Stig Saeterbakken took his own life in 2012 and
this novel deals with suicide, through the eyes of Karl Meyer, a dentist, who
is struggling to come to terms with his teenage son’s suicide. The book opens
with a powerful set of vignettes, with Karl attempting to deal with his grief,
make sense of his wife’s grief (who has just put an axe through the television)
and wondering how he can reconnect with his daughter.
Our novel then tracks back, through a long series
of short memories, recalling the events that Karl shared with his son
Ole-Jacob, and all the actions that may have led to this tragic suicide.
The thought of losing her left me cold and made me
feel faint. I didn’t understand why it had to be this way, why one life was so
completely destructive in relation to the other. I wanted to live together with
Eva, and I wanted to drown together with Mona. So why couldn’t it be done? Was
it just down to all the ideas we’d pledged allegiance to, keeping these states
mutually exclusive? But what were our real thoughts, aside from what we’d been
instructed to think? Why should you have to stop living just because you were
drowning?
As a novel this appears to be broken into two
distinct sections – the lead up to Ole-Jacob’s death and the events that may
have pushed him to take his own life; and then the post death grieving and
attempts at reconciling with oneself that final act.
The first section reminded me (slightly) of Karl
Ove Knausgaard, in that the everyday was explored in some detail (nowhere near
the minute detail we see in “My Struggle”) as Karl recalls his passions, his
neglect, his attempts at “fatherhood”, a complex pile of short vignettes that
make up this man’s past.
I thought about my father. What would he have made
of it all? And what about him, when he was alive? Did he ever want more than he
had, more than he allowed himself to ask for? Was he really, as his manner
suggested, so reconciled with everything that was his? So uninterested in
everything that was not? Or was it simply convention, his generation’s penchant
for reserve, the way they would confuse taciturnity with masculinity, that had prevented
him from expressing the desire for anything more?
The second section, where Karl leaves his family
for a second time, to reconcile with himself the horrors of his son’s death,
takes us to a shady world of dream like sequences, changes of character where
Karl no longer acts as he would have in the earlier section, visits to horror
movies and apocalyptic plays and finally to a house of horror where anybody can
confront all of their fears.
Yet I had a feeling of security which rendered me
unafraid, now that I was finally standing there. All the scares, they were only
there as a barrier, an ordeal you had to endure, an obstacle you had to
overcome, in order to get to what really lay in store for you, and which was,
as the dream at the Hotel Lucia had convinced me, the fulfilment of all
desires, all dreams, all needs. Those who had gone mad from being in the house,
they were the only ones who’d given up in the face of all its ordeals. While
those who’d come out happy, they were the ones who’d endured them, and defeated
them, and in the end had been rewarded, satisfied down to the very depths of
their innermost desires.
A novel that is a meditation on death, that takes
us through the journey of attempting to make sense of suicide, of a father
grieving and looking at ways of healing, this book is does not cover easy
subject matter. Very much like Knausgaard’s “My Struggle”’s this is a deeply
personal book of a writer struggling with his own existence.
I put my hands in my lap and sat staring, as if it
were important not to take my eyes off them, even for a moment. My feet were
freezing. I thought about the muddy ground we’d been standing in and imagined I
could hear a sucking every time I moved my toes. Some speeches were made. But nothing
that was said had anything to do with my son, none of the character sketches
were accurate, it was like they were talking about someone else, or like they
weren’t talking about anyone in particular, but merely singling out the
characteristics of an average eighteen year old, keeping themselves to the
fringes of what anyone would assume about boys of that age, without daring to
venture in past the periphery, where he was really to be found. Everyone spoke
in a subdued voice; some whispered. The whole gathering proceeded in that same
drone, a monotonous, lifeless stream of words around the tables, as if volume
was a luxury it would be tactless to indulge in.
Personally I found the earlier section more
gripping as the character of Karl is slowly revealed and as we learn his fears,
misgivings and motivations. Through simple, short sections that portray a
man struggling with his own existence we learn all about his fears. The second
section, where he confronts such, to me was a little metaphysical and
introducing characters such as a man who is on a well-balanced alcohol only
diet, although intriguing seemed a little broad for the subject matter at hand.
The inclusion of photos of a simple house that you could probably find anywhere
in Croatia was a bit strange and I’m not 100% convinced of the ending. The
translation was probably a little shabby too, there were a couple of sentences
that I read over a number of times before giving up because they simply didn’t
make sense – this could be the writer not the translation, however I’ll go with
the translator (apologies if it’s not their work!)
Overall another great book from an interesting list
of translated works, one that approaches the dark, often ignored, subject of
suicide as the main theme. Such a pity our author didn’t personally confront
the subject matter he so expertly wrote upon – or maybe he did!
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