Moment of Freedom is the first book in the Bjorneboe trilogy known as History of Bestiality. The two other books are Powderhouse and The Silence.

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