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Jonas Wergeland trilogy #1
Le Séducteur
Qu'est-ce qui relie les grands et les petits événements d'une existence ? Sommes-nous définis par les milliers d'histoires qui composent notre vie ou par un instant crucial où tout se décide presque malgré nous ?
598 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
63 people are currently reading
2864 people want to read
About the author
Jan Kjærstad
42 books135 followersJan Kjærstad is a Norwegian author. Kjærstad is a theology graduate from MF Norwegian School of Theology and the University of Oslo.
He has written a string of novels, short stories and essays and was editor of the literary magazine Vinduet ("The Window"). He has received a number of prizes, the most important being the Nordic Council Literature Prize, which he received for the perspectivist trilogy about the TV personality Jonas Wergeland (The Seducer, The Conqueror and The Discoverer).
Kjærstad's books are complex and humorous, showing an outstanding ability to visualize modern life and its many interdependencies, reminiscent of a less computer-focused Neal Stephenson. His books have been translated to English, French, German, Danish, Swedish, and Hungarian, among others.
He has written a string of novels, short stories and essays and was editor of the literary magazine Vinduet ("The Window"). He has received a number of prizes, the most important being the Nordic Council Literature Prize, which he received for the perspectivist trilogy about the TV personality Jonas Wergeland (The Seducer, The Conqueror and The Discoverer).
Kjærstad's books are complex and humorous, showing an outstanding ability to visualize modern life and its many interdependencies, reminiscent of a less computer-focused Neal Stephenson. His books have been translated to English, French, German, Danish, Swedish, and Hungarian, among others.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 99 reviews
September 1, 2018
i have decided.
all of you booknerds who like discovering and championing forgotten authors like MacDonald Harris and are all holding hands reading proust together, this should be your next read. because he is too under-read, and your energies should be used for good, and he is actually very similar to proust, in a lot of ways, but just more fun overall. a lot more action, but the same spirally, drifting writing.
i am floating this review FOR NO OTHER REASON than as a call-to-arms. come on, booknerds, answer my challenge!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
so i embarked upon "trilogy month" with some trepidation; what if i hate the writer and then i am forced to continue slogging through the rest of the books because of my self-imposed need to follow through on things i start?? but - hey - this time it is smooth sailing.
like, seriously smooth. in my supreme arrogance, i have complained several times on here about why writers don't just write the things i want to read, and why i am forced sometimes into reading unsatisfying books. well, someone has been reading my mail. this is exactly the kind of book i like to read - meandering plot, callbacks, repetition (but not aggressive-repetition like that other norwegian monstrosity, Melancholy) for clarity: these are things it is like: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, arrested development, Magnetic Field, fanny and alexander. these are things i thought would be good for the same reasons this book is good, but didn't work for me: The Arabian Nightmare, House of Leaves, Hopscotch.
basically, the book revolves around two basic and oft-repeated questions: "how do the pieces of a life fit together?", and "when do we become who we are"?? and this book, ostensibly posing as a murder-plot-driven book, seeks to explore these ideas. every segment builds to the brink of release and answers and closure, only to loop back again as though the plot itself were reminded of another bit of minutia that applies to the story at hand and then weaves back and forth in time and splits tales up into wanting and wanting and wanting more. unlike the calvino, there is release and return, though, so for all the winter's night haters, this should suit you better.
and, yes, there is a magical penis involved and lots of farcical, forrest gump-like sex (by which i mean his knack for falling into bed with every norwegian woman who will later go on to be well-known, famous, or otherwise influential in the norwegian realm, not dopey and soft-spoken). jazzle finds the sex creepy, i think it is funny. they are over-the-top sex scenes that sometimes read like sara barron's 12-year-old porn: "so i am lying on top of him and he is humping me so hard im nearly flying off him. then i take his pienus and rub my face and in it. then i grab it in my two hand rub it all over." (sic.)
i mean, it's better than that,obviously, but in its convenience and pizza-delivery-boy spontaneity and irrepressibility it sometimes reads a little comical to me. all these horny, liking-it-on-top norwegian broads foaming at the mouth for him and his magical penis. i mock, but i love, too.
this just barely escaped a five-star from me. it certainly started out that way, but i think there were a few bits, some pieces of a life that maybe could have been shaved down a little. but that just leaves a little room to grow, as i begin the second part.
high points are the story of red daniel, the entire character of nefertiti, and the fact that he thinks the number 6 looks like a hard-on. i look forward to the rest of the trilogy, because i still have burning questions...
come to my blog!
all of you booknerds who like discovering and championing forgotten authors like MacDonald Harris and are all holding hands reading proust together, this should be your next read. because he is too under-read, and your energies should be used for good, and he is actually very similar to proust, in a lot of ways, but just more fun overall. a lot more action, but the same spirally, drifting writing.
i am floating this review FOR NO OTHER REASON than as a call-to-arms. come on, booknerds, answer my challenge!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
so i embarked upon "trilogy month" with some trepidation; what if i hate the writer and then i am forced to continue slogging through the rest of the books because of my self-imposed need to follow through on things i start?? but - hey - this time it is smooth sailing.
like, seriously smooth. in my supreme arrogance, i have complained several times on here about why writers don't just write the things i want to read, and why i am forced sometimes into reading unsatisfying books. well, someone has been reading my mail. this is exactly the kind of book i like to read - meandering plot, callbacks, repetition (but not aggressive-repetition like that other norwegian monstrosity, Melancholy) for clarity: these are things it is like: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, arrested development, Magnetic Field, fanny and alexander. these are things i thought would be good for the same reasons this book is good, but didn't work for me: The Arabian Nightmare, House of Leaves, Hopscotch.
basically, the book revolves around two basic and oft-repeated questions: "how do the pieces of a life fit together?", and "when do we become who we are"?? and this book, ostensibly posing as a murder-plot-driven book, seeks to explore these ideas. every segment builds to the brink of release and answers and closure, only to loop back again as though the plot itself were reminded of another bit of minutia that applies to the story at hand and then weaves back and forth in time and splits tales up into wanting and wanting and wanting more. unlike the calvino, there is release and return, though, so for all the winter's night haters, this should suit you better.
and, yes, there is a magical penis involved and lots of farcical, forrest gump-like sex (by which i mean his knack for falling into bed with every norwegian woman who will later go on to be well-known, famous, or otherwise influential in the norwegian realm, not dopey and soft-spoken). jazzle finds the sex creepy, i think it is funny. they are over-the-top sex scenes that sometimes read like sara barron's 12-year-old porn: "so i am lying on top of him and he is humping me so hard im nearly flying off him. then i take his pienus and rub my face and in it. then i grab it in my two hand rub it all over." (sic.)
i mean, it's better than that,obviously, but in its convenience and pizza-delivery-boy spontaneity and irrepressibility it sometimes reads a little comical to me. all these horny, liking-it-on-top norwegian broads foaming at the mouth for him and his magical penis. i mock, but i love, too.
this just barely escaped a five-star from me. it certainly started out that way, but i think there were a few bits, some pieces of a life that maybe could have been shaved down a little. but that just leaves a little room to grow, as i begin the second part.
high points are the story of red daniel, the entire character of nefertiti, and the fact that he thinks the number 6 looks like a hard-on. i look forward to the rest of the trilogy, because i still have burning questions...
come to my blog!
September 1, 2017
I wrote the careful, analytical review below, and then I thought: this is all wrong. I am willfully misunderstanding the book. What makes it unusual, almost unique, is the very personal relationship it establishes with the reader. It is like a teacher, or a lover; it is about how imagination and art and love can change your life. Also, it is about how you can't reduce life to abstract schemas. You have to use fantasy and intuition to find the special detail which illuminates the whole.
Writing an analytical review was completely inappropriate. I mean, read my review by all means, I'm not saying that anything I wrote was incorrect, but I could feel that the book was disappointed in me. So I did something else instead, which was a more appropriate response. I won't say what it was, but if you read Forføreren, then you may also find yourself doing something that surprises you. It's not an ordinary piece of literature.
_______________________
This is a beautiful, extremely original, magical-realist novel. Thank you, Oriana, for pointing me to it! It's about a Norwegian TV director called Jonas Wergeland, whose masterpiece is a series called Å Tenke Stort ("Thinking Big"). It soon becomes clear that Jonas stands for the author, and the program stands for the book, which does indeed think big; bigger, in fact, than anything else I can recall reading for a long while. Kjærstad is being staggeringly ambitious, and any description risks giving the impression that he's failed. So let me start by saying that he in fact succeeds brilliantly. The novel, at least in the original Norwegian in which I read it, is fantastic: it's lyrical, sensual, beautifully structured, and philosophically provocative. You could hardly ask more from any book.
It combines a bewildering and paradoxical range of influences. Some of the more obvious ones are Hermann Hesse; The Kama Sutra; The Thousand and One Nights; the music of Duke Ellington, Bach and Messaiaen; the philosophy of Derrida; several major figures from Norwegian history, including Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun; the Bergman film Persona; Gödel's incompleteness theorem; and Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto. The narrative structure is also superficially chaotic, consisting of an endless series of flashbacks within flashbacks. You'd be right to wonder how anyone could do all this, and not just create an unholy mess.
The way he keeps control over his material is through a number of recurrent symbols and images, which rather resemble leitmotifs in music, and tie everything together. Three of these are particularly important. The first is the circle: everything goes round until it comes back to where it started, but at any point you can suddenly fly off at a tangent, on some completely new course. He is imaginative at showing both inevitable recurrence, and the wealth of startling, completely unexpected possibilities that exist at every moment.
The second is the turtle. As we all know, the world was once supposed to rest on the back of a giant turtle, and he uses this image as shorthand to refer to hidden, underlying, generally more or less fallacious assumptions. So he'll give you a brief glimpse of people's true motivations, and comment it ironically as "another turtle". This makes a fine running joke.
The third key image is the church organ. The organ, with its many pipes, stands for the huge range of ideas and influences in the book. It also stands for the divided, fragmented nature of modern existence. The music of the organ, which appears in several critical passages, combines the many different voices from its component pipes, and turns them into a single, unified harmony. This is linked to the redemptive power of art, and the intertwining of pain and joy. Often, some terrible event happens, and then there is a shift of perspective, so that it is seen as beautiful and necessary. It becomes part of the ongoing work of art that is the main character's life.
The author seems to know a great deal about the specifics of organs, which is characteristic of the book; details are important, and he takes them extremely seriously. This is another of his major themes. He is fiercely against reductionistic accounts, which seek to transform everything into flat schemas. (I am painfully aware that writing this review is in some important ways contrary to the spirit of the book). Instead, his thesis is that the true way to understand something is to find the detail that will reveal its essense, and completely submerge oneself in that detail. This is what motivates the prose style, which is full of startling sensory images: visual, auditory, tactile, everything. Paradoxically, as he says, the whole can be included in one of its parts. He presents this poetically, in the legend of the flower so perfect that, if you picked it, the whole world would disappear. He also slyly introduces an ironic reference to the Gödel incompleteness proof in one of the episodes where Jonas and his friend are giving their math teacher a hard time.
He explores the relationship between the part and the whole in many ways. Two are particularly important. First, the novel is both completely Norwegian, and also completely universal; as he says early on, all of the world includes something of Norway, and Norway includes all of the world. We see this, among other things, in Jonas's TV series. Second, every person contains many people within them. The way Jonas usually discovers his other, hidden, sides is through sex.
I'm a little surprised that I haven't already mentioned the sex, because there's certainly a lot of it. In keeping with this paradoxical book, it's both extremely explicit, and impeccably tasteful. It's sensuous and erotic, and full of unexpected metaphors. People do strange and beautiful things, which come across as making perfect sense, rather than being weird or perverse. The magical realist dimension of the book is largely concerned with these passages: somehow, when Jonas has sex with a woman, he magically acquires some of his lover's special qualities. In general, the sex has an artistic and mystical dimension that is extremely unusual. And it's funny. In fact, although I've somehow missed saying that too, a lot of the book is funny. He has a wonderfully bizarre sense of humor. Just to pick one random example, I loved the scene in the classroom with the Marxist teacher; the poor guy's brought in his toy steam engine to demonstrate how new means of production transformed 19th century society, and he's then taken apart by Jonas and his snotty friend. It reads like a sequence from The History Boys.
I still don't feel I'm doing the author justice. The experience is so much more direct than anything I have said. You feel personally engaged with him in a most unusual way; sometimes it's like being hit over the head by a Zen master, and sometimes it's like making love with someone who's smarter and more insightful than you are. If you have imagination, and you want to break out of the circle you're stuck in, you should read this book.
_______________________
[Second reading]
About halfway through rereading Forføreren, I found this passage about Jonas's TV series which I liked so much that I just have to try and translate it myself:
_______________________
[Third reading]
There are many books which people say can change your life - but this one actually can change your life. For example, it persuaded me that I needed to learn Norwegian properly. And that was just one of the minor items.
Writing an analytical review was completely inappropriate. I mean, read my review by all means, I'm not saying that anything I wrote was incorrect, but I could feel that the book was disappointed in me. So I did something else instead, which was a more appropriate response. I won't say what it was, but if you read Forføreren, then you may also find yourself doing something that surprises you. It's not an ordinary piece of literature.
_______________________
This is a beautiful, extremely original, magical-realist novel. Thank you, Oriana, for pointing me to it! It's about a Norwegian TV director called Jonas Wergeland, whose masterpiece is a series called Å Tenke Stort ("Thinking Big"). It soon becomes clear that Jonas stands for the author, and the program stands for the book, which does indeed think big; bigger, in fact, than anything else I can recall reading for a long while. Kjærstad is being staggeringly ambitious, and any description risks giving the impression that he's failed. So let me start by saying that he in fact succeeds brilliantly. The novel, at least in the original Norwegian in which I read it, is fantastic: it's lyrical, sensual, beautifully structured, and philosophically provocative. You could hardly ask more from any book.
It combines a bewildering and paradoxical range of influences. Some of the more obvious ones are Hermann Hesse; The Kama Sutra; The Thousand and One Nights; the music of Duke Ellington, Bach and Messaiaen; the philosophy of Derrida; several major figures from Norwegian history, including Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun; the Bergman film Persona; Gödel's incompleteness theorem; and Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto. The narrative structure is also superficially chaotic, consisting of an endless series of flashbacks within flashbacks. You'd be right to wonder how anyone could do all this, and not just create an unholy mess.
The way he keeps control over his material is through a number of recurrent symbols and images, which rather resemble leitmotifs in music, and tie everything together. Three of these are particularly important. The first is the circle: everything goes round until it comes back to where it started, but at any point you can suddenly fly off at a tangent, on some completely new course. He is imaginative at showing both inevitable recurrence, and the wealth of startling, completely unexpected possibilities that exist at every moment.
The second is the turtle. As we all know, the world was once supposed to rest on the back of a giant turtle, and he uses this image as shorthand to refer to hidden, underlying, generally more or less fallacious assumptions. So he'll give you a brief glimpse of people's true motivations, and comment it ironically as "another turtle". This makes a fine running joke.
The third key image is the church organ. The organ, with its many pipes, stands for the huge range of ideas and influences in the book. It also stands for the divided, fragmented nature of modern existence. The music of the organ, which appears in several critical passages, combines the many different voices from its component pipes, and turns them into a single, unified harmony. This is linked to the redemptive power of art, and the intertwining of pain and joy. Often, some terrible event happens, and then there is a shift of perspective, so that it is seen as beautiful and necessary. It becomes part of the ongoing work of art that is the main character's life.
The author seems to know a great deal about the specifics of organs, which is characteristic of the book; details are important, and he takes them extremely seriously. This is another of his major themes. He is fiercely against reductionistic accounts, which seek to transform everything into flat schemas. (I am painfully aware that writing this review is in some important ways contrary to the spirit of the book). Instead, his thesis is that the true way to understand something is to find the detail that will reveal its essense, and completely submerge oneself in that detail. This is what motivates the prose style, which is full of startling sensory images: visual, auditory, tactile, everything. Paradoxically, as he says, the whole can be included in one of its parts. He presents this poetically, in the legend of the flower so perfect that, if you picked it, the whole world would disappear. He also slyly introduces an ironic reference to the Gödel incompleteness proof in one of the episodes where Jonas and his friend are giving their math teacher a hard time.
He explores the relationship between the part and the whole in many ways. Two are particularly important. First, the novel is both completely Norwegian, and also completely universal; as he says early on, all of the world includes something of Norway, and Norway includes all of the world. We see this, among other things, in Jonas's TV series. Second, every person contains many people within them. The way Jonas usually discovers his other, hidden, sides is through sex.
I'm a little surprised that I haven't already mentioned the sex, because there's certainly a lot of it. In keeping with this paradoxical book, it's both extremely explicit, and impeccably tasteful. It's sensuous and erotic, and full of unexpected metaphors. People do strange and beautiful things, which come across as making perfect sense, rather than being weird or perverse. The magical realist dimension of the book is largely concerned with these passages: somehow, when Jonas has sex with a woman, he magically acquires some of his lover's special qualities. In general, the sex has an artistic and mystical dimension that is extremely unusual. And it's funny. In fact, although I've somehow missed saying that too, a lot of the book is funny. He has a wonderfully bizarre sense of humor. Just to pick one random example, I loved the scene in the classroom with the Marxist teacher; the poor guy's brought in his toy steam engine to demonstrate how new means of production transformed 19th century society, and he's then taken apart by Jonas and his snotty friend. It reads like a sequence from The History Boys.
I still don't feel I'm doing the author justice. The experience is so much more direct than anything I have said. You feel personally engaged with him in a most unusual way; sometimes it's like being hit over the head by a Zen master, and sometimes it's like making love with someone who's smarter and more insightful than you are. If you have imagination, and you want to break out of the circle you're stuck in, you should read this book.
_______________________
[Second reading]
About halfway through rereading Forføreren, I found this passage about Jonas's TV series which I liked so much that I just have to try and translate it myself:
For selv om hon ikke klarte å sette ord på det, hadde hun sett noe nytt, noe viktig, noe hun aldri hadde sett før og som fylte henne med positiv energi, og som fikk henne til å se programmenne enda en gang, slik at hun standig oppdaget elementer og detaljer som hadde gått henne hus forbi de foregående gangerne, samtidigt som hun så mer av likheter oh mønstre som gikk igjen og dermed hele tiden utvidet forståelsen for sammenhanget mellom alle programmene. "Det er som smykker inne i et større smykke," sa hun.I find it surprisingly difficult to come up with a good translation for the key word smykke, which literally means "ornament". Ornaments are unnecessary things, and to call something "ornamental" is to mildly disparage it. Smykke, in contrast, is related to the adjective smukk, "beautiful", so it conveys the meaning "something beautiful". The various episodes of Jonas's series, and by extension the various sections of Kjærstad's book, are indeed beautiful things that combine to make a greater beauty, and that beauty is in no way ornamental. I chose the word "jewel", but the metaphor isn't quite right: you can't really have jewels inside a jewel. I can't think of anything better though.
For even if she could not put it into words, she had seen something new, something important, something she had never seen before and which filled her with a positive energy and made her watch the different episodes again, so that she constantly discovered elements and details which she had completely missed the previous times, and simultaneously saw more of the echoes and patterns which repeated themselves and endlessly revealed more connections between all the episodes. "It's like jewels inside a larger jewel," she said.
_______________________
[Third reading]
There are many books which people say can change your life - but this one actually can change your life. For example, it persuaded me that I needed to learn Norwegian properly. And that was just one of the minor items.
February 18, 2010
Only a man would write a book where the main character has a magic penis and includes a female character that spends her life obsessed with all things phallic. You boys really think you hold the key to the universe between your legs don't you.
With that aside this was a wonderful story. I will leave the dissection of its qualities to others more articulate than myself. We've all heard it before so I will spare you the deep analysis.
This Norwegian (I'm 5/8) was part of the original conversion that took place with Manny's review last April and completely agree with his summation. Kjaerstad is a masterful storyteller that gently guides you through only allowing you enough information to keep you going. Like a true seducer he knew when to give you what you wanted and when to hold it back. Just when you thought you were going to get exactly what you needed, what you had been waiting for... he led you down another path of wants and needs until finally...YES!
The copious phallic imagery lead me to believe Mr. Kjaerstad might be compensating for a case of mangina. He created a character that felt like the author's own unfulfilled fantasies. Jonas could do no wrong. His life was full of adventures and death defying feats. He had a perfectly sculpted career full of fame and fortune where enemies were left in piles of humility behind him. Everything he touched turned to gold while beautiful successful brilliant women fell at his feet waiting to have a chance with his "magic penis". Even with his charmed life you still like him. You still want him to succeed. Could this be a clever way to juxtapose where the story takes this character in the next book? Maybe. Could it be a symptom of the author's inadequacies? Probably not but I enjoyed his story enough to find out. He may just really be the true seducer in his writing as well as in life without a single inadequacy and I'm just projecting. Overcompensation or not he seduced this reader and I will keep reading.
and now onto #2.
With that aside this was a wonderful story. I will leave the dissection of its qualities to others more articulate than myself. We've all heard it before so I will spare you the deep analysis.
This Norwegian (I'm 5/8) was part of the original conversion that took place with Manny's review last April and completely agree with his summation. Kjaerstad is a masterful storyteller that gently guides you through only allowing you enough information to keep you going. Like a true seducer he knew when to give you what you wanted and when to hold it back. Just when you thought you were going to get exactly what you needed, what you had been waiting for... he led you down another path of wants and needs until finally...YES!
The copious phallic imagery lead me to believe Mr. Kjaerstad might be compensating for a case of mangina. He created a character that felt like the author's own unfulfilled fantasies. Jonas could do no wrong. His life was full of adventures and death defying feats. He had a perfectly sculpted career full of fame and fortune where enemies were left in piles of humility behind him. Everything he touched turned to gold while beautiful successful brilliant women fell at his feet waiting to have a chance with his "magic penis". Even with his charmed life you still like him. You still want him to succeed. Could this be a clever way to juxtapose where the story takes this character in the next book? Maybe. Could it be a symptom of the author's inadequacies? Probably not but I enjoyed his story enough to find out. He may just really be the true seducer in his writing as well as in life without a single inadequacy and I'm just projecting. Overcompensation or not he seduced this reader and I will keep reading.
and now onto #2.
August 14, 2024
In stark contrast to fellow countryman Jon Fosse’s mesmeric, insular style, The Seducer is an unashamedly plump, digressive, and saucy monster of a novel, where a narrator besotted with the Golden Balls™ of architect and TV presenter Jonas Wergeland serves up a minutiae’s minutiae of the man’s life, elevating all instances of the things happening to Jonas from moment to moment to mythical status. A leisurely, philosophical, lyrical and playful epic, written in compelling waves of over-explanatory prose (averse to dialogue), with a grandiosity bordering on the farcical, Kjærstad’s novel is a perfect turn-of-the-century postmodern Proustesque beast to wrap your intellectual gnashers around whenever you may feel compelled to indulge your gnashers in that sort of thing.
February 13, 2025
Jonas Swallows the Whale.
I will make you read this book.
This is a cathedral of words.
Cocooned within these pages is a living organism. In preparations for metamorphosis, the encasing structure takes on increasing complexity, immersing the reader in its development, through stages, through time, the creature inside is the main character, Jonas, but he is also the author, and the cocoon is both the world, and this book.
The DNA of causal relationships takes on life while Jonas' desire to dissect the structure of reality mirrors his subsuming of physical natures. The heated passion for understanding illuminates his carnal quest. The conquering of intellectual forces, merging with physical mastery, as he engages in speed skating, tennis, art, music, or politics, no talent is out of reach, and the value of his own genetic material increases, as if he were reincarnating into his own body as different versions of himself. The ambition to swallow the entire universe, against the threat of invisibility, is inversely proportional to the extent the author buries himself beneath this dramatic persona, this living embodiment of his literary ambition.
"How do the pieces of life fit together?"
They are particles, these human masks, the psychological disguises, the whims of propriety, these densely congregated principles, these guiding facets of our being. The central wheel's relation to time seductively reaches each corner of this gamopetalous book, wherein deceptively layered complexities of form and rhythm portray profound insight into Jonas' psyche. Peering in at his escapades at intrinsic viewpoints allows us the same wish fulfillment as the author, who indulges in every excess of accomplishment.
Recursively returning to cause and effect, the interiority of stories bleeds through the framework of the novel. You have the constant contest between Bach and Mozart, Hamsun and Hitler, Ibsen and Shakespeare, and multitudes of others in Jonas' life. The competition is inherent to the far-reaching initiative of this book. The phallic fixation of his aunt, the willingness of the women to be seduced, while it all defies verisimilitude, reinforce the central career of our hero, the man among men, Jonas, as he fits together the jigsaw puzzle of his life, standing outside of it, at the defining moment, the hub of the wheel, revealed in the first chapter in the form of a dead woman. The author falls back on the 2nd person perspective for these recursive moments, outside of time, at a far remove from the action of discovering Jonas' modus operandi. Against tradition, casting a male in the role of seducer is not as original as at first glance, but it does raise many questions about the role of women within this novel, and if they are mere objects. The self-indulgence in this regard would merit scorn, if it wasn't so artfully composed - perhaps.
Several digressions into Norwegian history, politics, science, music, history, and sports, at first seemingly disparate elements, eventually coincide in their focus within the schema of Jonas' mind.
The search for the self, entailing the architectural symbolism that comprises a human, the myriads we contain, the authenticity and imitation, the layering of memory and the ghosts it paints over our experience, the tapestry radiating outward, of the generations that spawned us, all of these confluent forces charging toward some inevitable conclusion. Luckily, the tone is one of a constant unveiling of intimate secrets. The book is supremely readable. We are allowed to draw our own conclusions about the morality of conquest, and the merit of competition.
The inversion of religious imagery, the transcendence of isolated experience, the references to popular and classical music, and regional artists people the very infrequent landscapes, and inhabit a strictly intellectual panorama instead, navigating a layered political climatology, invoking the great artists of the past in every major discipline, like Mount Rushmore-size affronts to our MC's immortality.
If none of these themes interest you, how about the exploration of human archetypes? Light: a particle and a wave, representing turbulence and the dual nature of human beings as both divine and animal.
Who or what is a seductress? What seduces the seducer? Can we deduce that that seducer is a medusa?
Secrets triggering memories, many episodes marked by a peculiar odor, rites of passion, sex devoid of lasting love, events spoking out from the central point, the Wheel of Fortune revealing letter by letter the inevitable fate of our Grail-seeker. Recapturing lost childhood, longing for nostalgia, Jonas ventures farther afield in search of consequences, finding only affirmation of the dreaded summation of his career.
Kjærstad also incorporates Norway's cultural imprint on the world, the art and music scene, fashion, high society, critics, schmoozers, culture, corruption and frailty, Nationalism, in a word, and posits a contention that Jonas is the Everyman his country needs, to pull it out of the small ice cave it has become.
Our myriad selves, the nucleus of human potential - all of the people you might have been, a haunting evaluation of artistic accomplishment as a life's defining features, are we more than the sum of our works? From one step to the next - from Zambezi river rapids, budding with memento mori, to a garden of gravitas sprouting around the biographical cocoon. There's always 2 sides to every coin, 2 sides to every mirror. Every mirror has a deceptive silver lining. And the Bergensveien winding serpentine, a silver vein, the silver thread running through it all, from Jonas' very spine, this same thread, thrummed by the gods. He becomes a divine instrument, the overcomer, the proto-human, Prometheus, resulting in his intuition, or 6th sense for opportunity and conquest and significance that derives from this subtle vibration. And the charging silver train, a forward thrusting movement, until he returns to the polar bear rug and the Antarctic fascination spreading outward from it, an interstitial motif, a preoccupation with snow, death, and the story's central cavern, relegated to a base level background hum, in an absence of scenery, in the irrelevance of fame, a Faustian accumulation, the prestige, success, like weighty concentric circles, ripples, latitude lines, planetary orbits, causality, the Butterfly Effect, the hurdles he leaps. Each sport he triumphs in is a symbol, becomes part of his DNA, like the women, palimpsests laying on top of one another, like cards in a deck, stacked.
The body, blood, fluids, heart and adrenaline runs through the prose. Once again the book is a living organism, Jonas merging with the other characters, conquering one after another, sexually, physically and intellectually. If he were a chess player, he would be Magnus Carlsen.
The motif of the color silver - Nefertiti's mouth organ, frozen mammoths, the transmogrification of animals and vehicles, the merging of symbols, alongside the golden luster, the golden opportunity, the golden child, his lust and manhood, like the naked ladies on the highball glasses' interior, clothed on the outside, the 2-sided mirror, the dimensions of lives, like images trapped in the camera obscura of her dead pupils.
The Lego blocks, mirroring his near death in the fetal ice fortress, the relevance of temperatures, a fear of cold, Norway, if it can be so labeled. This is the reason Jonas' travels abroad. In order to escape.
P. 499 sums it all up in a vast atemporal vision, encompassing eras in the snapshot of the moment, Jonas sees through time to the various states of the environment as the scene transforms, regresses and progresses. In a way we glimpse our own deaths day after day, in the interrelationship of forces and concrete reality. We relegate this trauma to memory, blurring out time and reimagining ourselves anew. Our malleable clay lives, as much as we would like to mold them, are not in our own hands. Or are they?
I will make you read this book.
This is a cathedral of words.
Cocooned within these pages is a living organism. In preparations for metamorphosis, the encasing structure takes on increasing complexity, immersing the reader in its development, through stages, through time, the creature inside is the main character, Jonas, but he is also the author, and the cocoon is both the world, and this book.
The DNA of causal relationships takes on life while Jonas' desire to dissect the structure of reality mirrors his subsuming of physical natures. The heated passion for understanding illuminates his carnal quest. The conquering of intellectual forces, merging with physical mastery, as he engages in speed skating, tennis, art, music, or politics, no talent is out of reach, and the value of his own genetic material increases, as if he were reincarnating into his own body as different versions of himself. The ambition to swallow the entire universe, against the threat of invisibility, is inversely proportional to the extent the author buries himself beneath this dramatic persona, this living embodiment of his literary ambition.
"How do the pieces of life fit together?"
They are particles, these human masks, the psychological disguises, the whims of propriety, these densely congregated principles, these guiding facets of our being. The central wheel's relation to time seductively reaches each corner of this gamopetalous book, wherein deceptively layered complexities of form and rhythm portray profound insight into Jonas' psyche. Peering in at his escapades at intrinsic viewpoints allows us the same wish fulfillment as the author, who indulges in every excess of accomplishment.
Recursively returning to cause and effect, the interiority of stories bleeds through the framework of the novel. You have the constant contest between Bach and Mozart, Hamsun and Hitler, Ibsen and Shakespeare, and multitudes of others in Jonas' life. The competition is inherent to the far-reaching initiative of this book. The phallic fixation of his aunt, the willingness of the women to be seduced, while it all defies verisimilitude, reinforce the central career of our hero, the man among men, Jonas, as he fits together the jigsaw puzzle of his life, standing outside of it, at the defining moment, the hub of the wheel, revealed in the first chapter in the form of a dead woman. The author falls back on the 2nd person perspective for these recursive moments, outside of time, at a far remove from the action of discovering Jonas' modus operandi. Against tradition, casting a male in the role of seducer is not as original as at first glance, but it does raise many questions about the role of women within this novel, and if they are mere objects. The self-indulgence in this regard would merit scorn, if it wasn't so artfully composed - perhaps.
Several digressions into Norwegian history, politics, science, music, history, and sports, at first seemingly disparate elements, eventually coincide in their focus within the schema of Jonas' mind.
The search for the self, entailing the architectural symbolism that comprises a human, the myriads we contain, the authenticity and imitation, the layering of memory and the ghosts it paints over our experience, the tapestry radiating outward, of the generations that spawned us, all of these confluent forces charging toward some inevitable conclusion. Luckily, the tone is one of a constant unveiling of intimate secrets. The book is supremely readable. We are allowed to draw our own conclusions about the morality of conquest, and the merit of competition.
The inversion of religious imagery, the transcendence of isolated experience, the references to popular and classical music, and regional artists people the very infrequent landscapes, and inhabit a strictly intellectual panorama instead, navigating a layered political climatology, invoking the great artists of the past in every major discipline, like Mount Rushmore-size affronts to our MC's immortality.
If none of these themes interest you, how about the exploration of human archetypes? Light: a particle and a wave, representing turbulence and the dual nature of human beings as both divine and animal.
Who or what is a seductress? What seduces the seducer? Can we deduce that that seducer is a medusa?
Secrets triggering memories, many episodes marked by a peculiar odor, rites of passion, sex devoid of lasting love, events spoking out from the central point, the Wheel of Fortune revealing letter by letter the inevitable fate of our Grail-seeker. Recapturing lost childhood, longing for nostalgia, Jonas ventures farther afield in search of consequences, finding only affirmation of the dreaded summation of his career.
Kjærstad also incorporates Norway's cultural imprint on the world, the art and music scene, fashion, high society, critics, schmoozers, culture, corruption and frailty, Nationalism, in a word, and posits a contention that Jonas is the Everyman his country needs, to pull it out of the small ice cave it has become.
Our myriad selves, the nucleus of human potential - all of the people you might have been, a haunting evaluation of artistic accomplishment as a life's defining features, are we more than the sum of our works? From one step to the next - from Zambezi river rapids, budding with memento mori, to a garden of gravitas sprouting around the biographical cocoon. There's always 2 sides to every coin, 2 sides to every mirror. Every mirror has a deceptive silver lining. And the Bergensveien winding serpentine, a silver vein, the silver thread running through it all, from Jonas' very spine, this same thread, thrummed by the gods. He becomes a divine instrument, the overcomer, the proto-human, Prometheus, resulting in his intuition, or 6th sense for opportunity and conquest and significance that derives from this subtle vibration. And the charging silver train, a forward thrusting movement, until he returns to the polar bear rug and the Antarctic fascination spreading outward from it, an interstitial motif, a preoccupation with snow, death, and the story's central cavern, relegated to a base level background hum, in an absence of scenery, in the irrelevance of fame, a Faustian accumulation, the prestige, success, like weighty concentric circles, ripples, latitude lines, planetary orbits, causality, the Butterfly Effect, the hurdles he leaps. Each sport he triumphs in is a symbol, becomes part of his DNA, like the women, palimpsests laying on top of one another, like cards in a deck, stacked.
The body, blood, fluids, heart and adrenaline runs through the prose. Once again the book is a living organism, Jonas merging with the other characters, conquering one after another, sexually, physically and intellectually. If he were a chess player, he would be Magnus Carlsen.
The motif of the color silver - Nefertiti's mouth organ, frozen mammoths, the transmogrification of animals and vehicles, the merging of symbols, alongside the golden luster, the golden opportunity, the golden child, his lust and manhood, like the naked ladies on the highball glasses' interior, clothed on the outside, the 2-sided mirror, the dimensions of lives, like images trapped in the camera obscura of her dead pupils.
The Lego blocks, mirroring his near death in the fetal ice fortress, the relevance of temperatures, a fear of cold, Norway, if it can be so labeled. This is the reason Jonas' travels abroad. In order to escape.
P. 499 sums it all up in a vast atemporal vision, encompassing eras in the snapshot of the moment, Jonas sees through time to the various states of the environment as the scene transforms, regresses and progresses. In a way we glimpse our own deaths day after day, in the interrelationship of forces and concrete reality. We relegate this trauma to memory, blurring out time and reimagining ourselves anew. Our malleable clay lives, as much as we would like to mold them, are not in our own hands. Or are they?
June 22, 2009
I don't know what to say about this book. I don't know if I should even be rating it yet. I feel like I'm only a third of the way through a novel having finished this, that the next two novels not so much being a trilogy are going to comprise a finished work. Sort of like a piece of classical music, sure you can listen to just a part of a Wagner opera and enjoy or not enjoy it, but you can't see the whole genius of what is going on by just listening to one movement of the entire work.
I don't want to say much yet about this, partly because I'm planning on campaigning heavily for every who cares about books that I know to read this, and I don't want to give away anything.
As for the style of the book it's not straight forward. Some other reviewers seem to think that the book should be put into linear order, and the narrative pieces linked in a more reader friendly manner. Those people are wrong. The author drops literary/musical/cinematic/artistic hints all over the place that help 'guide' the reader to what he is doing with form, and even without the hints having any kind of attentiveness should pull together all the different scenes into a coherent story. Maybe the back of the book is to blame. This is not a 'detective' story about who killed the guys wife, it's not a murder mystery, it's not a James Patterson book.
I feel like I've already said too much. But I'll add one last thing because I don't think anyone I know will get it, I don't mean that smugly I just think the reference will not mean much. This book reminds me, formally at least, like the opening seven or eight minutes of Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (before the signing starts, something that still makes the music 'nice' but takes away from the beauty created in the first half of the first movement). I recommend listening to it as much as I recommend reading this book.
I don't want to say much yet about this, partly because I'm planning on campaigning heavily for every who cares about books that I know to read this, and I don't want to give away anything.
As for the style of the book it's not straight forward. Some other reviewers seem to think that the book should be put into linear order, and the narrative pieces linked in a more reader friendly manner. Those people are wrong. The author drops literary/musical/cinematic/artistic hints all over the place that help 'guide' the reader to what he is doing with form, and even without the hints having any kind of attentiveness should pull together all the different scenes into a coherent story. Maybe the back of the book is to blame. This is not a 'detective' story about who killed the guys wife, it's not a murder mystery, it's not a James Patterson book.
I feel like I've already said too much. But I'll add one last thing because I don't think anyone I know will get it, I don't mean that smugly I just think the reference will not mean much. This book reminds me, formally at least, like the opening seven or eight minutes of Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (before the signing starts, something that still makes the music 'nice' but takes away from the beauty created in the first half of the first movement). I recommend listening to it as much as I recommend reading this book.
October 31, 2014
Additional thoughts towards the end.
I wish I could give this six stars.
Before I start The Conqueror...
One of the aspects of current literary fashion which has me somewhat confounded is the pejorative way in which sentimentality is viewed. If only I had a dollar for every discussion of literature which compliments a writer or a book for not being sentimental. Listen to the average critic talk about sentimentality in literature and it doesn't sound much different from Bush talking about The Axis of Evil.
Most recently I was looking at a discussion of As You Like It which complimented Rosalind's lack of sentimentality and quoted this famous reply to the idea that Orlando might die of love:
Good old Rosalind. A jolly rolemodel for a girl, no doubt. But she is wrong. Of course people die for love....
The thing that struck me through and through while reading The Seducer is here is a man not afraid for one moment to write a book which is simply oozing with sentimentality of the most unabashedly Victorian type, something which should, if we are to believe the critics, quite offend us.
The chapter (p.323-330 in the English edition) devoted to a description of Margrete's relationship to bread could come straight out of any Victorian depiction of the joys of domesticity.
And p. 272, the most sentimental of all Victorian belief:
Jonas cannot die, there'd be no story left, but the idea is still there. Of course people die of love. The Victorians knew it. But we live in a period which views love with complete cynicism, so it is not something we would care to acknowledge.
Perhaps Jan Kjaerstad gets away with his lavish sentimentality by couching it all in an overtone of sex. One might think this is a book about a man with a magic penis who has artistic sex with all sorts of girls along the way. Yet the sex is completely irrelevant to this book. Take it away and the book would remain complete in every important respect, lacking nothing but an irrelevantly silly idea that a man - this man, the hero - can become a good mathematician by shagging a mathematician; a good musician by shagging a musician etc etc etc.
Even this amusing idea, now that I think about it, would fit nicely into a Victorian setting.
So, one of the things I'm left with after reading this book is sense of gratitude that Kjaerstad has been brave enough to re-introduce this important aspect of human nature back into literature and damn the critics if they care.
Additional thoughts.
Regarding the issue of repetition in this novel, which some regard as intolerable and which certainly took some getting used to on my part.
I've read books before which are too long and yet which seem to consist of essential words. This is something different again. In a sense it would be possible to take out many of the words in that way one often wishes to edit Victorian literature, of which this is a prime, if modern, example.
Yet I come to the conclusion that his use of repetition is necessary and important. Even his lists are purposeful, if neither necessary or important. But look at the repetition involved in his coming again and again back to the murder scene which opens the book. And another sort of repetition he uses to build up to an event, which not only builds up but also gives such a sense of being there. I think that is the key, you aren't really reading, you are being there. So, the scene that comes obviously to me as the prime example is that of the events leading to Nefertiti's death. How could you not be utterly at one with what is happening in those pages? Brilliant and moving.
As one who has tended always to be minimalist in my writing, but at the same time has increasingly moved towards short sentences and simple approaches I could not help but wonder how one sets about writing as Kjaerstad does. I keep wondering why and how does it work.
Figuring the answer to that is in practising the technique, I've been working on that. Here are some examples, and the topic is purely dictated by the magic penis theme of the book...nothing to do with my personal preferences (!)
I wasn't sure about these to begin with, but having read a couple of reviews since that are critical about the sex in this book, well, I can't get any more flak than that....can I????
What's interesting once you start trying to write like this is that you think about it all the time...and you find it is all much harder than you might expect.
I wish I could give this six stars.
Before I start The Conqueror...
One of the aspects of current literary fashion which has me somewhat confounded is the pejorative way in which sentimentality is viewed. If only I had a dollar for every discussion of literature which compliments a writer or a book for not being sentimental. Listen to the average critic talk about sentimentality in literature and it doesn't sound much different from Bush talking about The Axis of Evil.
Most recently I was looking at a discussion of As You Like It which complimented Rosalind's lack of sentimentality and quoted this famous reply to the idea that Orlando might die of love:
No, faith; die by attorney. The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club, yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun if it had not been for a hot midsummer night, for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
Good old Rosalind. A jolly rolemodel for a girl, no doubt. But she is wrong. Of course people die for love....
The thing that struck me through and through while reading The Seducer is here is a man not afraid for one moment to write a book which is simply oozing with sentimentality of the most unabashedly Victorian type, something which should, if we are to believe the critics, quite offend us.
The chapter (p.323-330 in the English edition) devoted to a description of Margrete's relationship to bread could come straight out of any Victorian depiction of the joys of domesticity.
To Jonas, this is happy married life: looking forward to breakfast. Jonas experienced many great and exciting things in his life, and yet given the choice, there was nothing to match breakfast with Margrete, her bread with wild raspberry jam and a glass of milk.
And p. 272, the most sentimental of all Victorian belief:
There comes a day when, as one writer put it, the bubble of chilhood bursts, and for Jonas that day came with Nefertiti's death. Of course Jonas had always known that Nefertiti was too good for this workd, but even so, when she died he was not prepared for it. In short, he fell aprt. He took ill, become so ill that he had to be taken to hospital. Jonas Wergeland was sick right to the marrow and so cold that he thoght he wold never be warm again. The doctors at the hospital did not know what to make of it: a ten-year old who languished in bed, pale and wan, and kept throwing up, vomiting fits for which they could find no cause, a boy with a body temperature well nigh as low as that encountered only in people who had miraculously survived record lengths of time in extreme cold. And one thing they would not have understood anyway, even if there had been gauges to measure that sort of thing, was Jonas's feeling of being totally out of joint, of lying there like a carcass that had been chopped limb from limb. Jonas had only one thing to hold onto: a crystal prism which he clenched tightly in his fist and did not let go of, not even when he was at his sickest.
Jonas cannot die, there'd be no story left, but the idea is still there. Of course people die of love. The Victorians knew it. But we live in a period which views love with complete cynicism, so it is not something we would care to acknowledge.
Perhaps Jan Kjaerstad gets away with his lavish sentimentality by couching it all in an overtone of sex. One might think this is a book about a man with a magic penis who has artistic sex with all sorts of girls along the way. Yet the sex is completely irrelevant to this book. Take it away and the book would remain complete in every important respect, lacking nothing but an irrelevantly silly idea that a man - this man, the hero - can become a good mathematician by shagging a mathematician; a good musician by shagging a musician etc etc etc.
Even this amusing idea, now that I think about it, would fit nicely into a Victorian setting.
So, one of the things I'm left with after reading this book is sense of gratitude that Kjaerstad has been brave enough to re-introduce this important aspect of human nature back into literature and damn the critics if they care.
Additional thoughts.
Regarding the issue of repetition in this novel, which some regard as intolerable and which certainly took some getting used to on my part.
I've read books before which are too long and yet which seem to consist of essential words. This is something different again. In a sense it would be possible to take out many of the words in that way one often wishes to edit Victorian literature, of which this is a prime, if modern, example.
Yet I come to the conclusion that his use of repetition is necessary and important. Even his lists are purposeful, if neither necessary or important. But look at the repetition involved in his coming again and again back to the murder scene which opens the book. And another sort of repetition he uses to build up to an event, which not only builds up but also gives such a sense of being there. I think that is the key, you aren't really reading, you are being there. So, the scene that comes obviously to me as the prime example is that of the events leading to Nefertiti's death. How could you not be utterly at one with what is happening in those pages? Brilliant and moving.
As one who has tended always to be minimalist in my writing, but at the same time has increasingly moved towards short sentences and simple approaches I could not help but wonder how one sets about writing as Kjaerstad does. I keep wondering why and how does it work.
Figuring the answer to that is in practising the technique, I've been working on that. Here are some examples, and the topic is purely dictated by the magic penis theme of the book...nothing to do with my personal preferences (!)
Lying in bed last night, thinking this – that if your cock was so available to me that I could put it in my mouth every day for ten years, every one of those days and the first day of the eleventh year and so on would be a new, wonderful thing – I did wonder if a world view dictated by my clitoris being firmly attached to my finger might be skewed and that it if wasn’t rubbing against my finger, maybe I wouldn’t think that every one of those days would be its own small heaven; but since then I can report that sitting in the E*****n, eating poached apple breakfast cumble and toast with ******* changes nothing, that sitting here lost in the idea of those ten years is no less overwhelming than if I were lying in bed, wishing my hands were yours.
Or:
There was only one thing she could put in her mouth that would make her happy and she thought not so much of ten years as three thousand and six hundred and fifty days of it, every one of which was a new chance to pay homage - as she liked to think of it - though she was taking as much pleasure as she might be giving every day, and as she lay there, her thoughts directed by where her hand was and she decided to picture those days one by one, it was clear to her what the first day would be like and day two, and even day three, but at some point as she lies there stroking herself the days, his penis, her mouth blur into one impossibly long vision of penis and mouth seeking each other out to join together in this never-ending moment of sweet sexiness, never-ending and yet different every time.
Or :
She was sure that what would restore her appetite was to be able to put the one thing in her mouth that she really wanted to be there, and not for one moment or for one day but for ten years or a hundred and every day being able to do that, rekindle her desire to eat; for 3650 days (to keep the numbers to a manageable level or because she is not greedy) to be able to part her lips and put them around his penis and taste it anew every one of those days; to have butterflies in her stomach at the very idea that today, never mind it is day 3651, she would be able to once more – and yet if once more, still for the first time, it so feels – look with her eyes and then look with her lips; dwelling upon this, wishing to play every one of those scenes slowly from start to finish, touching herself until she doesn’t need to any more she does in her mind see the whole of day one of ten years and falls asleep thinking that tomorrow she will find out what day two will be.
I wasn't sure about these to begin with, but having read a couple of reviews since that are critical about the sex in this book, well, I can't get any more flak than that....can I????
What's interesting once you start trying to write like this is that you think about it all the time...and you find it is all much harder than you might expect.
June 18, 2014
http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/8911403...
This is a very long book and it is quite amazing to me that any one writer can have this much life experience and still be capable of telling about it. And keep it interesting. Even if research offered the many historical facts adjusted as fiction and presented as anecdotes I would still find it remarkable that Jan Kjærstad could actually pull it off as well as he did. It is a long life story of Norwegian TV celebrity Jonas Wergeland told in circles and repeats, ending at a certain point when the weary traveler and star of his show discovers the love of his life flat-out on a polar bear rug dead-red in their home after being murdered with a Luger. For an enormous number of pages the narrator relates the many stories connected to the life of Jonas Wergeland and how these events all contributed to the dreadful result we are faced with in the very early pages of the novel. The mystery the book blurbs promise it to to be never quite measures up, though the revealing and tantalizing anecdotes all add to a quite suspenseful and fulfilling climax.
There is no possible way in which I might explain this novel. I can say however that as I perhaps too eagerly updated my wife these last few days about each extremely wonderful experience I had while reading this novel she finally replied, “It sounds like a Wes Anderson movie.” So the very best I can do now would be to inform anyone already enamored with the work of screenwriter/filmmaker Wes Anderson that this book is completely up their alley. Throughout the revolving myriad of countless stories related page after page regarding this fascinating life of Jonas Wergeland one is immediately struck by the eccentricities, curiosities, dangers, and clever results in all his affairs. Jonas is quite an amazing individual as are the unlikely heroes in every Wes Anderson film. Over-the-top is an understatement but it makes the reading experience absurdly fun.
A continuing theme for me throughout this first book of a trilogy is how everything is always connected. Each chapter in one way or another returns to visit a previously told story or adds something or other to an unfinished business. I failed to count the many chapters but there are numerous anecdotes involved in getting to know this man Jonas and the principle influences that made up his life. There are several memorable and important characters we meet along the way. By the end of the book almost every question of fate is answered except for the initial mystery of his good wife’s death. I suppose that being the paramount reason for the author making this work a trilogy.
It is quite unfair to focus on the almost undo importance given to Jonas’s “magic penis” or the phallic symbol his aunt employed as a life-long artistic obsession. The truth is that most young men are a bit too interested in that thing between their legs, as are some women perhaps, but there is really nothing to be done about it. Denying, ridiculing, or shaming only makes it worse. But the interesting development in this book for me regarding this phallic obsession is that Jonas himself never seems overly impressed or even brazenly brags about his manly gift. Jonas always is the wanted one in a sexual relationship, which to some of us just might be a mutual fantasy not often shared. He was never the initiator of any of the sexual behaviors in the first place, and for the most part always during the act itself remained on his back on the bottom. And what seemed both beautiful and amazing to the narrator of this tale was the unlikely fact that this magic organ could fairly accommodate and satisfy any wanting vessel, be it large or small. But the book was far beyond such a seemingly shallow thing as this magic penis. It was achingly more about a real tingling up his spine that would climb up and into his shoulders. It was about owning and using his imagination, exploring and revealing human nature, and understanding the world we live in a bit outside of the box rather than remaining stubbornly stuck in our given notions of things as they are.
Given that Jan Kjærstad, like me, was also born in 1953 added more of a connection to his writing. Having the novel placed in the same time period I grew up in offered opportunities galore for me to remember and reflect upon too. I smiled often and always felt satisfied. This is rare in a book for me. In absence of any good explanation of what actually occurred between the covers for me, the bottom line for what I took away from reading this novel was a poignant reminder that life can be comprehended only as a collection of stories. In good time I look forward to my continued reading of the remaining two books in this trilogy.
This is a very long book and it is quite amazing to me that any one writer can have this much life experience and still be capable of telling about it. And keep it interesting. Even if research offered the many historical facts adjusted as fiction and presented as anecdotes I would still find it remarkable that Jan Kjærstad could actually pull it off as well as he did. It is a long life story of Norwegian TV celebrity Jonas Wergeland told in circles and repeats, ending at a certain point when the weary traveler and star of his show discovers the love of his life flat-out on a polar bear rug dead-red in their home after being murdered with a Luger. For an enormous number of pages the narrator relates the many stories connected to the life of Jonas Wergeland and how these events all contributed to the dreadful result we are faced with in the very early pages of the novel. The mystery the book blurbs promise it to to be never quite measures up, though the revealing and tantalizing anecdotes all add to a quite suspenseful and fulfilling climax.
There is no possible way in which I might explain this novel. I can say however that as I perhaps too eagerly updated my wife these last few days about each extremely wonderful experience I had while reading this novel she finally replied, “It sounds like a Wes Anderson movie.” So the very best I can do now would be to inform anyone already enamored with the work of screenwriter/filmmaker Wes Anderson that this book is completely up their alley. Throughout the revolving myriad of countless stories related page after page regarding this fascinating life of Jonas Wergeland one is immediately struck by the eccentricities, curiosities, dangers, and clever results in all his affairs. Jonas is quite an amazing individual as are the unlikely heroes in every Wes Anderson film. Over-the-top is an understatement but it makes the reading experience absurdly fun.
A continuing theme for me throughout this first book of a trilogy is how everything is always connected. Each chapter in one way or another returns to visit a previously told story or adds something or other to an unfinished business. I failed to count the many chapters but there are numerous anecdotes involved in getting to know this man Jonas and the principle influences that made up his life. There are several memorable and important characters we meet along the way. By the end of the book almost every question of fate is answered except for the initial mystery of his good wife’s death. I suppose that being the paramount reason for the author making this work a trilogy.
It is quite unfair to focus on the almost undo importance given to Jonas’s “magic penis” or the phallic symbol his aunt employed as a life-long artistic obsession. The truth is that most young men are a bit too interested in that thing between their legs, as are some women perhaps, but there is really nothing to be done about it. Denying, ridiculing, or shaming only makes it worse. But the interesting development in this book for me regarding this phallic obsession is that Jonas himself never seems overly impressed or even brazenly brags about his manly gift. Jonas always is the wanted one in a sexual relationship, which to some of us just might be a mutual fantasy not often shared. He was never the initiator of any of the sexual behaviors in the first place, and for the most part always during the act itself remained on his back on the bottom. And what seemed both beautiful and amazing to the narrator of this tale was the unlikely fact that this magic organ could fairly accommodate and satisfy any wanting vessel, be it large or small. But the book was far beyond such a seemingly shallow thing as this magic penis. It was achingly more about a real tingling up his spine that would climb up and into his shoulders. It was about owning and using his imagination, exploring and revealing human nature, and understanding the world we live in a bit outside of the box rather than remaining stubbornly stuck in our given notions of things as they are.
Given that Jan Kjærstad, like me, was also born in 1953 added more of a connection to his writing. Having the novel placed in the same time period I grew up in offered opportunities galore for me to remember and reflect upon too. I smiled often and always felt satisfied. This is rare in a book for me. In absence of any good explanation of what actually occurred between the covers for me, the bottom line for what I took away from reading this novel was a poignant reminder that life can be comprehended only as a collection of stories. In good time I look forward to my continued reading of the remaining two books in this trilogy.
August 4, 2019
This book defies description.
Or rather, I will fail at describing it. That being said, I will willfully fail at describing this piece of new-classic Norwegian literature by calling it an extremely funny sexcapade of a magical penis. Yes, a magical penis. You've probably heard about it. They're usually attached to a Gary Stu.
AND YET, Jonas, our magical stud, is also a WIZARD at everything because he naturally gets the full sweeping talents automatically from every woman he manages to seduce.
It would be absolutely absurd and atrocious if it wasn't so eye-rollingly funny. And the novel doesn't even have the FEEL of a humorous piece. It reads somewhat dire and emotional because we keep bouncing around an epic framework of his wife's murder and ALL THE MEMORIES of his entire life as vignettes couched within ALL the most minor details that eventually make up an epically cool building of a single character that I admit I grew to love.
Just not because he's so stultifyingly brilliant at anything he puts his hand to.
Indeed, the whole structure of the novel is all kinds of brilliant for real. An endless tirade of moments from his life that doesn't apparently have anything to do with the dire scene in question but EVENTUALLY becomes super-important. Multiply these by a bazillion and you've got yourself a prism of a character as seen by so many instants and the effect is FREAKING AMBITIOUS.
All the props. I'm really amazed.
Of course, I was VERY often annoyed as hell about Gary and the magical penis. But oh well, right? The annoyance almost always transformed into me muttering, "Ohhhh, pllleeeeaaaaseeeee..." and enough eye-rolls to make my eyes pop out like I just came out of a Warner Brother's cartoon.
BUT it worked. Strangely enough, it worked.
Or rather, I will fail at describing it. That being said, I will willfully fail at describing this piece of new-classic Norwegian literature by calling it an extremely funny sexcapade of a magical penis. Yes, a magical penis. You've probably heard about it. They're usually attached to a Gary Stu.
AND YET, Jonas, our magical stud, is also a WIZARD at everything because he naturally gets the full sweeping talents automatically from every woman he manages to seduce.
It would be absolutely absurd and atrocious if it wasn't so eye-rollingly funny. And the novel doesn't even have the FEEL of a humorous piece. It reads somewhat dire and emotional because we keep bouncing around an epic framework of his wife's murder and ALL THE MEMORIES of his entire life as vignettes couched within ALL the most minor details that eventually make up an epically cool building of a single character that I admit I grew to love.
Just not because he's so stultifyingly brilliant at anything he puts his hand to.
Indeed, the whole structure of the novel is all kinds of brilliant for real. An endless tirade of moments from his life that doesn't apparently have anything to do with the dire scene in question but EVENTUALLY becomes super-important. Multiply these by a bazillion and you've got yourself a prism of a character as seen by so many instants and the effect is FREAKING AMBITIOUS.
All the props. I'm really amazed.
Of course, I was VERY often annoyed as hell about Gary and the magical penis. But oh well, right? The annoyance almost always transformed into me muttering, "Ohhhh, pllleeeeaaaaseeeee..." and enough eye-rolls to make my eyes pop out like I just came out of a Warner Brother's cartoon.
BUT it worked. Strangely enough, it worked.
January 24, 2011
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"They jotted down ideas that had come to them between their discussions on the streets, thoughts generated by something one of the others had said, or by the graffitti on a statue, or quite simply churned out by brains that were running at top gear. And naturally, at that moment, sitting in the Magnet, scribbling down these thoughts as quickly as their pencils could shed their carbon fragments, they honestly believed that what they were writing, at any rate after a bit of polishing, would cause the Milky Way to vibrate on its axis. They sat there with their fags between their lips, eyes narrowed, as if these notes they were making were of such brilliance that they were almost dazzled by them. Jonas knew that none of them would ever become novelists or writers of any description, but he never made fun of them, quite the opposite; he understood that these notebooks full of presumptuous, high-flying ideas would be worth their weight in gold at later and more disillusioned stages of their lives, that there would come a time when looking through these little books would prove a more effective way of dulling their depression and worldweariness than all the medicines and pills in the world: to see, to have confirmed that they once thought such thoughts, so grand, so outrageous, so extravagantly naive, and, above all, so insanely beautiful, like turtles with gems affixed to their shells."
There were a lot of good things about this book, things that I enjoyed very much, things that in hindsight made it worth reading. I liked the interlocking stories and couldn't help but admire the author's skill. Had he already told us the beetle story? I racked my brain trying to think of the beetle story, and lo and behold there was the beetle story, revealed a few pages later. I liked a lot of the writing, especially in the last 150 pages or so. The descriptions of the Midsummer's Eve party, for example, were lovely.
But I hated the smugness of it, I hated the avuncular self-consciousness of it and I hated the way I could tell I was being led by the nose, that I was being fed just enough information to make me want to know what happened next, but never enough to satisfy me. I hated the use of repetition, of phrases and of motifs, of characters who reappeared again and again. I hated that it was impossible to tell what order things were happening, that Margrete's death kept recurring, and besides I thought the resolution of that plot thread was unsatisfying. So naaaaaaaah.
I hated Jonas and his magic penis, Jonas and his little red notebook, Jonas and his extraordinary friends, Jonas and the endless descriptions of Jonas's TV show, which seemed to me like masses of artistic wankery. And I hate that anything I try to write in criticism of this book comes out sounding like Veronika Roed, like someone Norwegian, like I don't like this because it's new and different and there's never been anything like it before. And I hate that to an extent any criticism is going to sound like that, and I also hate that maybe its newness and different-ness is part of the reason why I didn't love it. And it did make me think, think bigger, wonder if I've been engaging in reductionism my whole life. Hats off to Kjaerstad, it's clever, it's very clever. I respect the guy, that's for sure.
So now, in order to salvage this review from bitterness and Norwegianness, to save my self-respect from total and utter annihilation, I have to come up with that special angle, the one that will break everything open and leave the victory in my hands. And, I'll let you into a secret, I'd rather it not involve me imagining that I'm making love to the people who are reading this review. I'm no seducer, I haven't got Jonas's charisma, I have no magic shiver down my spine, no priceless pile of antiquarian books, no underlinings by Nefertiti providing me with the wisdom I'll need to succeed in this world. All I have is Dad's voice in the background, 'reminding' me that I have to get ready to go somewhere where there isn't any internet access. So I've got to hurry, and really I should have written this last night when it was fresh in my mind anyway.
Because yes, I did stay up late on Christmas night finishing this, even though I didn't get home until 3am the night before thanks to midnight mass. And I told myself it was because I wanted to finish it before I had to leave this morning, but is that the truth? Or was it because I wanted to know what happened, I was caught up in the story? Because I was still counting the pages, even at the end when the smugness was dropped, the writing was good, there was a sense of urgency, 100 pages, 50 pages, 24 pages, 16, 14, 12 pages, 9 pages, 8765432 pages, 1 page and there was the end. But I can't deny that I was caught up in Jonas's battle with Veronika, that I wanted him to win, that I was urging him on in my head to find that special angle, that I was seriously hating on Veronika Roed and that Tango dude, even though quite a large part of me wanted to see him destroyed, crushed to a bloody pulp on the stage.
I'm not sure really if my angle is really an angle, but if it is it's the one that Jonas never seemed to think of using, no matter how much I urged him to in my mind: honesty. The honest truth is that I didn't enjoy this book, I had to force my way through it, I was glad when I made the decision to put it aside for a few days, it was a relief. I sighed when I picked it up again in a here-we-go-again way, knowing that I had to finish it, but wishing that it wasn't so. Clever and pomo it was, and I might even read the sequels some day (maybe; not soon) but I didn't enjoy reading it, even to admire at the skill and craftsmanship, and if you don't enjoy reading, what's the point of doing it?
______________________________________
There are a lot of things I don't like about this book, but I've been reading people's reviews and they have reminded me of the things that I do like about it, and there are quite a few things. But Manny, Notgettingenough and Alan have written about the good things very well, and since they are true fans, I'll leave it to them to talk about the strong points and I will limit myself to talking about the things that are making me throw my hands up in disgust.
Firstly, the style. It's painful. It also reminds me very strongly of Jostein Gaarder, who is also Norwegian. Now, I've read a few of Gaarder's books (in English, of course), and enjoyed them quite a lot, but I note that Kelly mentions in her review of Sophie's World that he talks down to the reader a lot, and unnecessarily so. I guess I didn't really notice it a lot while reading Gaarder, possibly because I was a lot younger then and used to it, but I think this is partly my problem with The Seducer. I haven't gotten around to checking if the translator is the same yet, but maybe it's something to do with Norwegian that makes it translate like that. I don't know enough about translation to tell, but it seems to happen with Russian too.
So it talks down. It's also highly introspective and self-absorbed and self-conscious and prone to saying things like "So how do the pieces of a life fit together? Or, to put it another way, do they fit together at all?"
and
"the moment which I have chosen to form the hub of this spinning narrative in which I keep picking spokes at random, something which I can do becasue I know that all of the spokes run from the outer rim to the centre and that chronology is not the same as causality. Anyone wishing to understand Jonas Wergeland's life will first have to dispense with the belief that the passage of time says anything about cause and effect."
and
"But enough of that. I promise not to go on and on about my own motives. This is not meant to be about me, for one thing because I know how averse Norwegians are to self-conscious narratives and, for another, because the essential idea behind this project, if I dare use such a word, is my own deep secret."
I feel like it is written by an upper-middle-aged man who knows a lot more than me about a lot of things, and knows he knows a lot more than me about a lot of things (including and most importantly what happens in this story), and isn't worried about rubbing my face in his superior knowledge. It has an orotund effect, a fatherly, affectionate, condescending tone, that gets my back up in a major way.
The fractured plot sequence is really annoying, though deliberately so I'm sure. There are so many questions I want answered, and which he keeps backing off from at the last possible moment: what happened to Nefertiti? Why did Margrete leave him the first time, and what made her come back? Why does he not get on with Daniel and is Daniel the same person as Buddha? Why does no one else notice that Veronika is trying to kill him and why does she do it? Why do they keep inviting Veronika's odious family around for dinner? Is Aunt Laura fat or thin?
This is a clever technique, in many ways, I'll give him that, but I've read plenty of other books which use a similar method, and which don't drive me up the wall.
I also have a lot of problems with Jonas Wergeland, the protagonist. I'm sure this is a deliberate effect that will come to make sense later on, but for now, he's just a Mary Sue (or Gary Stu, etc) of truly gigantic proportions. He seems to have an innate talent for drawing, playing the organ, acting, attracting women, and generally being awesome. He's also apparently simultaneously a gun architect and TV-program producer of unparalleled brilliance. He also has a magic penis which drives me fucking CRAZY (but not in that sense). Just because... I don't know, exactly. But somehow it stinks of patriarchy or something in a way that I absolutely hate.
"...Jonas Wergeland had a magic penis, a penis that could become thicker or thinner, shorter or longer as required, like a zoom lens... Jonas Wergeland could fill any vagina exactly as that vagina longed to be filled, perfectly, to give a pleasure second to none."
"Margrete discovered to her surprise that she was pregnant, even though she had been using contraception. Jonas felt sure that the polar bear must have scared extra life into his sperm cells, enabling them to defy all resistance."
About his TV program: "To be honest, I felt as though I was being made love to. I mean it. And as the program was coming to a close I could feel myself swelling up with pleasure... a sense of gratitude that someone had fondled her of all people, her eyes, her ears, all of her senses, not least her intellect, giving her a sort of all-embracing sense that this concerned her, concerned her to such a degree that it gave her goosebumps."
There's something about the way this book is written - and I think this is to do with me and my insecurities as much as anything else - that makes me feel inferior for not having been surrounded as cool friends as Jonas did as a child, friends like Nefertiti and Axel and girlfriends/wives like Margrete, and brilliant women like Anne B. and Nina G. and that artist at the beginning who can transfer aspects of their talents to him via sex (wtf?). And somehow I'm made to feel stupid because for me primary school was like sitting in a hole in the ground while people shovelled shit in on top of me, but secondary school was mostly completely wonderful, even without a little red book.
A couple of things I did like which haven't been covered exhaustively in other reviews:
- Reading about Norway from the point of view of a Norwegian. Scandinavia often seems to be surrounded by a sort of halo of perfection from where I'm sitting, so it was interesting to read about it from an insider's perspective.
- Some individual passages/ideas, like Gabriel's long spiel about acting.
"Every one of us invents and plays as many different parts in our daily lives as we need in order to be taken seriously.
"...there's more than one side to a human being; just like light, we contain the potential for both particles and waves.
"[Gabriel brought:] a fresh motivation to every part he played, inasmuch as he worked from the premise that the entire play centred on that one part, no matter how small that part might be.
"...the realisation that he is manifold, that he contains a multitude of different personas within himself - all at once.
"...those old theories that say you have to forget yourself on stage, as if we have this nucleus inside us, this individuality which constitutes our self and which will always get in the way of all the other roles we try to play. On this point, I always maintained... that, on the contrary, I was those other roles; that the potential for all of them was already there, inherent in me, it was only a matter of unearthing it."
At this point it seemed like he abandoned the narrative for a few seconds to express an idea that was somehow separate from it, outside it, transcendent of it, and at the same time he managed to escape the horrid style in which the rest of the book is written and it was much better. I loved it, it expresses for me something which is deeply true to a level beyond normal truth, and it struck me as much better written than most of the rest of the book.
I probably will finish this book - for one thing, I'm curious to see what happens - and I wouldn't be surprised if my opinion changes by the end. But I'm putting it aside for a few days.
"They jotted down ideas that had come to them between their discussions on the streets, thoughts generated by something one of the others had said, or by the graffitti on a statue, or quite simply churned out by brains that were running at top gear. And naturally, at that moment, sitting in the Magnet, scribbling down these thoughts as quickly as their pencils could shed their carbon fragments, they honestly believed that what they were writing, at any rate after a bit of polishing, would cause the Milky Way to vibrate on its axis. They sat there with their fags between their lips, eyes narrowed, as if these notes they were making were of such brilliance that they were almost dazzled by them. Jonas knew that none of them would ever become novelists or writers of any description, but he never made fun of them, quite the opposite; he understood that these notebooks full of presumptuous, high-flying ideas would be worth their weight in gold at later and more disillusioned stages of their lives, that there would come a time when looking through these little books would prove a more effective way of dulling their depression and worldweariness than all the medicines and pills in the world: to see, to have confirmed that they once thought such thoughts, so grand, so outrageous, so extravagantly naive, and, above all, so insanely beautiful, like turtles with gems affixed to their shells."
There were a lot of good things about this book, things that I enjoyed very much, things that in hindsight made it worth reading. I liked the interlocking stories and couldn't help but admire the author's skill. Had he already told us the beetle story? I racked my brain trying to think of the beetle story, and lo and behold there was the beetle story, revealed a few pages later. I liked a lot of the writing, especially in the last 150 pages or so. The descriptions of the Midsummer's Eve party, for example, were lovely.
But I hated the smugness of it, I hated the avuncular self-consciousness of it and I hated the way I could tell I was being led by the nose, that I was being fed just enough information to make me want to know what happened next, but never enough to satisfy me. I hated the use of repetition, of phrases and of motifs, of characters who reappeared again and again. I hated that it was impossible to tell what order things were happening, that Margrete's death kept recurring, and besides I thought the resolution of that plot thread was unsatisfying. So naaaaaaaah.
I hated Jonas and his magic penis, Jonas and his little red notebook, Jonas and his extraordinary friends, Jonas and the endless descriptions of Jonas's TV show, which seemed to me like masses of artistic wankery. And I hate that anything I try to write in criticism of this book comes out sounding like Veronika Roed, like someone Norwegian, like I don't like this because it's new and different and there's never been anything like it before. And I hate that to an extent any criticism is going to sound like that, and I also hate that maybe its newness and different-ness is part of the reason why I didn't love it. And it did make me think, think bigger, wonder if I've been engaging in reductionism my whole life. Hats off to Kjaerstad, it's clever, it's very clever. I respect the guy, that's for sure.
So now, in order to salvage this review from bitterness and Norwegianness, to save my self-respect from total and utter annihilation, I have to come up with that special angle, the one that will break everything open and leave the victory in my hands. And, I'll let you into a secret, I'd rather it not involve me imagining that I'm making love to the people who are reading this review. I'm no seducer, I haven't got Jonas's charisma, I have no magic shiver down my spine, no priceless pile of antiquarian books, no underlinings by Nefertiti providing me with the wisdom I'll need to succeed in this world. All I have is Dad's voice in the background, 'reminding' me that I have to get ready to go somewhere where there isn't any internet access. So I've got to hurry, and really I should have written this last night when it was fresh in my mind anyway.
Because yes, I did stay up late on Christmas night finishing this, even though I didn't get home until 3am the night before thanks to midnight mass. And I told myself it was because I wanted to finish it before I had to leave this morning, but is that the truth? Or was it because I wanted to know what happened, I was caught up in the story? Because I was still counting the pages, even at the end when the smugness was dropped, the writing was good, there was a sense of urgency, 100 pages, 50 pages, 24 pages, 16, 14, 12 pages, 9 pages, 8765432 pages, 1 page and there was the end. But I can't deny that I was caught up in Jonas's battle with Veronika, that I wanted him to win, that I was urging him on in my head to find that special angle, that I was seriously hating on Veronika Roed and that Tango dude, even though quite a large part of me wanted to see him destroyed, crushed to a bloody pulp on the stage.
I'm not sure really if my angle is really an angle, but if it is it's the one that Jonas never seemed to think of using, no matter how much I urged him to in my mind: honesty. The honest truth is that I didn't enjoy this book, I had to force my way through it, I was glad when I made the decision to put it aside for a few days, it was a relief. I sighed when I picked it up again in a here-we-go-again way, knowing that I had to finish it, but wishing that it wasn't so. Clever and pomo it was, and I might even read the sequels some day (maybe; not soon) but I didn't enjoy reading it, even to admire at the skill and craftsmanship, and if you don't enjoy reading, what's the point of doing it?
______________________________________
There are a lot of things I don't like about this book, but I've been reading people's reviews and they have reminded me of the things that I do like about it, and there are quite a few things. But Manny, Notgettingenough and Alan have written about the good things very well, and since they are true fans, I'll leave it to them to talk about the strong points and I will limit myself to talking about the things that are making me throw my hands up in disgust.
Firstly, the style. It's painful. It also reminds me very strongly of Jostein Gaarder, who is also Norwegian. Now, I've read a few of Gaarder's books (in English, of course), and enjoyed them quite a lot, but I note that Kelly mentions in her review of Sophie's World that he talks down to the reader a lot, and unnecessarily so. I guess I didn't really notice it a lot while reading Gaarder, possibly because I was a lot younger then and used to it, but I think this is partly my problem with The Seducer. I haven't gotten around to checking if the translator is the same yet, but maybe it's something to do with Norwegian that makes it translate like that. I don't know enough about translation to tell, but it seems to happen with Russian too.
So it talks down. It's also highly introspective and self-absorbed and self-conscious and prone to saying things like "So how do the pieces of a life fit together? Or, to put it another way, do they fit together at all?"
and
"the moment which I have chosen to form the hub of this spinning narrative in which I keep picking spokes at random, something which I can do becasue I know that all of the spokes run from the outer rim to the centre and that chronology is not the same as causality. Anyone wishing to understand Jonas Wergeland's life will first have to dispense with the belief that the passage of time says anything about cause and effect."
and
"But enough of that. I promise not to go on and on about my own motives. This is not meant to be about me, for one thing because I know how averse Norwegians are to self-conscious narratives and, for another, because the essential idea behind this project, if I dare use such a word, is my own deep secret."
I feel like it is written by an upper-middle-aged man who knows a lot more than me about a lot of things, and knows he knows a lot more than me about a lot of things (including and most importantly what happens in this story), and isn't worried about rubbing my face in his superior knowledge. It has an orotund effect, a fatherly, affectionate, condescending tone, that gets my back up in a major way.
The fractured plot sequence is really annoying, though deliberately so I'm sure. There are so many questions I want answered, and which he keeps backing off from at the last possible moment: what happened to Nefertiti? Why did Margrete leave him the first time, and what made her come back? Why does he not get on with Daniel and is Daniel the same person as Buddha? Why does no one else notice that Veronika is trying to kill him and why does she do it? Why do they keep inviting Veronika's odious family around for dinner? Is Aunt Laura fat or thin?
This is a clever technique, in many ways, I'll give him that, but I've read plenty of other books which use a similar method, and which don't drive me up the wall.
I also have a lot of problems with Jonas Wergeland, the protagonist. I'm sure this is a deliberate effect that will come to make sense later on, but for now, he's just a Mary Sue (or Gary Stu, etc) of truly gigantic proportions. He seems to have an innate talent for drawing, playing the organ, acting, attracting women, and generally being awesome. He's also apparently simultaneously a gun architect and TV-program producer of unparalleled brilliance. He also has a magic penis which drives me fucking CRAZY (but not in that sense). Just because... I don't know, exactly. But somehow it stinks of patriarchy or something in a way that I absolutely hate.
"...Jonas Wergeland had a magic penis, a penis that could become thicker or thinner, shorter or longer as required, like a zoom lens... Jonas Wergeland could fill any vagina exactly as that vagina longed to be filled, perfectly, to give a pleasure second to none."
"Margrete discovered to her surprise that she was pregnant, even though she had been using contraception. Jonas felt sure that the polar bear must have scared extra life into his sperm cells, enabling them to defy all resistance."
About his TV program: "To be honest, I felt as though I was being made love to. I mean it. And as the program was coming to a close I could feel myself swelling up with pleasure... a sense of gratitude that someone had fondled her of all people, her eyes, her ears, all of her senses, not least her intellect, giving her a sort of all-embracing sense that this concerned her, concerned her to such a degree that it gave her goosebumps."
There's something about the way this book is written - and I think this is to do with me and my insecurities as much as anything else - that makes me feel inferior for not having been surrounded as cool friends as Jonas did as a child, friends like Nefertiti and Axel and girlfriends/wives like Margrete, and brilliant women like Anne B. and Nina G. and that artist at the beginning who can transfer aspects of their talents to him via sex (wtf?). And somehow I'm made to feel stupid because for me primary school was like sitting in a hole in the ground while people shovelled shit in on top of me, but secondary school was mostly completely wonderful, even without a little red book.
A couple of things I did like which haven't been covered exhaustively in other reviews:
- Reading about Norway from the point of view of a Norwegian. Scandinavia often seems to be surrounded by a sort of halo of perfection from where I'm sitting, so it was interesting to read about it from an insider's perspective.
- Some individual passages/ideas, like Gabriel's long spiel about acting.
"Every one of us invents and plays as many different parts in our daily lives as we need in order to be taken seriously.
"...there's more than one side to a human being; just like light, we contain the potential for both particles and waves.
"[Gabriel brought:] a fresh motivation to every part he played, inasmuch as he worked from the premise that the entire play centred on that one part, no matter how small that part might be.
"...the realisation that he is manifold, that he contains a multitude of different personas within himself - all at once.
"...those old theories that say you have to forget yourself on stage, as if we have this nucleus inside us, this individuality which constitutes our self and which will always get in the way of all the other roles we try to play. On this point, I always maintained... that, on the contrary, I was those other roles; that the potential for all of them was already there, inherent in me, it was only a matter of unearthing it."
At this point it seemed like he abandoned the narrative for a few seconds to express an idea that was somehow separate from it, outside it, transcendent of it, and at the same time he managed to escape the horrid style in which the rest of the book is written and it was much better. I loved it, it expresses for me something which is deeply true to a level beyond normal truth, and it struck me as much better written than most of the rest of the book.
I probably will finish this book - for one thing, I'm curious to see what happens - and I wouldn't be surprised if my opinion changes by the end. But I'm putting it aside for a few days.
August 18, 2024
Another entertaining novel by Kjærstad, this one reads like a thriller, as far as I remember, having read it when it was first published. I can’t think of any other author in Norway or in Denmark for that matter who writes quite like Kjærstad.
Want to read
July 4, 2009Manny said I must, so I guess I must! : )
December 28, 2015
A book like a fugue from Bach in which every note is important and leads to the next and echoes later on, and brings the whole back to the starting point. A book like a skilfully woven tapestry in which each thread tells a story and the stories depends on each other. A fantastic, a magical book. And a book about Norway in the world and the world in Norway. And this is only part one of a trilogy.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
March 13, 2017
Provisional rating, as I'm to understand the subsequent volume is something of an antithesis, the last an integration.
November 13, 2012
"How do the pieces of a life fit together?"
This is the central question posed by Kjærstad throughout this book, and answered in full. By using a mysterious third person narrator to tell stories about the life of the central character, Jonas Wergeland, Kjærstad not only tells us how the pieces of a life fit together, he shows us over and over again.
A number of recurring images and themes are used to great effect, including: the circle/spokes/tangent, the turtle with a world on the back of his shell, the pipe organ, granite, coltsfoot, persian rugs and the transformative nature of sex - which tie the stories together. Eventually, the themes are woven together tightly enough to describe Wergeland's life in a way that is more rich and meaningful than any linear narrative could achieve. Kjærstad does all of this masterfully, in a way that is straightforward and not heavy-handed.
I do find it strange that the book's title is "The Seducer" - the character as a seducer of people being one of the least prolific and least cogent of all the recurring themes. Presumably the next instalments of the trilogy, The Conqueror and The Discoverer, will shed some light as to why these aspects of the life in question were chosen as the focal point. This book could easily have been called "The Meaning of Life" and not been an exaggeration.
I must admit, it took me a while to settle into this. At first I found the tone to be a little too smug and prim. As the pieces of the puzzle began to come together though, I started enjoying it a lot more. That said, I didn't find myself itching to pick the book up again once I had put it down for the day. Initially I rated the book 4 stars on the basis that I didn't find it as enjoyable to read as some, however, I'm finding myself thinking back to the points the book makes. I suspect that some of these ideas have been indelibly imprinted on my brain, so I have upped my score.
A tip to anyone picking up Kjærstad for the first time too - read quickly. Don't pore over every word in every very long sentence (and they are very long), and you'll find a rhythm and momentum that really add something to the book's charm.
A highly recommended, unique reading experience.
PS - I got to write this status update while reading The Seducer, which made me very happy:
I've just learned that one of those fur hats with the earflaps is called a "bjørnefitte" in Norway - literally a "bear-twat". This has made my week.
This is the central question posed by Kjærstad throughout this book, and answered in full. By using a mysterious third person narrator to tell stories about the life of the central character, Jonas Wergeland, Kjærstad not only tells us how the pieces of a life fit together, he shows us over and over again.
A number of recurring images and themes are used to great effect, including: the circle/spokes/tangent, the turtle with a world on the back of his shell, the pipe organ, granite, coltsfoot, persian rugs and the transformative nature of sex - which tie the stories together. Eventually, the themes are woven together tightly enough to describe Wergeland's life in a way that is more rich and meaningful than any linear narrative could achieve. Kjærstad does all of this masterfully, in a way that is straightforward and not heavy-handed.
I do find it strange that the book's title is "The Seducer" - the character as a seducer of people being one of the least prolific and least cogent of all the recurring themes. Presumably the next instalments of the trilogy, The Conqueror and The Discoverer, will shed some light as to why these aspects of the life in question were chosen as the focal point. This book could easily have been called "The Meaning of Life" and not been an exaggeration.
I must admit, it took me a while to settle into this. At first I found the tone to be a little too smug and prim. As the pieces of the puzzle began to come together though, I started enjoying it a lot more. That said, I didn't find myself itching to pick the book up again once I had put it down for the day. Initially I rated the book 4 stars on the basis that I didn't find it as enjoyable to read as some, however, I'm finding myself thinking back to the points the book makes. I suspect that some of these ideas have been indelibly imprinted on my brain, so I have upped my score.
A tip to anyone picking up Kjærstad for the first time too - read quickly. Don't pore over every word in every very long sentence (and they are very long), and you'll find a rhythm and momentum that really add something to the book's charm.
A highly recommended, unique reading experience.
PS - I got to write this status update while reading The Seducer, which made me very happy:
I've just learned that one of those fur hats with the earflaps is called a "bjørnefitte" in Norway - literally a "bear-twat". This has made my week.
October 13, 2009
Not used to this kind of book -600 page novels, and a brain hurting scope. I'm a short story writer and deal in, and usually read about, the domestic and limited.
However this was brilliant, a kind of modern Norwegian Tristram Shandy, but with more sex, going back and forth in time and situation leaving stories unfinished and returned to, stretching out the narrative to cover the world, physically and philosophically. It centres on a TV personality, Jonas, who has aspects of both the everyman, and also a Christ like figure absorbing the projections, fears and sins of his nationwide audience and radiating a kind of enlightenment and power.
There are some brilliant pieces of writing - the lorry crash delivered in painstaking detail and crucial repetition, the walk round Beunos Aries playfully evoking Borges, a boat trip in dangerous seas, an amazing encounter with a polar bear, saved, yet again, by his magic penis.
The sex though underwhelmed me, despite all the talk of yonis and the masses of penises 'collected' by his aunt there is only ever one position portrayed (except for a significant exception), and one method of pick -up, the woman swoons/asks. Fair enough given his superman status I suppose, but I like my sex with grit and fault. (Not actual grit btw).
But minor quibble, this is fantastically wide ranging, insightful, such a sweeping narrative, going back and forth and full of ideas and memorable landscapes, The Antartic, Timbuctoo, Tianamenn Square. I learnt so much along the way, about Norway and its people as portrayed here: suspicious and sceptical, worthy too, and needing to be reminded of their heros (hence Jonas's TV series 'Thinking Big' about significant Norwegians). Architects, fashion designers, explorers and thinkers.
I did lag a little at times - eg his wife's breadmaking and lovemaking (yes at the same time) followed by her contemplation of her bowel movements, but on the whole this big book won me over. It is beautiful and niave and aslo shrewd and strange. It is playful, exuberant, unstoppable and also moving at times - the love, the grief he shows for his wife and his boyhood friend Nefertiti is heartfelt and detailed.
Quite near a five then.
However this was brilliant, a kind of modern Norwegian Tristram Shandy, but with more sex, going back and forth in time and situation leaving stories unfinished and returned to, stretching out the narrative to cover the world, physically and philosophically. It centres on a TV personality, Jonas, who has aspects of both the everyman, and also a Christ like figure absorbing the projections, fears and sins of his nationwide audience and radiating a kind of enlightenment and power.
There are some brilliant pieces of writing - the lorry crash delivered in painstaking detail and crucial repetition, the walk round Beunos Aries playfully evoking Borges, a boat trip in dangerous seas, an amazing encounter with a polar bear, saved, yet again, by his magic penis.
The sex though underwhelmed me, despite all the talk of yonis and the masses of penises 'collected' by his aunt there is only ever one position portrayed (except for a significant exception), and one method of pick -up, the woman swoons/asks. Fair enough given his superman status I suppose, but I like my sex with grit and fault. (Not actual grit btw).
But minor quibble, this is fantastically wide ranging, insightful, such a sweeping narrative, going back and forth and full of ideas and memorable landscapes, The Antartic, Timbuctoo, Tianamenn Square. I learnt so much along the way, about Norway and its people as portrayed here: suspicious and sceptical, worthy too, and needing to be reminded of their heros (hence Jonas's TV series 'Thinking Big' about significant Norwegians). Architects, fashion designers, explorers and thinkers.
I did lag a little at times - eg his wife's breadmaking and lovemaking (yes at the same time) followed by her contemplation of her bowel movements, but on the whole this big book won me over. It is beautiful and niave and aslo shrewd and strange. It is playful, exuberant, unstoppable and also moving at times - the love, the grief he shows for his wife and his boyhood friend Nefertiti is heartfelt and detailed.
Quite near a five then.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 12, 2010
First I would like to apologize to my copy of this book, greg and kjaerstad for destroying my copy. I know that you have given me advice before on how not to destroy books, but I wanted to go for a walk and I wanted to read and it happened to be raining so... yeah. Not that it affects the quality of the book.
This book doesn't seem to have any defining plot points. It isn't even that it lacks a story but that like the name of the rose the "plot" doesn't seem to actually be relevant to the story.
This book is a bit perverted. Just something important to be aware of. I also believe that I missed something at one point and couldn't figure out when Jonas' mother was taking buddha places whether buddha was an actual person or not.
I don't know what to say about this book basically because of the lack of direction in the actual book. The stories are touching and interwoven extremely well. Not unlike the watchmen where several divergent things are going on that all seem to matter to each other.
One of the great things about the book is the focus on turtles and cause and effect. The book is about why things happen, and specifically why people react the way they do to especially to death.
This book doesn't seem to have any defining plot points. It isn't even that it lacks a story but that like the name of the rose the "plot" doesn't seem to actually be relevant to the story.
This book is a bit perverted. Just something important to be aware of. I also believe that I missed something at one point and couldn't figure out when Jonas' mother was taking buddha places whether buddha was an actual person or not.
I don't know what to say about this book basically because of the lack of direction in the actual book. The stories are touching and interwoven extremely well. Not unlike the watchmen where several divergent things are going on that all seem to matter to each other.
One of the great things about the book is the focus on turtles and cause and effect. The book is about why things happen, and specifically why people react the way they do to especially to death.
July 22, 2012
I'm not sure if this is really abandoned or just on pause. Maybe I'll come back to it, but the narrator's voice and the writing in general are really awful. I'm sure he was going for a certain style, but I can't take it for 550+ more pages.
Things that suck about this book:
1) It feels like 50% of the clauses I've read so far have been disclaimers. This gives me little confidence.
2) The redundancies are also distracting.
Just say what you mean!
3) It seems like the author refused all editing there are so many first-draft sentences. I already gave two examples but:
4) The decided lack of subtlety and finesse.
5) Lots of telling and not much showing.
6) Random asides/tirades about Norway that really make me think that Jan Kjærstad really likes to hear himself talk a lot or is senile.
I was really looking forward to enjoying this, but.
Things that suck about this book:
1) It feels like 50% of the clauses I've read so far have been disclaimers. This gives me little confidence.
He was making a quick sketch in his notebook, concentrating mainly on capturing the sweet of the cascade – not an easy task with the paper continually being spattered by spray – when an African man approached him and inquired politely as to whether Jonas was Norwegian, pointing as he did so at the plastic bag in which Jonas was carrying his shirt and camera and which – quite coincidentally and yet most aptly, considering that they were standing next to a rock-face curtained by water – happened to come from the Steen & Strøm, literally 'Stone & Stream', department store in Oslo.
2) The redundancies are also distracting.
...reviewers had slated her exhibition. In fact, they had well and truly torn it to shreds.
Just say what you mean!
3) It seems like the author refused all editing there are so many first-draft sentences. I already gave two examples but:
I do not intend to delve much deeper in my attempt to describe Jonas Wergeland's uncle and his three children, not that it does not, for all its brevity, say something about these people, but because Jonas – who is, after all, my main concern – did not really know these relatives, a fact which never ceased to intrigue him, all through his life.
4) The decided lack of subtlety and finesse.
'Realism ought to be defined as the opposite of art...The only thing which could save realism from being something other than an empty word would be if all people had the same idea and were of the same opinion on absolutely everything.' Although he did not say so, Jonas was quoting the French painter Eugène Delacroix, from an entry in his diary for 22 February 1860, if anyone is interested.
5) Lots of telling and not much showing.
The reason for my dwelling at such length on Sir William is, of course, that this person happens to personify a crucial element in the story of Jonas Wergeland's life. Sir William is not merely an uncle, Sir William is Norway, disguised in a blue blazer and gold cravat, a nouveau riche upstart.
6) Random asides/tirades about Norway that really make me think that Jan Kjærstad really likes to hear himself talk a lot or is senile.
I was really looking forward to enjoying this, but.
January 22, 2022
Det här är den första fristående boken i trilogin om tv-personligheten Jonas Wergeland. Till att börja med kan jag säga att jag är jävligt trött på trilogier och romansviter. Ferrante, Knausgård... Den där norrmannen Jon Fosse har nu släppt dem första två delarna i en romanserie om sju, "Septologin". Snark... Deppigt att Jonathan Franzen också har fallit till föga (Vägskäl, som var jättebra, är tydligen del 1 i en planerad trilogi).
Hur som helst, Förföraren är en postmodern roman. Det betyder att det s k narrativet är lite okonventionellt. Man fattar inte vem berättaren är och berättelsen har en snurrig, icke-linjär struktur.
Jag Kjærstad är kanske en nordisk David Foster Wallace (aldrig läst). Förföraren handlar bland annat om tennis och television (Två ämnen som ligger DFW varmt om hjärtat va?)
Jag vet inte hur förtjust jag är i sådana här postmoderna böcker, som består av idel utvikningar. Eller utvikningar är ett missvisande ord, för det finns ingen huvudsaklig handling, romanen är en räcka små historier. Boken är jävligt lång, för att inte säga mastig; långa stycken och nytt kapitel efter två radbrytningar. Episod på episod ur Jonas Wergelands liv, berättat huxflux. Jag lovar mig själv på sida 300, när jag är som mest utled på hela grejen, att inte låta mig charmas av ett spännande slut.
Men på upploppet är jag faktiskt rätt så golvad. Inte för att alla historier knyts samman på något perfekt sätt, utan mest för att Kjærstad tror så uppriktigt på det han skriver. Jag älskar faktiskt böcker som hyllar berättandet.
Sammantaget: boken är en tjock massa av text, som i sina sämsta stunder mer känns som ett informationsflöde än litteratur. Men det ändå en häftig resa.
Hur som helst, Förföraren är en postmodern roman. Det betyder att det s k narrativet är lite okonventionellt. Man fattar inte vem berättaren är och berättelsen har en snurrig, icke-linjär struktur.
Jag Kjærstad är kanske en nordisk David Foster Wallace (aldrig läst). Förföraren handlar bland annat om tennis och television (Två ämnen som ligger DFW varmt om hjärtat va?)
Jag vet inte hur förtjust jag är i sådana här postmoderna böcker, som består av idel utvikningar. Eller utvikningar är ett missvisande ord, för det finns ingen huvudsaklig handling, romanen är en räcka små historier. Boken är jävligt lång, för att inte säga mastig; långa stycken och nytt kapitel efter två radbrytningar. Episod på episod ur Jonas Wergelands liv, berättat huxflux. Jag lovar mig själv på sida 300, när jag är som mest utled på hela grejen, att inte låta mig charmas av ett spännande slut.
Men på upploppet är jag faktiskt rätt så golvad. Inte för att alla historier knyts samman på något perfekt sätt, utan mest för att Kjærstad tror så uppriktigt på det han skriver. Jag älskar faktiskt böcker som hyllar berättandet.
Sammantaget: boken är en tjock massa av text, som i sina sämsta stunder mer känns som ett informationsflöde än litteratur. Men det ändå en häftig resa.
September 10, 2011
Prepare to be seduced ,not by Jonas, but by the author himself , wonderful prose and very unique writing style.Its been called from other people a Sexual Comedy and I couldn't agree more.
A must read .Loved it so much .
A must read .Loved it so much .
February 28, 2021
Unsure. While in theory this is a book I'd love, I ended up just liking it. The pieces of life and how they fit together is an interesting leitmotif but in this case I was just extremely charmed by some pieces and disaffected by others and it created huge fluctuations in my reading interest.
While other writers use a binding glue to keep the leimotif from scattering (for example knausgard uses extreme sentimentality, proust summons intellectualism), I felt the glue was missing here. Or I didn't understand it. Or it's lacking in translation because the narrating disembodied voice didn't work for me at all as a glue, rather as a voice pushing everything further apart.
The thing is I am not interested enough for the rest of the trilogy, I prefer reading ten more volumes of knausgard instead. I'll accept spoilers for what happens to Mr magic penis of Norway.
While other writers use a binding glue to keep the leimotif from scattering (for example knausgard uses extreme sentimentality, proust summons intellectualism), I felt the glue was missing here. Or I didn't understand it. Or it's lacking in translation because the narrating disembodied voice didn't work for me at all as a glue, rather as a voice pushing everything further apart.
The thing is I am not interested enough for the rest of the trilogy, I prefer reading ten more volumes of knausgard instead. I'll accept spoilers for what happens to Mr magic penis of Norway.
March 30, 2018
You could easily be misled by the description into thinking this is a whodunnit-style of mystery, but the mystery is more of a philosophical nature. There's no search for a murderer because at the moment the protagonist discovers his dead wife, the novel splits into short stories, or inter-connected excerpts from his life, all attempting to make sense of how events have led to this traumatic moment.
I found myself thinking of Proust and Auster at turns, because the writing drifts in and out from subjects, rendering the minuscule to macroscopic, teasing out the nuance and painting a life with language both thoughtful and dense and constantly compelling, but for my money, more interesting to read than Proust or Auster. If you enjoy discovering new ways to experience character through language, you will be seduced.
I found myself thinking of Proust and Auster at turns, because the writing drifts in and out from subjects, rendering the minuscule to macroscopic, teasing out the nuance and painting a life with language both thoughtful and dense and constantly compelling, but for my money, more interesting to read than Proust or Auster. If you enjoy discovering new ways to experience character through language, you will be seduced.
January 25, 2013
I came to this book with very high expectations mainly due to Manny's excellent review and the incredible ordeal of getting the trilogy (took about 4 months, many emails, several phone calls and a credit card fraud).
All the more it pains me that I am giving up roughly halfway through the first book. When I reread Manny's review I almost want to begin to read again, but I have to stop myself... a sunk cost is a sunk cost.
If you are thinking about embarking on this book here are a few notes to maybe take into consideration:
First, the good:
- the story is told in a very fragmented way, full of mini-flashbacks, cross-roads and roundabouts. Given the incredible scope (time and geographical) it is quite a feat. The book reads well and its short chapters do seduce to "just one more and I'm done".
- there are great many intriguing ideas and a few interesting stories
The bad:
- while many of the topics are indeed universal, this really *is* a Norwegian novel. Norwegian history, politics, arts, sports are its major focus and an ever present background. Almost every single page contains the word "Norway/Norwegian" and no matter what exotic locale is any given episode taking place, there certainly will be some connection to Norway. If you are Norwegian (and ideally roughly Kjaerstad's age and from Oslo) or very interested in the country this might be a great boon. But I absolutely underestimated how deeply this is steeped in the culture and it did detract from my enjoyment of the book (and I do like Norway and the part about Vigeland was very interesting mainly because the park made such a huge impression on me).
- the copious scenes of love making... Manny says: "it's both extremely explicit, and impeccably tasteful". I certainly agree they were explicit, but don't see the tastefulness. And not that you have to be tasteful when talking about this, but please don't be... imbecilic... At their "lowest" these passages read like they were written by an eight year old and they "highest" (meaning most "spiritual" not "best") as by some sort of new age guru talking about a cosmic covenant two souls (not that Kjearstad would use these words but it comes to the same effect nonetheless). I didn't recognize in any of this an activity real human beings could engage in.
It makes me almost angry thinking back how many idiotic sentence did Kjaerstad make me read. Just an example (almost the straw that broke the camel's back, but I did go on for a few chapters more):
"And this might explain - it's just a thought mind you - why a polar bear would one day back away from Jonas Wergland's genitals: out of the respect from the divine."
Yes, you read that correctly. And this is not sarcastic, not tongue-in-cheek. There is no book that could pull of a sentence like that in a tone like that - ever. And this is just one of very many examples.
- speaking of which - the book is 100% serious, practically completely humorless. Apparently this aspect of humanity didn't find any place in 1800 pages. If there is a funny story it is told in a way that all punch is taken away from it...
- language: there are hints that this is only problem of the English translation, but while the book is an easy read, the language is quite bland and strangely anachronistic (I imagine that this is what an old British lady imagines the young adult people speak like). There is nothing poetic here, no beautiful sentences (sometimes the ideas are beautiful but not the way they are expressed)
As such, Kjaerstad occupies a similar territory as Kundera, but unlike him the prose is much blander, the interest in philosophy and literature largely replaced by interest in geography and history (a minus for me personally) and heavily steeped in Norway and it's history (nothing bad in itself, but decreases its appeal for a general audience).
It is clear that Kjaerstad *is* an interesting writer and I want to read some of his newer books, but a 1800 page investment given all these drawbacks is not worth it at the moment for me and it might not be worth for you either.
This time Manny was far more seductive than Jonas Wergland could ever be...
All the more it pains me that I am giving up roughly halfway through the first book. When I reread Manny's review I almost want to begin to read again, but I have to stop myself... a sunk cost is a sunk cost.
If you are thinking about embarking on this book here are a few notes to maybe take into consideration:
First, the good:
- the story is told in a very fragmented way, full of mini-flashbacks, cross-roads and roundabouts. Given the incredible scope (time and geographical) it is quite a feat. The book reads well and its short chapters do seduce to "just one more and I'm done".
- there are great many intriguing ideas and a few interesting stories
The bad:
- while many of the topics are indeed universal, this really *is* a Norwegian novel. Norwegian history, politics, arts, sports are its major focus and an ever present background. Almost every single page contains the word "Norway/Norwegian" and no matter what exotic locale is any given episode taking place, there certainly will be some connection to Norway. If you are Norwegian (and ideally roughly Kjaerstad's age and from Oslo) or very interested in the country this might be a great boon. But I absolutely underestimated how deeply this is steeped in the culture and it did detract from my enjoyment of the book (and I do like Norway and the part about Vigeland was very interesting mainly because the park made such a huge impression on me).
- the copious scenes of love making... Manny says: "it's both extremely explicit, and impeccably tasteful". I certainly agree they were explicit, but don't see the tastefulness. And not that you have to be tasteful when talking about this, but please don't be... imbecilic... At their "lowest" these passages read like they were written by an eight year old and they "highest" (meaning most "spiritual" not "best") as by some sort of new age guru talking about a cosmic covenant two souls (not that Kjearstad would use these words but it comes to the same effect nonetheless). I didn't recognize in any of this an activity real human beings could engage in.
It makes me almost angry thinking back how many idiotic sentence did Kjaerstad make me read. Just an example (almost the straw that broke the camel's back, but I did go on for a few chapters more):
"And this might explain - it's just a thought mind you - why a polar bear would one day back away from Jonas Wergland's genitals: out of the respect from the divine."
Yes, you read that correctly. And this is not sarcastic, not tongue-in-cheek. There is no book that could pull of a sentence like that in a tone like that - ever. And this is just one of very many examples.
- speaking of which - the book is 100% serious, practically completely humorless. Apparently this aspect of humanity didn't find any place in 1800 pages. If there is a funny story it is told in a way that all punch is taken away from it...
- language: there are hints that this is only problem of the English translation, but while the book is an easy read, the language is quite bland and strangely anachronistic (I imagine that this is what an old British lady imagines the young adult people speak like). There is nothing poetic here, no beautiful sentences (sometimes the ideas are beautiful but not the way they are expressed)
As such, Kjaerstad occupies a similar territory as Kundera, but unlike him the prose is much blander, the interest in philosophy and literature largely replaced by interest in geography and history (a minus for me personally) and heavily steeped in Norway and it's history (nothing bad in itself, but decreases its appeal for a general audience).
It is clear that Kjaerstad *is* an interesting writer and I want to read some of his newer books, but a 1800 page investment given all these drawbacks is not worth it at the moment for me and it might not be worth for you either.
This time Manny was far more seductive than Jonas Wergland could ever be...
January 15, 2017
This year I've decided to read more series or more likely trilogies. These books have been on my to read list for quite awhile and I was hyped and had high expectations. So after reading this, the first book in this trilogy, I find myself pretty disappointed. One of the first things books these size (this is 600 pages long) beg, is the question ~ Does it really need to be this long?? and in this case it doesn't. I think this would of been better with the less is more approach considering the centrepiece of the novel, Jonas Wergeland isn't half as interesting as characters like Nefertiti who are hardly in it. The most interesting thing about this novel is it's structure. Each chapter is almost like a short story. There is also an amazing chapter about an episode of Jonas's TV show which is about when Knut Hamsun met Hitler, this almost makes up for the countless horrendous sex scenes that are in this book. I'm reading on and only hope the next book is better.
December 27, 2009
Wow, read it on Manny's recommendation and can only say it was worth the effort. Am now on the second. I like the concept, I like the style, the telling of all the many yarns ismaking my mind spin in a wonderful way.
Read
April 7, 2024Och nö. Das nervt mich schon nach wenigen Seiten.
Und wenn in begeisterten Rezis Punkte angesprochen werden, von denen ich weiß, dass sie mir im besten Fall egal sind, muss ich gar nicht darauf warten, dass es besser wird.
Und wenn in begeisterten Rezis Punkte angesprochen werden, von denen ich weiß, dass sie mir im besten Fall egal sind, muss ich gar nicht darauf warten, dass es besser wird.
July 7, 2017
A MURDER STORY ABOUT A NORWEGIAN GUY WITH A MAGIC PENIS.
March 20, 2021
For krevende kronologi til full pott. Samtidig veier glitrende språk og filosofiske betraktninger ispedd dråper med historiske skråblikk ganske godt opp!
April 6, 2023
As suggested by my Goodreads friend Kirsten.
So many digressions though but enjoyable.
P112 Pyramid Playing. To be continued next time I’m away
Yes, definitely an enjoyable read. Well recommended
So many digressions though but enjoyable.
P112 Pyramid Playing. To be continued next time I’m away
Yes, definitely an enjoyable read. Well recommended
March 7, 2010
I really liked this novel a lot - though I have to admit that it was quite a hard read for me - not only because I read it in its original version, but because of its quite different structure. The novel, being a biography of the fictional character Jonas Wergeland, tells the story of his life - but not in chronologial order, like one might expect, but in about 80 little stories which are linked only through assosiations. That can be really confusing from time to time, but over all it really is worth reading. =)
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