The Exception

I bought The Exception on a whim after seeing a positive review of it in the New Yorker this past summer, and it turned out to be possibly the best contemporary novel I've read in the last couple of years; I read the last 200 pp in a day. The prose is clean, spare, taut, the characters well drawn. The use of the Danish Center for Information on Genocide is fantastic--the novel is presented as a thriller, and it is in a way, but really it's a close examination of office politics through a masterful use of multiple points of view. I realize that description doesn't sound all that thrilling in itself, and I actually wasn't sure Jungersen would be able to adequately connect the meditations on the horrors of genocide (represented in the book through a number of DCIG articles, which appear in their entirety) with the petty gossip, backbiting, and bullying that occurs in a contained social space like an office, but the results are positively chilling and thoroughly thought-provoking. With the threatening e-mails, it's technically a whodunit, but really, whodunit is not the point. Really, it's about the darkest corners of human nature, and it's unflinching. Highly recommended.

This novel embeds a story about a painful and challenging small office environment inside a larger meditation the nature of evil and human cruelty. The office -- the fictional Denmark International Genocide Center -- provides both the setting for the office plot and the mechanism for explorations of organized violence in Nazi Germany and Yugoslavia, among other locales. Somewhat reminiscent of Skvorecky's now out-of-print, "Miss Silver's Past" and extensively researched -- the author's working knowledge of the literature is impressive -- the novel explores the burden of evil's memory, the relationship between members of a group and "the other", and how the former can mobilize against the latter. Iben and Marlene, two old friends from college, share a tight personal relationship in the small 5-person office, a relationship that has effectively pushed librarian Anne-Lise to the boundaries, both literally and figuratively. Meanwhile, Camilla, the office secretary, is still struggling to leave behind a painful past in which she was bullied in school and abused by her war criminal boyfriend. Iben, who serves as the primary vehicle for the author's meditations on violence and evil, recently returned from Africa where she was briefly held hostage by a disenfranchised minority group. The plot begins when Iben and Marlene each receive a threatening email in which the anonymous sender attacks them for their hypocrisy and self-importance, and warns that their days are numbered. Both come to believe that the emails originated from a wanted Serbian war criminal, but when charges against him are dropped, their suspicions turn to their colleagues, thus initiating a silent psychological assault on Anne-Lise, who each (perhaps guiltily) believes has reason to hate them. The book combines painful descriptions of the intra-office relationships between the women -- at times I felt a layer of dread descend over me -- with a sharp and disturbing assessment of how people behave in dark times. Drawing in particular on Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101"Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Jungersen reiterates the importance of peer relationships in perpetuating inhumanity and raises the particularly challenging question of "what would you do in this situation." Ultimately, the novel picks up speed as it goes, moving from philosophy to thriller and culminating in a startling twist at the end. At times I could not put it down, and at others I dreaded picking it up again. Christian Jungersen has written an extraordinarily complex and troubling novel that deserves a broad readership.

This is an extraordinary new novel, just published in the United States, which kept me engrossed all last Labor Day weekend almost without stopping. It's a long book but it reads like a very short one. It's a thriller that's grounded in all-too-tangible reality. It's smart without pretentiousness. It's very, very dark; but I believe it has an almost subterranean Christian theme, which I will get to after I describe the novel. "Don't they ever think about anything except killing each other?" It's a bold author who announces his subject in the very first line of his novel. The line is spoken by a kidnapped foreign-aid worker caught in the middle of an African civil war, but we learn to our horror it's also a delineation of the entire human condition. The novel is set in the fictional Danish Center for Information on Genocide (DGIC), a small foundation in Copenhagen dedicated to the collection of documents and testimony about international mass-murder. The employees are Iben and Malene, two women in their late 20's who are researchers and writers; Anne-Lise, the librarian, who is about ten years older; Camilla, the secretary who is the same age as Anne-Lise; and Paul, their boss. The cast is mostly made of women, and Jungersen makes an audacious attempt to enter the psychology of a female-dominated office (he says he ran the novel past his mostly female writing group). The ingredients of conflict quickly become apparent. These, nice, progressive, enlightened women begin indulging in intimidation, gossip, dirty tricks, bullying, ruthless competition, and soon enough, bloodshed against each other. It begins when Iben and Malene receive e-mailed, anonymous death threats, possibly from Mirko Zigic, a notorious, still-at-large Serbian war criminal. But the possibility emerges that they were sent by someone inside the office. And for what they think are the best of reasons Iben and Malene begin to make Anne-Lise's life a living hell. Jungersen adroitly connects the small-scale subjects of workplace bullying and the so-called "mean girl" phenomenon with ruminations about the large-scale subjects of the psychology and practice of genocide. Jungersen does this by including several articles written by Iben about notorious 20th-century atrocities like the Holocaust, the post-war terrors inflicted on the German populations of Eastern Europe (which are still little understood), Stalin's purges, and of course the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990's, which plays a prominent part in the story. It becomes blazingly obvious to us that the women are participating in the same behaviors which contributed to the genocides. The very dark irony is, of course, they of all people should know better. But each of them have secrets, and private shame. One comes to believe that we are all "rats, without free will, who will tear each other to pieces if trapped in a cage together." (That character later turns out to be a nearly psychotic murderer, which cou

Its been a while since i've read a book that's kept me up, and kept me so interested till the end. I do hope the authors' first book gets translated soon, so i can read it. Thoroughly enjoyable, makes you think, and wonder about human nature.I can't recommend this book enough.

This taut and compelling novel is set in an office, The Danish Center for Genocide Information in Copenhagen, a seemingly homogenous, if small, group of females, their boss, Paul, frequently absent at important meetings to promote the interests of the Center. Upon further observation, certain rifts become clear, three of the women forming a subgroup to keep the fourth from joining their intimate inner circle. Iben and Malene, the youngest and most attractive of the women, are friends outside the office, their relationship defined as much by their outside activities as through office camaraderie. Camilla, Paul's secretary, keeps mostly to herself, but gravitates toward the security of the younger employees. It is the new librarian, Anne-Lise, who is the object of their petty rejection. Anne-Lise is purposely kept off balance, out of the loop of conventional discourse, the library door kept closed to protect Camilla from drafts. There is no apparent reason for Anne-Lise's isolation from the others, but after Iben and Malene receive threatening emails on their office computers, it becomes clear that the poor treatment of the librarian has existed for some time. The threats are taken seriously because of the nature of the Center's activities, archiving publications exposing the hidden motivations of various societies in service to genocide throughout history (elimination of the Jews, Darfur and related atrocities). Serbian war criminal Mirko Sigic is an obvious suspect, but his current whereabouts remains unknown. When the police fail to determine the source of the emails, the office settles into an uneasy coexistence, relations breaking down further when Anne-Lise reacts to an increasingly untenable situation. Before long, a whispering campaign begins, Anne-Lise the brunt of her coworkers' doubts- could Anne-Lise be the source of the threats? In particular, Iben and Malene are hostile adversaries in a sly campaign to drive the librarian from her position. For her part, Anne-Lise is inclined to doubt her own sanity, tormented by the women's escalating cruelties, examining herself for the same terrible motives that cause innocent people to become complicit in genocide: "We all have it in us to be murderers and executioners and war criminals." As the fragile balance of the office slowly unravels, each woman is laid bare, her inner demons exposed: "It is as if the normal rules no longer apply." The juxtaposition of office politics and the Center's purpose is a brilliant maneuver. The actions of the four protagonists and their rationalizations for aberrant behavior, reveals the larger issue writ small, the elementary level of basic human behavior: "Victimizing others is part of human nature." The result is shocking, the occasional insertion of treatises emphasizing the insidious nature of evil. The four separate voices document the obvious, what each person may do in the interest of survival. There are no easy answers here, no deft closure to the th