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Tommy Kristoffersen #3
Knuseverk
Tommy Kristoffersen står ovenfor en alvorlig prøvelse: Han har fått nye naboer, den barmfagre og resolutte bergenkvinnen Hildegunn Moberg og hennes tenåringsdatter. Motstrebende må han innrømme at Hildegunn har det meste av det han drømmer om i en kvinne. Men i god tid før jul inviterer hun ham entusiastisk til å feire julaftensammen med dem, og Tommy går øyeblikkelig i baklås. Feire jul med Hildegunn Moberg? Umulig, selvsagt. For hvilke baktanker kan hun ikke ha med en slik invitasjon? En freidig kvinne som henne – antakelig vil hun bare bruke ham som sexleketøy.
Tommy ser seg nødt til å sykemelde seg, og adventstiden blir preget av tunge refleksjoner over livet og alt det fører med seg av sosiale og eksistensielle prøvelserl
Tommy ser seg nødt til å sykemelde seg, og adventstiden blir preget av tunge refleksjoner over livet og alt det fører med seg av sosiale og eksistensielle prøvelserl
345 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2003
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June 12, 2017
The final book about Tommy Kristoffersen and his neurotic struggle against himself. This time there is a woman involved.
In the first book we were introduced to Tommy Kristoffersen's person and the accompanying anxieties, and the second one deals with how he tries to change his life in order to improve upon it. In the third and final book, Knuseverk (which translates to Crushing Works), we get to see the end of the line for him – will he manage to turn his life around and deal with his neuroses, or will he find himself unable to face them when the time comes? And to make the task at hand even more difficult, there is a woman involved – confident, luscious, and with an enticing reddening that at covers her soft face when she blushes – and it is under such circumstances that the danger of rumours become especially threatening. What must they not think of him now? That finally there would arrive someone that would de-bachelorize him, to save his lonely existence from a life that he thinks is the best one for himself, but which everyone else seems to know to be untrue? Other people have probably been talking behind his back for years, waiting for this opportunity, to verify for themselves that they were right all along in thinking that his preference for solitude was just a sign of his underlying misery.
And when this woman, one Hildegunn Moberg, invites him to celebrate Christmas with her and her daughter it is too much to bear for him. He has to take a sick leave lasting several weeks just to cope with it; officially he states that his leave is due to a back problem, but in truth his nerves are far more crippling. Had she been a perfect hag then things would be simple, he could have quarrelled with her as much as he wanted and thus kept his own life at a distance from hers, safe from any insight on her part, while he dreamt of having a wonderful and attractive neighbour instead. Unfortunately, reality would have it that she really is both wonderful and attractive, and that is the problem. Kristoffersen really likes her and that is what frightens him most of all. Surviving Christmas eve, and the Advent that leads up to it, is his current objective and as a task it would be the psychological equivalent of scaling mountains.
As in all of Surén's books, the title presents us with an essential theme in Crushing Works. Physically it refers to an actual crushing works that is situated a short distance away from Kristoffersen's house, where it slowly eats the hill it sits beside, churning one rock at the time into gravel. Its placement is such that it is impossible to see unless one goes inside the compound and so Kristoffersen has never seen it. But what he has sensed of it is the clamorous noise that it makes, a noise that oddly enough does not bother him. Instead he thinks of it as ”the sound of work, of usefulness, […] Of diligence and continuity. Of business as usual” (p. 40; reviewer's own translation.) Yet, this machine and its ruckus becomes a metaphor for his perception of the forthcoming Christmas eve with Hildegunn:
”Noise, that was all that was sent to me. Utterly deafening noise. That is, from a source of noise. Either the brain itself, or what it conveyed. This futural. Which I could only mention by its proper name with the greatest antagonism. The Christmas dinner!” (p. 13; reviewer's own translation)
The noise is, in short, a consequence of his all-consuming fear and an essential part of the battle he has to fight with himself in order to emerge victorious by the dawn of Christmas day.
It should be noted that the story does at one point take a detour into a topic that does not really pertain to it. The story takes place in the autumn and early winter of the year 2001, during which the world also witnessed the events of the eleventh of September. It affected the globe in its entirety, including Kristoffersen. Most of the text between page 169 and 222 is dedicated to his experience of the tragedy and its aftermath, and it sits there as a testament to that period in time rather than as a part of the overall tale. The section acts as if a shock shook away the goings-ons of the everyday human for a time, and that is, of course, quite accurately what did happen. In other words, by being an irrelevant deviation from the main plot, this section manages to preserve something important about history as perceived by the average Norwegian.
As one approaches the end of Crushing Works so does one approach the final verdict on Tommy Kristoffersen's life. We have followed him through Dråper I havet (Drops in the Ocean) and Kometenes øyeblikk (The Moments of Comets), observing a life lived in fear of the eyes of others, or, more precisely, of what they perceive and interpret, and how he attempts to change his life in order to rid himself of that fear. But what will the verdict be? As we readers have witnessed, he has fought and he has battled, on one hand he has tried to conquer his fears and on the other merely tried to solve his problems by avoiding to stimulate them. He could either succeed in defeating them, or he could accept an existence at least partially within their clutches. And on that subject, there have been other reviewers who considers the end of the novel to be too abrupt, who say that it doesn't really give an answer as to what happens. My reply to that would simply be to encourage readers to revisit the first two pages over again after finishing. I assure you, there is an answer.
The Tommy Kristoffersen books have never been translated, but they have been re-released twice in their original Norwegian. Since they are the only ones of Surén's books to have been re-released at all they could be considered his most popular works, and are as such likely his best candidates for translation if any of them ever were to be considered. As it is, these masterpieces remain exclusive to the mere five million speakers of the Norwegian language, and among even them it is unlikely that they are known to more than one in a thousand. This is truly a shame since these novels are flawless in their rendition of a life of anxiety, so much so that they could collectively very well function as a textbook on the subject, where the primary lesson would perhaps be of the individuality of the affected, of how specific lives are affected by it in their own specific manners. It is, you could say, moisture that adds to the dryness of a regular textbook on the subject, that puts a sense of reality back into the statistics and generalisations. And to think that Kristoffersen amongst his fears counted one of that his life would never amount to anything great.
In the first book we were introduced to Tommy Kristoffersen's person and the accompanying anxieties, and the second one deals with how he tries to change his life in order to improve upon it. In the third and final book, Knuseverk (which translates to Crushing Works), we get to see the end of the line for him – will he manage to turn his life around and deal with his neuroses, or will he find himself unable to face them when the time comes? And to make the task at hand even more difficult, there is a woman involved – confident, luscious, and with an enticing reddening that at covers her soft face when she blushes – and it is under such circumstances that the danger of rumours become especially threatening. What must they not think of him now? That finally there would arrive someone that would de-bachelorize him, to save his lonely existence from a life that he thinks is the best one for himself, but which everyone else seems to know to be untrue? Other people have probably been talking behind his back for years, waiting for this opportunity, to verify for themselves that they were right all along in thinking that his preference for solitude was just a sign of his underlying misery.
And when this woman, one Hildegunn Moberg, invites him to celebrate Christmas with her and her daughter it is too much to bear for him. He has to take a sick leave lasting several weeks just to cope with it; officially he states that his leave is due to a back problem, but in truth his nerves are far more crippling. Had she been a perfect hag then things would be simple, he could have quarrelled with her as much as he wanted and thus kept his own life at a distance from hers, safe from any insight on her part, while he dreamt of having a wonderful and attractive neighbour instead. Unfortunately, reality would have it that she really is both wonderful and attractive, and that is the problem. Kristoffersen really likes her and that is what frightens him most of all. Surviving Christmas eve, and the Advent that leads up to it, is his current objective and as a task it would be the psychological equivalent of scaling mountains.
As in all of Surén's books, the title presents us with an essential theme in Crushing Works. Physically it refers to an actual crushing works that is situated a short distance away from Kristoffersen's house, where it slowly eats the hill it sits beside, churning one rock at the time into gravel. Its placement is such that it is impossible to see unless one goes inside the compound and so Kristoffersen has never seen it. But what he has sensed of it is the clamorous noise that it makes, a noise that oddly enough does not bother him. Instead he thinks of it as ”the sound of work, of usefulness, […] Of diligence and continuity. Of business as usual” (p. 40; reviewer's own translation.) Yet, this machine and its ruckus becomes a metaphor for his perception of the forthcoming Christmas eve with Hildegunn:
”Noise, that was all that was sent to me. Utterly deafening noise. That is, from a source of noise. Either the brain itself, or what it conveyed. This futural. Which I could only mention by its proper name with the greatest antagonism. The Christmas dinner!” (p. 13; reviewer's own translation)
The noise is, in short, a consequence of his all-consuming fear and an essential part of the battle he has to fight with himself in order to emerge victorious by the dawn of Christmas day.
It should be noted that the story does at one point take a detour into a topic that does not really pertain to it. The story takes place in the autumn and early winter of the year 2001, during which the world also witnessed the events of the eleventh of September. It affected the globe in its entirety, including Kristoffersen. Most of the text between page 169 and 222 is dedicated to his experience of the tragedy and its aftermath, and it sits there as a testament to that period in time rather than as a part of the overall tale. The section acts as if a shock shook away the goings-ons of the everyday human for a time, and that is, of course, quite accurately what did happen. In other words, by being an irrelevant deviation from the main plot, this section manages to preserve something important about history as perceived by the average Norwegian.
As one approaches the end of Crushing Works so does one approach the final verdict on Tommy Kristoffersen's life. We have followed him through Dråper I havet (Drops in the Ocean) and Kometenes øyeblikk (The Moments of Comets), observing a life lived in fear of the eyes of others, or, more precisely, of what they perceive and interpret, and how he attempts to change his life in order to rid himself of that fear. But what will the verdict be? As we readers have witnessed, he has fought and he has battled, on one hand he has tried to conquer his fears and on the other merely tried to solve his problems by avoiding to stimulate them. He could either succeed in defeating them, or he could accept an existence at least partially within their clutches. And on that subject, there have been other reviewers who considers the end of the novel to be too abrupt, who say that it doesn't really give an answer as to what happens. My reply to that would simply be to encourage readers to revisit the first two pages over again after finishing. I assure you, there is an answer.
The Tommy Kristoffersen books have never been translated, but they have been re-released twice in their original Norwegian. Since they are the only ones of Surén's books to have been re-released at all they could be considered his most popular works, and are as such likely his best candidates for translation if any of them ever were to be considered. As it is, these masterpieces remain exclusive to the mere five million speakers of the Norwegian language, and among even them it is unlikely that they are known to more than one in a thousand. This is truly a shame since these novels are flawless in their rendition of a life of anxiety, so much so that they could collectively very well function as a textbook on the subject, where the primary lesson would perhaps be of the individuality of the affected, of how specific lives are affected by it in their own specific manners. It is, you could say, moisture that adds to the dryness of a regular textbook on the subject, that puts a sense of reality back into the statistics and generalisations. And to think that Kristoffersen amongst his fears counted one of that his life would never amount to anything great.
Displaying 1 of 1 review