The private lives of postwar Norwegians
Erling Vik is a Norwegian writer and an alcoholic. The love of his life is Felicia, whom he first met in 1934. He took her virginity when she was 17, and he 34. This created a lifelong bond between them, though they often went their separate ways in life. He married another woman, was involved with many others, and had an illegitimate daughter with a prostitute. Felicia, likewise, had relationships with other men before marrying Jan and settling down at his farm named Venhaug. Now Felicia is in her early forties, and Erling in his late fifties. He is a frequent visitor to Venhaug, where he and Felicia carry on their sporadic love affair, with the approval of Jan. In addition, Felicia has essentially adopted Erling’s daughter Julie, who also resides at Venhaug. When the Nazis invaded Norway, Erling, Felicia, and Jan all had roles in the resistance movement. They all took a part in the “liquidation” (assassination) of Nazi collaborators and spent time in exile in Sweden. Now, years after the war, Felicia (with Jan’s blessing) encourages Erling to move to Venhaug. Erling, however, doesn’t know if he’s ready to settle down to such a permanent arrangement and give up his personal freedom.
It takes an awfully long time to figure all of that out. Sandemose doesn’t present the narrative in chronological order. Thus, the lives of these characters are a puzzle that the reader has to piece together. I see no good reason for this strategy, other than it’s the kind of thing that literary critics like and expect from modernist writers. It certainly doesn’t do the reader any favors, and seems a pretentious gimmick that actually hampers one’s understanding of the characters.
As one can tell from the synopsis above, this book is not about a werewolf. The werewolf here is metaphorical, much like the wolf of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. The way Sandemose haphazardly throws around the word “werewolf” in this novel results in a very ambiguous metaphor indeed. He seems to use the word as a euphemism for the personal demons that people face (particularly males), such as alcohol, insanity, a death wish, or a violent streak. At one point he seems to be using the word to describe the Nazis or those who sympathize with them.
At first I was drawn into the lives of these characters, but I really found myself losing interest at about the halfway point. Unlike the other books in the Nordic Translation Series, which are rather short, this novel is a long haul. One wishes there were more about the Nazi occupation and the characters’ resistance activities. Most of the book is concerned with the characters’ sex lives, but not in a graphic way, which might have been more interesting. Sandemose goes off into unnecessary digressions involving minor characters and treads water with dream sequences, strange pointless anecdotes, and quotations of poetry that don’t contribute much to the plot. The last ten percent of the book is actually very good, but one wishes the reader didn’t have to wade through so much needless excess to get there. Despite being published in 1958, Werewolf reads as if it might have been written within the past few years. One the one hand, it feels very contemporary in its open-minded liberalism, but on the other hand, it displays a propensity for self-indulgence common to many of today’s literary figures.
If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment