The Seducer

"Is this the most crucial story in Jonas Wergeland's life?" Like Karosawa's 'Rashomon,' the novel tells stories, one after the other, in the form of short chapters that fit together (the whole mosaic makes sense) and don't fit together (each glows on its own). The stories are spiced with a luscious sexuality ("The one thing the women who made love to Jonas had in common was that they all instinctively sat astride him."). Good sex seems to flow to him, like the prom king you hated in high school, without much effort. And each sexual event permeates his being with a new sense of who he is. The sustenance of book, though, is the story of Norway, what it is now, a nation of comfortable (indeed VERY comfortable) risk-averse, xenophobic social democrats watching TV, smug at times, breaking into a sweat not very often (perhaps only during Nordic races). "When do we see who we are?", asks the narrator. The author brilliantly, and often comically, keeps the reader engaged in cliff-hanger moments that rivet attention: Jonas as a child is trapped inside a snow fort and left for dead by his cousin, and the next chapter begins with Jonas as a teenager talking about Dostoyevsky's description of sable eyebrows and the Russian ideal of beauty. Disconnected? Yes. Totally effective in creating a can't-put-it-down novel? Definitely! The erudition of the author is impressive, his cliff-hanger style engaging, and his comments on present day Norway hilarious and thought-provoking. He is so in love with details his protagonist vomits when he sees his hometown at altitude and can't make out the beloved familiar texture of it. I loved reading this book, beginning it as a 'have to read it for book club' task and then finding I couldn't get enough.

Andrew Linkner has, I think, largely missed the point of the "sex scenes"'s predictability or episodic nature. Yes, they proceed in similar fashion; yes, the women featured in them appear and then disappear from the narrative. But Kjærstad is very clear in why this should be so: the short chapters comprising the novel are intended to evoke the structure of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights as well as the epic poem; the sexual episodes echo a more compact narrative related to the protagonist (Jonas) as a youth by his eccentric aunt; they provide a contrast to the two females/women whom the protagonist truly loves, who stay with us throughout the entire novel; and they are some of the "parts" into which Jonas's life is split by his prism, which guides him from his childhood love to his adult love, from his childhood aimlessness to his fame-making television series (23 episodes, mirroring his 23 sexual experiences). It is ironic that Andrew's criticism makes so much of the episodes' depicting sexuality in a juvenile fashion, considering that they occur primarily during Jonas's teenage and early adult years. The criticism is ironic, too, in that it suggests a moralistic discomfort with sexuality lampooned by Kjærstad in the form of Jonas's cousin Veronika. Veronika struggles to reduce a complex, incomprehensibly beautiful world into simplistic, flat dichotomies that only nauseate Jonas. That anyone reading this novel could come away from it thinking it to be sex-obsessed nauseates me, a bit. It is true that Jonas's appeal -- to his sexual partners, to the nation that adores him, to the narrator -- is mysterious and his motivations unexplained. But again these are part of the point in a novel that makes no firm commitment to causality or temporality. And, indeed, we are constantly asked, How do the pieces of a life fit together? How can we describe our lives as anything other than a series of disconnected stories (which is how the novel is structured)? One of Jonas's mentors reveals the infinite possibility of being human -- how do you bring that all to a point? And to be frustrated by the omniscient narrator's unresolved identity! Kjærstad is toying with us here -- the narrator tells us directly that there are things being related to us the narrator would have no way of knowing. Let it be! This is an exquisitely structured novel, full of beautiful moments, philosophical moments, moments that crack your head open and make you look at the world a different way. The chapters are very short, which makes the prose, which can be long-winded at times, much more bearable -- though by the end I scarcely noticed the long sentences any more. Take your time with this novel, let it seep into your brain, and the world around you will take on a deeper texture. It will make you a more patient person.

I just want to set the record straight :: This book is NOT only about sex. Was the negative reviewer expecting a steamy romance novel? This book is about philosophy, and memory, and socialism, and our individual and collective unconsciousness(es). The writer's got style to spare so that EVERY page is a joy to read and can be savored again and again. Yes, it IS postmodern. To paraphrase Madonna: We are living in the postmodern world, and I'm a postmodern girl. This is definitely a desert island book...and the the trilogy would be a luxury and a blessing.

Constructed as the biography of Jonas Wergeland, Norway's very popular TV documentary producer, the novel begins with a strange Publisher's Forward that explains that the biographer remains anonymous. Written in the first person by an author who knows more about Wergeland than Wergeland himself, the enigmatic author tells an enigmatic story. Non-linear in form, the biographer relates the story telling to a bicycle wheel, a story told as a "spinning narrative in which I keep picking spokes at random, which is something which I can do because I know that all of the spokes run from the outer rim to the centre and that chronology is not the same as causality." Cause and effect magically become effect generating its own cause. The story begins with Wergeland coming home to find his wife, Margrete, murdered. But this is most certainly not a murder mystery. Instead, it's a story about storytelling itself, the possibilities of life, and the reader`s own imagination. Wergeland is the both subject and of the story and the teller to Norwegians of stories about world-famous Norwegians. He is the seducer of women and of a nation, and I, for one, have also been seduced. Like a rug described in the book, The Seducer presents a world of infinite possibility.