This is a portrait of a society in which there is very, very little joy-or rather, a society in which pleasure, or even simply survival, always comes at the expense of someone else.įor each of the narrators the gap between how they feel and how they appear is chasm-wide. The blood seeps between her fingers, red blood on her slim white hand. And Mona puts a hand to her mouth and cries softly. That feeling of front teeth giving slightly, wonderful feeling…. Paranoid, drunk, and hyper-alert to humiliation, Tom Roger hits his girlfriend when she laughs during sex, and habitually at other times too:įeel my knuckles connecting with her front teeth. We encounter them all in the middle of domestic arguments that Tiller anatomizes in painful detail, from the microaggressions of a sneer or a jibe to the macro of physical violence. Embattled, lonely, misunderstood, each of the narrators struggles with being in the world.
These interior monologues are almost uniformly bleak, and very often delusional.Īrvid is in a hospice with terminal cancer, having lost his faith and any friends he once had Silje’s ambitions have contracted to enduring a miserable relationship with her husband, a pedantic shopkeeper Ole is caught in the middle of a grim battle between his mother and his wife Tom Roger is out of prison, trying and failing to behave well.
( Aftermath nods explicitly to Knut Hamsun’s spirit-of-the-age August trilogy as one model for this series.) Each of the long epistles to the past is embedded within a first-person account of the narrator’s life in the summer of 2006, when David’s request appears in the papers. And we have nine competing versions of the social history of rural Norway from the 1980s to the present. Here we meet Marius, the disaffected son of mega-rich fish farmers Susanne, David’s left-wing feminist friend from university and his former lover and finally we hear from David himself-now a struggling author living in Trondheim, in a tension-filled arrangement with his moneyed partner, Ingrid, Ingrid’s teenage daughter, and the couple’s baby boy.Īltogether then we have nine versions of David’s life, including his own in early middle age. In 2014 Tiller published the third volume, Aftermath, and Haveland’s translation has just appeared. David will escape from this world, but everyone else is trapped by their circumstances. This is a story of lawless children, living in an area that would officially be called “economically depressed” but which they think of as the arse-end of nowhere by their early teens their pastimes are stealing stuff and dodging arrest, not always successfully. But as yet we don’t know what the frontstory is.Įncircling 2: Origins (2010, translation 2017) went further back, to David’s early childhood in a family of “hick farmers” on the island of Otterøya, with testimonies from Ole, with whom David once played at Indian camps (“the brush shelters, the totem pole with its intricately carved bark, the smoking campfire with the ring of stones around it…and in it a bunch of small boys sitting, standing and walking around with quivers on their backs and bows slung across their chests”) and who is now struggling to make his living from farming Tom Roger, another childhood friend, who describes himself as a “tinker” and Paula, a woman who was working in the maternity ward at the time of David’s birth and who now lives in an old people’s home in Namsos. It’s a backstory of clever, damaged kids, struggling with parents who don’t understand them and whom they, in turn, fail to understand, experimenting with alcohol, sex, and “art” as ways of finding “meaning”-as clever kids do. We read the testimonies of Jon, David’s high school friend and first lover Arvid, David’s stepfather and a former pastor, with whom he lived from the ages of about twelve to eighteen and Silje, David’s teenage girlfriend after he rejects Jon. The first volume of the trilogy, also called Encircling (published in 2007 and translated into English in 2015 by Barbara Haveland), focused on David’s late-teenage years in the small fishing and sawmill town of Namsos in Trøndelag County, north of Trondheim. In effect he asks them to write him an identity. He puts an ad in the local paper asking for people who knew him when he was young to write to him and fill him in on his early years. David, a thirty-something resident of Trondheim, Norway, has lost his memory. Carl Frode Tiller, Trondheim, Norway, 2017Ĭarl Frode Tiller’s Encircling trilogy starts from an unlikely premise.