The suggestively named Lee, as he’s called throughout, is a solitary Chinese émigré math professor at the end of an undistinguished Midwestern university career. He remains bitter after two very different failed marriages, despite his love for Esther, his globe-trotting grown daughter from the first marriage.

A Person of Interest starts with a bomb that explodes in the office of a very popular math professor. The professor, Hendley, occupied the office next to Professor Lee. Shortly after the bombing, a jealous, resentful Lee felt himself briefly thinking Oh, good. As a did-he or didn’t-he investigation concerning Lee, the novel’s person of interest, unfolds, Lee’s carefully ordered existence unravels.

Increasingly, chunks of his painful past are forced into the light. While a cagily sympathetic FBI man named Jim Morrison and Lee’s former colleague Fasano – who links the bombings to several other technologists – play well-turned supporting roles, Choi’s reflections from Lee’s gruffly brittle point of view are as intricate and penetrating as the shifting intrigue surrounding the bomb. The result is a magisterial meditation on appearance and misunderstanding as it plays out for Lee as spouse, colleague, exile and citizen.

Rumors spreading at the university among students and colleagues along with broadcasts by the media turn more and more ugly, and Lee soon finds himself suspected by everybody and rapidly becoming totally isolated and alienated. Personal flaws and minor errors that would have been inconsequential in a normal situation suddenly become ominous signs subject to interpretation and reinterpretation. Professor Lee’s life is turned upside down, and his chances of returning to a normal daily life dwindle by the hour. Along with this process goes ever increasing self-consciousness and self-loathing on the part of Lee.

Choi tells a merciless tale of Professor Lee, with a sardonic analysis of his anxiety, his shame, and his compulsive jealousy. It is a wonderful, deeply penetrating analysis that turns Lee into a living, real, frail human being you can almost touch.
Choi tells this complicated story with nuance, psychological acuity and pitch-perfect writing. In doing this, in A Person of Interest she also tells a larger story of paranoia in the age of terror and the smaller story of the cost of failed dreams and the damage we do to one another in the name of love.

Choi shows a remarkable talent and remains, more than ever, a writer of interest. A highly recommended book!

Links to Susan Choi’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

Upon this petty and what he views as a vulgar concepcion of religion, the young Norwegian pastor declares war to the death. Better, according to Brand, to live in utter impiety, better to live like a libertine than to accommodate oneself to the practice of such a false and lying life. “Either everything or nothing.”

Thus Henrik Ibsen lets Brand struggle with and live out the dilemmas laid out by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in Either/Or (see Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (Penguin Classics)). And to some extent Brand may be viewed as Ibsen’s reply to, and partly also refutation of, Kierkegaard.

If there is a God, one should dedicate oneself to him completely, without dissimulation and without defections. In conformance to this ambitious ideal of his, Brand refuses to leave his parish although the climate threatens the life of his wife and child and later they die; and he also denies the sacrament to his aged dying mother, because she will not consent to give away all her riches. Contrary to Zarathustra, who from the mountain descends into the valley to be among men, Brand painfully climbs to the summit in order to be nearer to his God. But an avanche descends upon him. Dying Brand asks of the Eternal if the littlie grain of human will has any weight in the scale of redemption.

In the midst of the crash of the avalanche the answer comes to him: “God is love!” With such an answer the tragic Norwegian arrives at a more humane and generous conclusion than the philosopher Kierkegaard, whose life has some points of similarity with that of the cleric Brand. This is a wonderful play and a great, thought-provoking reading.

See also our Henrik Ibsen pages at ScandinavianBooks.com!

Order Henrik Ibsen’s Brand Henric Ibsen Newly Translated from the Norwegian By Michael Meyer from amazon US, or from amazon UK: Brand: Play (Penguin Classics)

About Henrik Ibsen, see: George Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism (Dover Books on Literature and Drama), James McFarlane’s The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen (Cambridge Companions to Literature), and Toril Moi’s excellent Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

Paperback Trade Fiction, Published: August 10, 2008

1. THE SHACK, by William P. Young. A man whose daughter was abducted is invited to an isolated shack, apparently by God.

2. WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, by Sara Gruen. A young man — and an elephant — save a Depression-era circus.

3. THE KITE RUNNER, by Khaled Hosseini. An Afghan-American returns to Kabul to learn how a childhood friend has fared under the Taliban.

4. BAREFOOT, by Elin Hilderbrand. Three women burdened by various problems (work, love, health) spend a transformative summer together on Nantucket.

5. THE ALCHEMIST, by Paulo Coelho. A Spanish shepherd boy travels to Egypt in search of treasure.

6. IN THE WOODS, by Tana French. An Irish detective investigating the murder of a 12-year-old girl returns to the woods where he experienced a terrible ordeal during his own childhood.

7. NINETEEN MINUTES, by Jodi Picoult. The aftermath of a high school shooting reveals the fault lines in a small New Hampshire town.

8. THE ROAD, by Cormac McCarthy. A father and son travel in post-apocalypse America.

9. LOVING FRANK, by Nancy Horan. A story of the romance between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney, and the scandal that followed when they left behind spouses and children.

10. THE FRIDAY NIGHT KNITTING CLUB, by Kate Jacobs.  A group of women meet weekly at a New York City yarn shop.

11. MY SISTER’S KEEPER, by Jodi Picoult. A girl sues her parents after learning they want her to donate a kidney to her sibling.

12. THE LAST SUMMER (OF YOU AND ME), by Ann Brashares.  The bond between two sisters is tested by a romance with an old friend.

13. THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES, by Sue Monk Kidd. In South Carolina in 1964, a teenage girl tries to discover the secret to her mother’s past.

14. SECOND CHANCE, by Jane Green.A group of 30-something friends reconsider their lives after one of their number is killed in a terrorist attack.

15. THE MEMORY KEEPER’S DAUGHTER, by Kim Edwards. A doctor’s decision to secretly send his newborn daughter, who has Down syndrome, to an institution haunts everyone involved.

16. OUT STEALING HORSES, by Per Petterson.  In a remote cabin, a Norwegian man circles around his memories of the past.

17. THOSE WHO SAVE US, by Jenna Blum.  A professor of German history investigates what really went on in her mother’s life in Germany during World War II.

18. ON CHESIL BEACH, by Ian McEwan. A wedding night goes terribly wrong.

19. THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION, by Michael Chabon. A detective investigates a murder in a Jewish settlement in Alaska.

20. TRUE TO THE GAME III, by Teri Woods. Gangsters, crooked cops and a vicious killer pursue Gena in this conclusion to the True to the Game trilogy.

21. THE GATHERING, by Anne Enright

22. THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH, by Ken Follett

23. MIDDLESEX, by Jeffrey Eugenides

24. THE GATECRASHER, by Madeleine Wickham

25. GHOSTWALK, by Rebecca Stott

26. THE GRAVEDIGGER’S DAUGHTER, by Joyce Carol Oates

27. ISLAND OF LOST GIRLS, by Jennifer McMahon

28. SOMETHING BORROWED, by Emily Giffin

29. AWAY, by Amy Bloom

30. REPLAY, by Ken Grimwood

31. BUDDHA, by Deepak Chopra

32. THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL, by Philippa Gregory

33. THE BOLEYN INHERITANCE, by Philippa Gregory

34. RANT, by Chuck Palahniuk

35. THE MAYTREES, by Annie Dillard

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

When Frithjof embarks on an affair with another woman, Ida Elisabeth chooses to live alone with her children. She provides for herself by becoming a seamstress, and her new life as a working woman entails wholly new qualities.

In a number of ways, this novel deals with conflicts and tensions that parallel aspects of Sigrid Undset’s own life. Ida Elisabeth is one of Undset’s great contemporary novels about women’s conditions and the difficult relationship between the sexes.

Bestill Ida Elisabeth på norsk fra Bokkilden!

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

The Redbreast has two parallel story lines, one starting during World War II, with Norwegians fighting for the Germans in Russia. The other story line is present, and takes place among neo-Nazis in Oslo One of them is on trial for a vicious, unprovoked attack with a baseball bat on a Vietnamese restaurant owner, but is freed on a technicality.

Inspector Harry Hole, alone again after having caused an embarrassment in the line of duty, has been promoted to inspector and is lumbered with surveillance duties. He is assigned the task of monitoring neo-Nazi activities; a fairly mundane task until a report of a rare and unusual gun being fired sparks his interest. A rare, high-caliber rifle, favored by assassins, has been smuggled into the country.

Then a former soldier is found with his throat cut. Harry suspects a connection. In an investigation that takes him to South Africa and Vienna, Harry finds himself perpetually one step behind the killer. And more and more the two story lines are drawn together – what is happening today has roots in the old, almost forgotten history of World War II in Norway.

The Redbreast in some way resembles Henning Mankell’s early Wallander novel, The White Lioness. Both feature leading men who are cops, both have a South African connection, and both involve racism, assassination, and weapons that are the tools of professional assassins.

The Redbreast is well written, very exciting, and has humor as well. Jon Nesbo is able to make us understand some of the troubling aspects of Nazism in Norway, and does a great job of weaving together past and present. Nesbo’s hero, Harry Hole, is very real and an interesting character. The Redbreast is an entertaining but an also illuminating crime book from a very talented author.

For more reviews of Jo Nesbo’s books, see ScandinavianBooks Jo Nesbo-page!

– Peter

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

The Norwegian author Linn Karin Beate Ullmann (born 1966) is the daughter of Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and Swedish movie director Ingmar Bergman. She is a graduate of New York University, where she studied English literature and also began work on her Ph.D. She returned to Norway in 1990 to pursue a career in journalism.

Her first novel, Before You Sleep, was published in 1998. Her second novel, Stella Descending (2001), received glowing reviews. Her third novel, Grace, was published in 2002 and won the prominent literary award “The reader’s prize” in Norway and was named one of the ten best novels of that year by the prestigious newspaper “Weekendavisen” in Denmark.

In 2007, Grace was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the UK. All of Linn Ullmann’s books are reviewed at Leserglede.

Ullmann’s fourth novel, A Blessed Child, was published in the fall of 2005, and was shortlisted for the Brage Price, one of Norway’s most prestigious literary awards.

The story in Before You Sleep is complicated. It is told, over time, from the mouth of one of the key characters in the book, Karin. It is about relations inside and out of the family, about motherhood, marriage, emotions, love, and even infidelity.

Before You Sleep is an exceptional debut book. It is very well worth reading. Linn Ullman tells her story in a way that makes the characters come alive, and make you sympathize with their strange actions and understand their emotions.

Praise for Before You Sleep:

“Of this autumns literary output, novelist Linn Ullmann is the wickedest and wittiest, and because she writes with a silent sincerity and merges all this with wit, intelligence and a generous picture of human beings, the novel is a real pleasure to read.” CECILIE WINGER, FÆDRELANDSVENNEN (Norway)

“Before You Sleep is infernally well written. The debutante, Linn Ullmann, has, from page one, found her own form and language, consistent in style until the end.”

GT (Sweden)

– Peter

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

Giants of the Earth (published 1925) is the first book in a trilogy of books about the Norwegian settlement of the Dakota Territory, written by the Norwegian-American author O. E. Rolvaag. Rolvaag (or Rølvaag) is a Norwegian who emigrated to the United States in 1896, and eventually became a professor at St. Olaf’s College in Minnesota. Giants in the Earth was originally written in Norwegian. The two other books in the trilogy are Peder Victorious and Their Fathers’ God.

Giants in the Earth is a beautifully written book about the experiences of the early Norwegians who settled in the vast prairie of the Dakota Territory during the latter half of the Nineteenth century. This book is truly an American classic, especially for those of Norwegian or Scandinavian descent or those who’ve lived in the Great Plains. It appears to be a realistic description of the life of the early settlers. It conveys their sense of isolation and desolation, as well as of the hardships inherent in pioneering so far West with so little resources. Giants in the Earth is a tale of hard work, ingenuity, and discipline. Their resilience in the face of relentless hardship, adversity, and deprivation is stunning, as is their belief in a better life.

Rolvaag’s characters are unbelievably rich and have considerable psychological depth. The primary characters are Beret, the troubled homesteader’s wife, Pers Hansa, her resourceful and cunning husband, their neighbor Han Olsa and his able and gentle wife Sorrine. Per Hansa is the focal figure of this group.

Rolvaag brilliantly describes both the psychological effect of early prairie life and the Norwegian immigrant culture of the time. Per Hansa is a man with tons of energy and enthusiasm, who thinks outside the box, and refuses to give in. He is a natural leader and a symbol of the pioneering spirit. It is hard not to love Per Hansa and the settlers even as they deal with squatters, locusts, sod houses, and the endless winter of the northern Plains.

Those who have read and enjoyed the quartet of books written by Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg, about the early Swedish settlers of Minnesota, will enjoy this book. And, indeed, all those who like lyrically written historical fiction. Giants in the Earth really ought to be read by all those in Scandinavia who have family members that immigrated to America. Few other books come even close to this one in expressing the experiences of those that departed. In Giants in the Earth, pioneer life is interpreted with compassion, understanding and consummate art – it is truly an epic of pioneering and a very good read.

– Peter

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

This was The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground, originally published in Leipzig in Latin in 1741. The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground is a classic in speculative fiction and was the first fully realized novel set underground in a hollow earth.

It is easy to think that science fiction is a genre of very recent origins, but that is not correct. Just to name a few, in classical literature we have such works as Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (The Dream, 1634), Cyrano de Bergerac’s Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1656), Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752), and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), which may all be labeled as science fiction or fantasy. And, of course, Holberg’s The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground, which was clearly inspired by Gulliver’s Travels.

The story is set, according to the book, in the Norwegian harbor town Bergen in 1664, after Klim returns from the University in Copenhagen, where he has studied philosophy and theology and graduated magna cum laude. His curiosity drives him to investigate a strange cave hole on the mountain above the town, which sends out regular gusts of warm air. He ends up falling down the hole, and after a while he finds himself floating in free space.

[He had] “had fallen through thick darkness and unremitting night for close upon fifteen minutes, so far as I in my confusion could count it, when I finally noticed a glimmer of light, as of twilight, and straight thereafter beheld a clean and shining sky. I thought, in my simplemindedness, that I had, either repelled by the subterranean airs or by some other counterblast of wind, been blown back up again, and that the cavern, by giving up its breath to me, had given me back to the Earth. However, as both the Sun and the sky and the stars that I saw were much smaller than those we generally see, I could not recognize them at all. I concluded, therefore, that this new construction of the heavens must be the result of mental confusion, my rattled brain’s imagination, or that I must be dead, and transported to the blessed abodes.”

Fantastic adventures at the center of the earth await the penniless Norwegian student after he plunges into a bottomless hole in a cave. Niels Klim discovers worlds within our own—exotic civilizations and fabulous creatures scattered across the underside of the earth’s crust and, at the earth’s center, a small, inhabited planet orbiting around a miniature sun. In an epic journey, Klim visits countries led by sentient and contemplative trees, a kingdom of intelligent apes preoccupied with fashion and change, a land whose inhabitants don’t speak out of their mouths, neighboring countries of birds locked in an eternal war, and a land where string basses talk musically to one another. Brave, inquisitive, and greedy, Klim faces many challenges, the greatest of which are his own temptations.

This book is as entertaining today as it must have been when it was published. The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground is beautifully written, well thought out, and provides numerous astounding tales and reflections about the nature of societies and social organization.

– Peter

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

This is a grand work. The anarchic Bjorneboe despised repression and repressive institutions, as well as authority. This trilogy is a broadly founded literary attack on the multiple foundations of repressive though. It is intended as a journey from chaos to cosmos, from bestiality to humanity.

Moment of Freedom marked a new departure in Bjorneboe’s literary production. It is generally considered to be Bjorneboe’s masterpiece. As before, the spectre of Nazism, which had haunted him since he first read Wolfgang Langhoff’s book on the Oranienburg concentration camp at the age of fifteen, looms large; the themes of injustice, authoritarianism, and the violence of power are pervasive.

Bjorneboe felt a need to place the mystery of human evil in a broader historical and philosophical context, as well as to make a more personal statement of a vision which sees beyond evil to the fundamental goodness and beauty of creation.

When published in 1966, Moment of Freedom was widely acclaimed in Europe as a masterpiece. It has long been out of print, but is now available in an updated translation.

In its apocalyptic view of mankind and in its haunting, devastating portrayal of justice, Moment of Freedom reminds one of the Book of Revelation and Kafka’s The Trial. Living high in the Alps in a German principality called Heiligenberg, our narrator tells us that he’s dutifully fulfilling his obligations as a Servant of Justice and acting as a daily witness to injustice masquerading as a court of law. One day in the courtroom he notices that the judge is much too engrossed in looking at something concealed in his folder to pay attention to the proceedings. The something turns out to be some pornographic photographs showing various other pillars of the town engaged in a variety of sexual activities with minors.

The incident propels him on a mental journey back through his life: dreams and hallucinations, black-humor fantasies and suicidal drinking binges; the Roman catacombs, warm summer nights in Brooklyn; brothels in Stockholm; his childhood in Norway, and wanderings in Germany and Italy. But aside from the court records he has been keeping his own long and detailed account of man’s cruelty to man in a massive twelve-volume study he calls his History of Bestiality. Acknowledging his Germanic past, the narrator realizes that all his attempts to perceive order in life lead only to his acceptance of the chaos of life.

Praise for Bjorneboe:
Bjørneboe … is a discovery, and what a great one! Not since the early Faulkner have I read such a powerful novel. I say Faulkner, but he does not have that writer’s confusion. Surely he will find his place in the world’s literature sooner or later….
       Bjørneboe is a writer’s writer. The book, which explores the dark night of the soul, probably will offend a good many readers. But as Flannery O’Connor, the Georgia writer, once said when confronted with the fact of “violence” in her novels: “You sometimes have to shout to be heard”….
       Here is a story-teller who writes with artistic mastership and should be carefully read by everyone who cares where we are going and where we have been.
            — Elise Sanguinetti, Anniston (Ala) Star, 27 July 1975

Many books have been published which try to tackle the ugly aspects of humanity at war with itself. Moment of Freedom is such a novel, less than a novel and more than one, written superbly….
—Boris Nelson, Toledo Blade, 6 July 1975

This is a monumental book, and an effort to write something that matters by one of Norway’s greatest post-WWII authors. He succeeded in what he set out to do. Only very rarely will you encounter a novel that you feel really has added something of the uttermost importance to your whole way of looking at yourself and the world. This is one of those books!

– Peter

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

Siri Hustvedt is an American, but with Norwegian parents. She lives in New York, and is married to, and have a daughter with, the author Paul Auster. She has a Ph.D. in literature from Columbia University (1986).

“What I Loved” is a juxtaposition of two stories in one book, about two New York families that come face to face with tragedy, and how they deal with the crisis.It tells these stories in a New York late 70’s and 80’s art world context. The story is rich, and gradually becomes a psychological thriller. It is based on excellent characterizations and the dynamics of the book is character-driven. You feel you know the characters. Their reactions to the tragedy they are forced to handle are remarkably well described. Hustvedt must have lived their tragedy and felt their pain while writing the book.

The language is beautiful and precise. The book is full of deep descriptions that are demanding to follow at times, but also very rewarding.

Reading it, I thought the beginning was a little slow. I didn’t understand where things were heading at all. I found the descriptions of art installations and paintings somewhat long and convoluted. But then, gradually, the book took hold of me. Suddenly I found I had a really hard time putting it down.

To me this is a great – even wonderful – book. But I think it is a book you either love or strongly dislike. There is no middle ground with this book – it is too demanding for any middle ground to exist. It is highly recommended – but be prepared. You will cry! You will find it tough!

Praise for the book: “This book knocked my socks off — literally and figuratively. It is a story to crawl into bed with, not because it is pleasant, or happy, or overly touching, but because it is a read that plays on your heart while appealing to your intellect.”
– E. A Grosvenor (Washington, DC)

– Peter

Also by Siri Hustvedt: A Plea for Eros: Essays, and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl: A Novel.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.