Powderhouse

The History of Bestiality Trilogy #2

by Jens Bjørneboe, Esther Greenleaf Mürer (Translator)

The second novel in Bjorneboe's ""History of Bestiality"" trilogy. The story is told by Jean, a janitor in a mental hospital in southern France. Jean keeps protocols, keeps for himself a written record of those events occurring around him. Also in the hospital are a strange cast of characters, any of whom could have committed the executtion-like hanging of an ex-German SS member around which the plot, which is akin to a mystery or espionage potboiler, revolves. It's hospital policy that everyone can give a lecture and a large portion of the book is taken up with three the narrator talks about witch symptomatology; Lacroix, a Belgian executioner, offers up a powerful, Foucault-like piece on the history of execution, executioners, and capital punishment; and the acid-dropping Dr. Lefévre discusses heresy and heretics. ""Exudes the intermittently charming hippie disaffection of the '60s."" Publishers Weekly

Genres: Fiction, Philosophy, Classics, Mental Illness, Literature, 20th Century

201 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Jens Ingvald Bjørneboe was a Norwegian writer whose work spanned a number of literary formats. He was also a painter and a waldorf school teacher. Bjørneboe was a harsh and eloquent critic of Norwegian society and Western civilization on the whole. He led a turbulent life and his uncompromising humanity would cost him both an obscenity conviction as well as long periods of heavy drinking and bouts of depression, which in the end led to his suicide.

Jens Bjørneboe's first published work was Poems (Dikt) in 1951. He is widely considered to be one of Norway's most important post-war authors. Bjørneboe identified himself, among other self-definitions, as an anarcho-nihilist.

During the Norwegian language struggle, Bjørneboe was a notable proponent of the Riksmål language, together with his equally famous cousin André Bjerke.

Jens Bjørneboe was born in 1920, in Kristiansand to Ingvald and Anna Marie Bjørneboe. He grew up in a wealthy family, his father a shipping magnate and a consul for Belgium. The Bjørneboe family originally immigrated from Germany in the 17th century and later adopted their Norwegian name. Coming from a long line of marine officers, Bjørneboe also went to sea as a young man.

Bjørneboe had a troubled childhood with sickness and depressions. He was bedbound for several years following severe pneumonia. At thirteen he attempted suicide by hanging himself. He began drinking when he was twelve, and he would often consume large amounts of wine when his parents were away. It is also rumored that he drank his father's aftershave on several occasions.

In 1943 Bjørneboe fled to Sweden to avoid forced labor under the Nazi occupation. During this exile, he met the German Jewish painter Lisel Funk, who later became his first wife. Lisel Funk introduced him to many aspects of German culture, especially German literature and the arts.

Bjørneboe's early work was poetry, and his first book was Poems (Dikt, 1951), consisting mainly of deeply religious poetry.

Bjørneboe wrote a number of socially critical novels. Among those were Ere the Cock Crows (Før Hanen Galer, 1952), Jonas (1955) and The Evil Shepherd (Den Onde Hyrde, 1960). Ere the Cock Crows is a critique of what Bjørneboe saw as the harsh treatment, after the Second World War, of people suspected of having associated in any way with the Nazis (among them the Norwegian writer and Nobel Prize in Literature winner Knut Hamsun). Jonas deals with injustices and shortcomings of the school system and The Evil Shepherd with the Norwegian prison system.

His most significant work is generally considered to be the trilogy The History of Bestiality, consisting of the novels Moment of Freedom (Frihetens Øyeblikk, 1966), Powderhouse (Kruttårnet, 1969) and The Silence (Stillheten, 1973).

Bjørneboe also wrote a number of plays, among them The Bird Lovers (Fugleelskerne, 1966), Semmelweis (1968) and Amputation (Amputasjon, 1970), a collaboration with Eugenio Barba and the Danish theatre ensemble Odin Teatret.

In 1967, he was convicted for publishing a novel deemed pornographic, Without a Stitch (Uten en tråd, 1966), which was confiscated and banned in Norway. The trial, however, made the book a huge success in foreign editions, and Bjørneboe's financial problems were (for a period) solved.

His last major work was the novel The Sharks (Haiene, 1974).

After having struggled with depression and alcoholism for a long time, he committed suicide by hanging on May 9, 1976.[2]

In his obituary in Aftenposten, Bjørneboe's life and legacy were described as follows:

"For 25 years Jens Bjørneboe was a center of unrest in Norwegian cultural life: Passionately concerned with contemporary problems in nearly all their aspects, controversial and with the courage to be so, with a conscious will to carry things to extremes. He was not to be pigeonholed. "

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

La Poudrière – Powderhouse – is a mental asylum for criminal minds… The story begins with an acid trip undertaken by the principal clinician and the caretaker…

In form and outline the objects were as usual, but their colors had an incomprehensible harmony and strength, with a clear, logical correspondence between them. It was like being inside a picture by one of the great impressionists whom this remarkable, brutal, swinish and wonderful land has fostered – this greedy, avaricious peasant nation of coarse exploiters, oppressors, and soldiers, of pimps, painters, and whores, saints and sodomites, but above all of painters. The colors filled me with a faint and peaceful sensuality; they ran through my body and surrounded me at the same time.

Now the former servant of justice and the narrator of Moment of Freedom is a janitor, factotum and patient in this macabre institution…

For a resident of such a distinguished and well-known madhouse as La Poudrière I must admit that I feel fine, and enjoy a bewildering degree of freedom of thought, expression and movement. At any rate greater than the stars’. And then there’s my own highly ambiguous position at the hospital. As caretaker and a kind of jack-of-all-trades (including that of observer) I have at my disposal one of the gardeners’ cottages…

He continues to compile his History of Bestiality… He contemplates the evil sides of the human history… He reflects on the nature of atrocity… He meets criminal occupiers…

My task on this syphilitic and cancer-ridden bomb crater of a planet is to simply and quietly remove the condoms from the park and clean up the madhouse – and then this eight-star idiot from Sing Sing comes along, yammering and wailing like a professional mourner over a corpse which in the first place he produced himself, and which in the second place is utterly and totally dead. I don’t give a single sou, not a used rubber, for that kind of murderer… Besides, as a general he favors capital punishment – at any rate for others, if they’ve done the same thing he did. On top of the whole dung heap he’s also started being a Christian. He thinks that rabbi Joshua died on the cross for Americans too.

He also delivers a gloomy lecture on the theme of witch trials to the staff and patients of the clinic…

We shall glance at the system of temporal courts, led in part by the same lawyers, scientists, and judges who so faithfully stood by the Church’s side through two hundred years of holy bloodbaths. And we shall simultaneously note that these two hundred years of witch trials lay not in the Middle Ages but in the Renaissance. The witch trials were the glorious introduction to our time, attended by a complete revolution in cosmography, by empirical science and by scientific heresy. And they blossomed right here in our beloved, beautiful Alsace. People painted the loveliest pictures and built the most splendid cathedrals while at the same time they incessantly roasted old women and small children alive.

Now there are no witches but witch hunt goes on… The Red Terror… Fascism… Holocaust… McCarthyism… The Cultural Revolution…
The narration is rich and generously fraught with metaphors and paradoxes…
Predictability… Order and disorder…

We know where a planet will be in twelve years, four months, and nine days. But we don’t know where a butterfly will have flown one minute hence.

System is a vehicle of order so it thoroughly destroys all the butterflies fluttering in its way.

[Lynne King · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again I would like to begin with the meaninglessness of outer space, the insane fire under us, and the deathly cold above us. On this green crust of vegetation, excrement, fertilization; life, there are still people who don’t let themselves be crushed by being physically torn to pieces, they are invincible. They sit in prisons all over the world, they’re abused and maimed by the vassals of the heads of state – today we know the details of the concrete methods all too well for me to need to mention them. We’re all a bit nervous here at La Poudrière.

I did indeed venture into uncharted territory with this book by an author who was unknown to me. I went purely on some excellent reviews and my own gut feeling, and soon found, quite frankly to my amazement, that this author had the gift of being able to combine his sensual and sensitive poetic naturalism with bestiality that was vile and evil. Personally the latter is not to my inclination as that veers towards other levels of consciousness but I thoroughly enjoy it here. And yet Bjørneboe has succeeded brilliantly with La Poudrière, an institution for the criminally insane (in Alsace, France) but with one added, extremely important difference – you could only go there if you had money and influence in your particular spheres in life. I also found the stories of the inmates gripping and riveting, but also horrifying at times.

Return to your primordial roots when the gene pool was first established billions of years ago. Is it true that scientists estimate this as being 13.7 billion years? My, it hardly seems worth thinking about.

Race with the wolves with this work and enjoy the thrill of the hunt and the capture, meet the witches and wizards in their thousands who lost their lives in the inquisition. But most of all meet the director, the chief physician, Professor Dr Lefèvre of this establishment, the very unusual Christine, the two hedgehogs (I really couldn’t understand their significance at all but there had to be a meaning for their presence surely?) and finally the person who holds everything together, the lynchpin, Jean the narrator (also known by other names depending upon who is talking to him) a groundskeeper, who lives in a small cottage in the hospital grounds and who is writing his monumental opus The History of Bestiality.

I also discovered unknown aspects of my character through reading this book. There are explicit sexual scenes that are exquisitely written but with gruesome butchery by artistic murderers and wrap this all up with this sublime prose and you have, as is to be expected, a superb tour de force.

This is actually the second novel in Bjorneboe's "History of Bestiality" trilogy but the translator stated in her introduction that she read this book first.

And what is the true meaning of “Le Poudrière”? Is it a tinder box or truly a powder keg that is going to explode at any moment? It is really all a question of personal interpretation but I do tend to go with the latter.

Oh to be able to write like that. I ruefully shake my head and think of those other excellent authors that I’ve met in my literary course with Goodreads this year. Christine Brooke-Rose, Rikki Ducornet, Mervyn Peake, Jack Kerouac, Jean Rhys, to name but a few. All different styles but I’ve learnt something through all of this in that I’m now fascinated with experimental fiction. Madness can prevail with thoughts but then don’t we all have a little madness within us, thrown in with our pursuit of love, friendship and that often elusive passion, be it from life or whatever you care to call it? One thing I know for sure though is that life on this planet is on the whole, a damned fine place but then who knows what our next life, if indeed there proves to be one, will have in store for us? It all adds to that magical quality and also that of the unknown…And that wonderful word: anticipation.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

At a lunatic asylum situated upon a thin crust of earth between wild raging magma below and the infinite clockwork idiocy of outerspace above, during the late-sixties/early-seventies, in the territory of Gaul, the narrator and a few criminal madmen lecture about humanity's history of atrocities, brutalities, and most interestingly, its executioners. Excellent essayism on cruelty and horror offset by tenderness for and appreciation of beautiful moments we spend alive eating, drinking, talking, tripping, communing with nature, cumming all over one another, sitting in an ice-cold brook in which we refrigerate our butter and wine. There's something black humorish about this second installment in "The History of Bestiality" trilogy, like an independent Woody Allen movie shot on Super 8 -- unlike the first installment (Moment of Freedom: The Heiligenberg Manuscript) it sometimes seems to want to veer toward straight-up comedy, what with every character essentially repeating the motif about the thin layer of crust (upon which we destroy each other) between raging fire and infinite idiot outerspace. Bjorneboe's pedantic side usually faces front, and he excels at pedantry, yet it also nevertheless can get a little slow, a little bit hit-over-the-headish (yeah, yeah, the Christian church killed several hundred million human beings, got it!), but when he describes his delight in the simple fact of existence upon the earth, he's at his best. Pretty good sex scenes, with a horny young lad at first and later with a hot young lady. Lots of semen spurted across a page or two -- surprised me! Really interesting exposition about executioners, particularly inept ones -- they're googleable, too. The lectures add a dimension that makes up for (kicks under the rug) a not even half-assedly explored murder mystery regarding a hanged Hungarian. Of note, there's a touchingly tender relation between the narrator and a hedgehog (symbol of the potential meaninglessness of existence).

Here's a representative passage:

"About this moon we know everything. About the whole machinery, the whole insane, mechanical appartus, the solar system, Andromeda's nebula, ellipses and periods, motions, metals. We sit here on our feeble-minded, explosive planet and sail around in an utterly meaningless, monomaniacal bedlam of a watchmaker's shop. About other solar systems we know everything, but to go up ot the ambassador's wife who howls her wolf-howls and clings to the barred window, go up to the little black-slayer of an American general -- and you'll see that we don't know anything about them.

We know everything about the cosmos, about outer space, but we don't know anything at all about Fontaine, our little Belgian sex murderer.

After this conquest, this assault on the dead, frozen space -- after this there must follow a conquest of something else.

We've conquered outer space, but not our neighbor.

And we must conquer him now.

For either it is totally insane and meaningless -- and ought to go under -- or it has a meaning and ought to survive."

Here's the sort of passage that excels:

"This time I was sufficiently refreshed: now I felt night only as warm and soft and living around me, confortably lukewarm, full of life, full of mating and lewdness, full of odors and of the faint night sounds which tell of the life which exists on this accursed, leprous, spiritually gonorrheal globe which is our little green home and which I love so indescribably, so full of lust, so full of thought, so full of cruelty, and so full of beauty. The sky was black as tar and the stars shone insanely, thick as thick, everywhere, all over the whole sky. In the enormous leafy treetops in the park there was a rustle of a faint, faint breeze, all too subtle to be called wind."

Will finish vol 3 The Silence soon enough . . .

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

" Books—certain books—have a strange ability to go underground, to disappear, become invisible, and to grow during the interval in which they're wholly or partially forgotten. Their effect will come slowly, their force grows as during a long and secret process of fermentation. A book which disappeared in silence and oblivion the day after it was published can return—make its comeback—twenty, fifty or a hundred years later, with a power and a youthfulness, a freshness and a vitality which is overwhelming, and which can set its mark on the thought of decades.
The reason for this resides in the fact that true literature has a far greater degree of reality-content than the current pamphlet or reportage can have. Such works are born with difficultly and grow slowly. A leopard has a longer gestation period and slower growth than a domestic cat. And a lion needs more time than a leopard. "

- from Jens' essay "Literature and Reality"

Complete Review's review here http://www.complete-review.com/review...

I so far seem to have been unsuccessful in my attempts to get more people reading Bjorneboe, a writer who is, in my opinion, one of the greatest of the post-war European authors.

So I will try a different tack.

Hey! This book has sex! And lots of violence! Like, serious graphic stuff about torture and executions. Plus it is totes hilares. And is set in an insane asylum, like American Horror Story was. Did I mention that there is sex in it? Plus, as I can guarantee that none of your friends will have read it, you can look super cool at dinner parties by referencing it and sneering at people when they look confused! Oh and there are also witches in it too, like the new series of American Horror Story, and we all know witches are the new vampires….

How's that?


I do not understand his words, though know they are on Freedom and Anarchy, but love his body language and his voice.

http://youtu.be/36VT6BfKIVU

[iva° · Rating 4 out of 5]

drugi dio trilogije "povijest bestijalnosti" bjørneboe je istkao oko zločina Crkve, u istom tonu kao i prvi dio ("trenutak slobode"), a i čita se s jednakim osjećajem besmislenosti ljudskih ponašanja, izbora, odluka i djelovanja. u osvrtu na "trenutak slobode" pisala sam ponešto o bjørneboevom privatnom životu, a nakon čitanja drugog djela, još je jasniji njegov izbor za maknuti se s ovoga svijeta. sjajan autor koji nam u lice baca sve opačine koje, kao ljudi, činimo jedni drugima (i nastavljamo živjeti, kao rasa), s podsmijehom na licu, podjednako okrenut zlu, teroru i mržnji, koliko i ljepoti, ljubavi i nježnosti. mučno je to čitati... ostavlja okus gorčine i tuge i nerazumijevanja zašto smo takvi kakvi jesmo - usprkos tome što imamo izbora.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

[from Moment of Freedom; Book 1 in the History of Bestiality]

This book is another fictional narrative.

From Heiligenberg in the Alpes the narrator, whose name is I. or J. or even G., moved to an asylum for the criminal insane in Southern France. It is also possible that this narrator is not the same as the one from Moment of Freedom. Who can say for sure? In his new refuge he meets an illustrious cast of characters, one more insane than the other. I.'s observations on the patients – murders and rapists for the most part –, the drug addicted chief physician, and the anarchist orderly from Russia make up half of the book. The other half are lectures held in front of the patients, dealing with the long and ongoing history of witch-hunt and all kinds of torture, and death penalty and executions in general over the centuries, the latter one being held by one who knows his stuff, being an executioner himself. This is some gruesome stuff, and the way the narrator/author/Bjørneboe tells it, I think, is the only way you can tell it without becoming insane or depressive or both and that is in a most satirical way. I can only guess how long it took the author to collect all these bizarre facts mentioned in the lectures, and what kind of thoughts were going around in his head. And I can easily see how dealing with this subject matter can lead to some serious mental disturbance.

Jens Bjørneboe once said Write as if each word can be used against you. Obviously he has done exactly this in the second book of the History of Bestialities. But I can only use his words in favor for him. When it comes to death penalty he kicks at an open door. Once, only once, I have wavered in my belief. That was when Anders Breivik (accidentally a Norwegian himself) butchered the seventy-seven people on this small island. For a short while I thought that maybe, in this special case, the world would be better off without Breivik.



When the BIG FEAR (as the narrator calls it) hits again, when paranoia strikes the powerful people of this world, the clerics and preachers, the judges and executioners, then the witch-hunt will once more flare up. Then heads will be rolling again and the mob will roar in excitement, while the unwelcome and misunderstood, the clueless and the innocent will loose their right to live. I don't thing the meek will inherit anything, the meek are the first to go. Actually, I'm only waiting for the nod of disaster any day. But until then I think I have still time to read more of this fascinating author.

[to The Silence; Book 3 in the History of Bestiality]


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/7694808...

Start with a mind-altering trip on LSD and then morph into a sermon on the ills of Christianity regarding witchcraft, Jews, negroes, and the persecution and torture of them all, the affects of evil in the world and how it is justly depicted in our modern art whereas the angelic can only be guessed at artistically and you have yourself one hell of a lot to think about here. And all of it coming from a madhouse by either a very sane person or one who is also mad. Better than any recent movie I can think of.

The fact that this book was written in 1969 and could have been written yesterday is astounding to me. There was a point last night I had to stop reading as the blood-letting (historical in fact) was overwhelming to me. We just do not know the trouble we humans have caused in the world, and the narrator says it is only going to get worse as we move out in our exploration and colonizing of space.

It was the beginning of the winter of 2014 when my wife and I began watching the brilliant Showtime series titled The Tudors. Among the many talented actors in the made-for-television event were Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Henry Cavill, not to mention the recently deceased Peter O'Toole. The show followed the reign of England's King Henry the Eighth. There were numerous changes in his kingdom throughout his many years in power but, not counting his six wives, the many gruesome public executions struck the loudest chord for me. The torture chambers extracting confessions leading to wrongful judgments in complicity, and the many ways to carry out these punishments, left little to the imagination. It was awful subjecting ourselves to this violence on our television, but it still felt as if it were a fiction, a movie, and not really true. Upon reading this second book in the trilogy of The History of Bestiality I came across many of these same exact instances and historical facts I learned from the TV. One of the executions on TV was of the King's cook who poisoned the Bishop (who, if memory serves, was actually an enemy). The cook was slowly lowered alive, spread-eagled and face up, into a large vat of boiling oil. So preposterous was this execution that I really did not believe they actually did this sort of thing. But then I read the same accounting in this very book! The actions of the king and others I was reading about throughout our gruesomely violent history of crimes against humanity became all too real for me and I had to put the book down for a spell. It was just too much to bear. Prior to this horrid feeling I was perfectly comfortable in my chair watching, I thought, an interesting, though gruesome, fiction. But to learn of all these terrible injustices brought down upon innocent peoples throughout the world and the history of humanity I was aghast at my own delusions and denials I had safely hidden my better self in. As charming as Jonathan Rhys Meyers was in his portrayal of King Henry the Eighth, my wife and I were both still horrified by his dozen or more tortures and public executions which included even one with a severely drunken headsman mutilating the neck, shoulders, and head of one of his sorry victims (actually the ill-favored King's right-hand man at the time) before an attendant took over for the oft-aimed inebriated axman to finish and successfully complete the awful deed. To make matters even worse I read this very morning in the novel that King Henry the Eighth actually ordered from the throne more than 70,000 executions during his reign on this bit of green crust called England.

I truly think this novel would make a great film. With the right actors it would be one of the richest, most rewarding films ever. Even the grounds and gardens of the bughouse are wonderful. The narrator's home. All the abundant nature. Including a hedgehog that made countless appearances. I even did a little bit of research today and learned that in 2006, McDonald's changed the design of their McFlurry containers to be more hedgehog-friendly. Previously, hedgehogs would get their heads stuck in the container as they tried to lick the remaining food from inside the cup. Then, being unable to get out, they would starve to death. And then what about all the other maladjusted, but brilliant and extremely bent personalities in this book? Wonderful wonderful. And that is how I am reading it. As a film. I think the Coen brothers would do it justice. Even Quentin Tarantino might make something out of it worth watching. And either one of these film-making teams could do the screenwriting as well.

Jens Bjørneboe produces numerous questions throughout his fictions. There are never any answers. He reports historical truth. His characters drink the wine and find pleasure where and when they can. There is little hope in the world of Jens Bjørneboe, and all our wishing in one hand produces nothing but shit in the other. He continually presents in his work a position of dissent, and a stance he demonstrates as historically heretical and generally punished by torture and execution. The violence and injustices can be tiresome at times, and in fact might wear a person down. These are novels most readers would not delve into and probably explains their commercial scarcity. These same careful and casual readers would rather sing carols and hear praises made to some holy name. Sort of helps me to understand better now the popularity of the world's current Catholic Pope. Very little of this reading was easy, but most of it was good. And if given enough time I would do it again, just like we humans do over and over in a world that hasn't really changed.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

More morbid than Moment of Freedom --yet brighter, too.

[Daria Ravlic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I ovo je roman (kao i Tišina) o okrutnosti ljudskog roda. Pripovjedač živi u zatvorskoj psihijatrijskoj bolnici u koju su smješteni silovatelji i ubojice, poticajno mjesto za promišljanje i pripovijedanje o crkvenim progonima vještica. Fascinantna je činjenica da su se kroz 200 godina na tisuće žena (uglavnom žena) palile na lomači po cijeloj Europi, dok se u isto vrijeme događala renesansa. U isto vrijeme se ponovno budila znanost i umjetnost, dok su se iza ugla ljudi drobili i pekli. Dok je Michelangelo radio Davida u mramoru iz Carrare, ljude su na trgovima javno vješali, sakatili i dekapitirali. Dobar dio teksta u knjizi posvećen je zanimanju krvnika, o kojemu vjerojatno nitko i nikada ne razmišlja.
Na kraju romana autor postavlja pitanje što je čovjek, i zašto se tako odnosimo jedni prema drugima? Zašto 10 milijuna žrtava kršćanske Crkve uime Kristove ljubavi? Odgoora naravno nema. Izvrsna knjiga.

[Jelena Djunisic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastčno !!!!!

[Stian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the central thesis in this book, and indeed probably in all of Bjørneboe's writing, is in this little part of Lacroix's talk:

I wish only to underscore that we live here, on a relatively infinitely thin crust of green and moist soil, filled with peach, nettles, animals and people -- we live on this thin crust -- with liquid, boiling minerals just underneath us with the dead, the ice cold, lifeless, and in all ways pointless and idiotic universe above us. The fire below us, and death's cold above us.

And on this beauitful, fertile, moist, green crust, which is given us to live on, we have slaughtered, massacred, and tortured each other for as long as history can tell.

Why in God's name do we hate each other so terribly?

[Lazar Trajković · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nastavlja da razapinje mit o evropskoj civilizovanosti. Većim delom je zapravo esej, ali ima trenuci kad izbije prava umetnička vrednost. Će vidimo kakav je kraj triologije.

[Selma · Rating 4 out of 5]

død, sex, fordervelse og sannhet

[Hux · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powderhouse (part 2 of Jens Bjørneboe's History of Bestiality trilogy) is possibly even better than part 1 (Moment of Freedom). It deals with the same bleak worldview but while Moment of Freedom felt like a collection of memories and opinions with no real narrative framework, Powderhouse was far more coherent and self-contained. The narrator is now working in an asylum for the criminally insane in France as an odd-job man and, as a result, the book has a more conventional narrative which allows for other characters and themes to be brought together in a way that was lacking in Moment of Freedom. This book felt like a book, but still provided Bjørneboe an opportunity to explore his ideas regarding the evil inherent to humanity.

One of the plot points is that the chief physician encourages lectures as a kind of therapy. This allows for the narrator to give a lecture about the history of witchcraft and the various inhuman methods with which society dispatched of the accused. This is then followed by a lecture from one of the doctors about the history of executions and the executioners themselves, a portion of the book that was thoroughly gripping in its macabre detail. The fact that execution was often a family business, the various methods used, and the countless downsides to each individual technique. How long it takes to die, what is considered humane, and the incident where a doctor twice shouted the name of a guillotined man at his severed head and the eyes looked at him.

The book had a strange, almost post-apocalyptic feel to it, as it all takes place of the grounds of the asylum and the narrator often sits outside his home on those grounds drinking wine, giving milk to a hedgehog, or having sex with the young nurse Christine.

I would be more inclined to recommend this book to people than Moment of Freedom as it has a more digestible narrative but still affords Bjørneboe an opportunity to examine how deeply unpleasant the world is.

[Simen Gunerius Jørgensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sommeren er forbi.

Bind 2 i "Bestialitetens historie"
Henrettelsesmetoder, hekseprosesser fra middelalderen og ren og skjær ondskap. Bjørneboe var jo heller ikke overfladisk og happy-go-lucky av det lyse sind.

Det nedestående er ikke mine ord.
Jeg er nemlig optimist og vet det går bra til sist.

Men, "Forskning har vist, at det kan hjælpe mennesker, hvis de forestiller sig, at tingene går galt, nedsætter deres forventninger og foretager såkaldte negative visualiseringer. Jeg aspirerer til at leve som pessimist og synes, at det er både sejere og dybere med den negative livsholdning."

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 2 out of 5]

After "Moment of Freedom: The Heiligenberg Manuscript" this is quite a disappointment. It is definitely more conventional, it reads easier, but aside from relating some interesting information (via lectures given by the characters), it is far too happy. I didn't expect that from Bjørneboe and I REFUSE TO TOLERATE IT.

[Magnus Rygge · Rating 2 out of 5]

"For Gud er vi alle amerikanere!"

Kanskje er jeg for svak til sinns for denne, men jeg syns mangelen på handling og de eeeendeløse foredragene med skildringer av de jævligste brutaliteter i verdenshistorien blir litt slitsomt og irriterende i lengden. Selv om den har noen geniale deler og en del fiffige og kreative betraktninger om mye, krevde det litt for mye tålmodighet å komme seg gjennom denne.

[Christian Etwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

En nøye gjennomgang av vår historiske elendighet fortsetter! Denne gangen satt til et skjønt sinnsykehus i Frankrike – igjen omringet til enhver tid av glassklare karakterer og mangfoldige flasker vin.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

part 2 of bjørneboe'a history of bestiality trilogy. hard-to-find, harder to put down.

[Åsa]

Hvis det etter Frihetens øyeblikk skulle være noen tvil om bakgrunnen for triloginavnet Bestialitetens historie er det i hvert fall oppklart etter denne!

[HGS · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not on par with the first volume of the trilogy; the more interesting subtext and commentary on human society (and the narrators introspection) has been reduced. In its place, more morbid, gruesome details.

It feels like Bjørneboe is growing more brooding and dark. Not in a good way.

Not a bad read, just, not as good.

[Terje Tofteberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fengende, men grusom. På den ene siden en detaljert og grotesk beskrivelse av menneskers ondskap gjennom hekseprosesser og henrettelser i slike detaljer at man blir fysisk sliten. Det hele blir fortalt av en sanselig jeg-person som nyter landskapet, selskapet av et pinnsvin om natten, vin, ost og sykepleiere.

[Trond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dette var noko anna! Ramma rundt forteljingane og tankene var mykje tydelegare enn i Frihetens øyeblikk, som gjorde det lettare å få med seg kva som vart sagt.

Flott veksling mellom ro, spesielle personar og eit piggsvin i galehuset, og alvorlege forteljingar frå talarstolen. Kan tilrådast!

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

HOUSEKEEPING 2025:

The second installment of the crucial trilogy by the Norwegian that made me fall in love with Norwegian writers, full stop. Everything he wrote is worth your time (that's not to says that all Jens are created equal).

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5 - This flat out didn't work for me. A material step down from Moment of Freedom.

[EliG · Rating 4 out of 5]

Underfundig.

[trygg hamar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grusom

[Lucas Latorre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mye flotte skildringer og interessante refleksjoner og tankerekker rundt samfunnets institusjoner, selvfølgelig ispedd en grei dose absurd.

[Sindre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Endeløse rants om menneskets grusomheter, fyll og sex... og/men skrevet av en ganske dugelig forfatter!

[EskilSkj · Rating 3 out of 5]

Skulle ønske jeg gikk på Steinerskolen på femtitallet og hadde Jens som lærer.