has an ear that is exquisitely tuned to the potential comedy of words. This extends to casual conversation: he has been accused not of slander, he will say, but of calumny; he confesses to a hope that is not silly, but demented. This last word, and other variations of insanity, come up often in his work. Sachs’s novel tells the winding story of a young Leibniz in the year 1666 who hears of a blind astronomer’s prediction that a solar eclipse will shroud all of Europe in darkness for exactly four seconds. None of the other, sighted, astronomers in the kingdom has made the same prediction. Is this man a genius, or completely mad? Leibniz wonders. Or, a mad genius? Or, neither a genius, nor mad? Compelled by the logical puzzle of determining the soundness of another’s mind, he decides to find the blind astronomer.

Earlier this month, I spoke to Sachs about The Organs of Sense and his first book, Inherited Disorders, at McNally Jackson bookstore in Brooklyn. At some point during the talk Sachs claimed to not be a funny person; despite this, there was frequent laughter. This interview is adapted from that conversation.

—Camille Bromley

I. “I’m usually enticed by a combination of ridiculousness and brilliance.”

THE BELIEVER: Why did you choose Leibniz as your central character in The Organs of Sense?

ADAM EHRLICH SACHS: For one thing, Leibniz is an inherently ridiculous character. Apparently he had a cyst on his head, so he wore a huge wig to cover it, a much bigger wig than one would need to cover a cyst of that size. He was made fun of for that in his own time. And Voltaire made fun of him in Candide. Everyone was making fun of him all the time. Recently I wrote a little piece online making fun of him and a Leibniz scholar accused me of calumny, so I guess it’s still a sore point. Leibniz invented calculus, but he also came up with a...