Grace: A Novel [Paperback]

Linn Ullmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 3, 2006

Johan has sometimes been fortunate but never particularly successful: he lost his job for a breach of professional integrity, and he and his son haven’t spoken in eight years. His greatest happiness–his grace–is his competent, confident wife Mai, who loves him unreservedly. Now, with six months to live, and with Mai’s help, he intends to die well. But as he broods on the pleasures and regrets of his life, and death slowly envelops him, Johan’s resolution begins to waver. Morally intricate and full of sly humor, Grace is a touching and unexpectedly dramatic exploration of the territory between life and death.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This slim, grim novel—Ullmann's third—tells a chilly tale charged with the moral ambiguity surrounding euthanasia. Terminal illness stories are often exploited for emotional payoffs, but Ullmann (Stella Descending; Before You Sleep) skirts the sap factor by casting a cold, hard light on her characters. The story begins in a doctor's office, where Johan Sletten, retired journalist and paragon of mediocrity, learns he has six months to live. As his health deteriorates, Johan muses on the major events in his life. His first marriage to Alice was almost cartoonishly unhappy, and resulted in a son he barely tolerates. Two years after Alice is run over by a car, when Johan is 47, he marries Mai, a 30-year-old pediatrician. Despite her brisk manner and penchant for unnecessary lies, she represents everything that is good in Johan's life. Through all of this, one detects the chilly side of Milan Kundera's influence; like him, Ullmann is a sharp chronicler of life's horrible ironies. The trouble is that no larger picture, no wealth of incident or even variety of secondary characters galvanizes this bedroom drama. Worse, the book's unidentified first-person narrator remains shrouded in opaque omniscience and half-amused aphorisms. Ullmann's exclusive commitment to exposing life's banality, combined with her condescending tone, lock the reader out of a story that was forbidding to begin with.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Relieved--in fact, pleased--by the accidental death of his irritating first wife, horselike Alice, the mother of their adult son, Andreas, Johan is remarried to the significantly younger Mai, the love of his life and beautiful to him, though colleagues on the newspaper for which he is literary reviewer think she is "a dog." But she is his grace and comfort, even after he is fired for going to press with a review plagiarized from a tiny German journal. Well, he had become supererogatory after 40 years, so his leave-taking is reframed as early retirement. Now, five years later and facing his own death, Johan recalls his mother's refusal to be at his dying father's side. Surely Mai, his virtual physician in her steadfast love, won't waver when he asks her to be his angel of death by enabling a graceful demise? Wrenching in its straight-ahead simplicity, lucid in Haveland's smooth, elegant translation, Ullmann's short novel resonates with a reader's inner, subliminal fears of deterioration in the face of death. Wonderful and chilling. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (January 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400078024
• ISBN-13: 978-1400078028
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.4 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,619,904 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cast a cold eye on death, January 25, 2005

By 

Reader 100 - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grace (Hardcover)

This short novel hums with honesty as it charts the life of a terminal patient, Johan Sletten, and his circle, but GRACE never stoops to cheap sentiment. I would like to unpack another review, which contends that Linn Ullmann has "an exclusive commitment to exposing life's banality" and a "condescending tone" that locks the reader out of the story. Taking the word at face value, of course life is banal -- what else can it be? We all have in common that we will die; there is nothing original there. Yet Ullmann emphatically finds meaning in life, in simple things like the dark strands of hair of Sletten's second wife, or her dutiful tending to a boil on his face. The human connections are true and moving, and we are only "locked out" of this story if we are expecting to be covered in sentimental goop and "feelings" a la the Oprah show; thankfully, Ullmann does not oblige. A condescending tone? Ullmann is clear-eyed, grown-up, and has no illusions about human virtuousness. If that's condescending, then Joseph Conrad was condescending. GRACE is a beautiful little book.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredibly dark, chilling novel..., February 28, 2005

By 

CoffeeGurl - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Grace (Hardcover)

I love the way Linn Ullmann has portrayed the married life in a darker, more surreal manner in Before You Sleep and Stella Descending. She does not sugarcoat the events when it is time to show the darker side of characters in love. Ullmann takes things to unflinching heights with Grace. This novel centers on a man's terminal illness with cold, unsentimental language that is both thought provoking and disturbing. Jonah, a journalist, learns he has six months left to live. As he waits around for death to befall him, he regales the reader with stories about his former relationships and the things he had done up to the moment that the doctor gives him the terrible news.

There is no way to summarize the plot of this novel. Linn Ullmann readers know that her novels are complex -- they jump from one different scene to another, with a lot of magic realism into the mix. The most fascinating part of Grace is the author's ability to turn what could have been a sad story into something disarming. The characters are all dark and unpleasant -- and the language of the novel makes them all the darker. The ending is one of the most disturbing ones I have read. I finished this book last night and I am still spooked over some of the scenes and passages. This is one incredible novel. Linn Ullmann has proven once again that she is a talented Scandinavian literary novelist. I recommend all of her novels, including this new piece of work.

4.0 out of 5 stars When you can't respect the life you've lived ...., November 2, 2011

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Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Grace: A Novel (Paperback)

... how can you hope to die with grace? That's the dilemma of Johan Sletten, a man in his 60s who has been diagnosed with an incurable disease, presumably cancer, and warned that he will die a nasty death within six months. Johan's life, as he painfully reviews it, has been largely a failure -- a mediocre career as a journalist, capped by a scandal that forced him into retirement, a miserable first marriage, a loveless fatherhood and a son he's ashamed of. The only grace he can claim for his life is the love of his second wife Mai, whom he literally calls his "grace". Now that he must live through the horror of dying, his most agonizing fear is the disgrace of losing control, of dying disgustingly, as his own father had died. Mai is a doctor, and it's with Mai whom Johan pleads for help in his assertion of a graceful death.

This is not a first person tale; supposedly Johan is a 'friend' of the narrator, but the course of his death and the scenes from his memory are all told from Johan's viewpoint. I think that's one of the limiting factors of this novella; the 'words' are not really Johan's, and Johan lies on his hospital bed just beyond our psychological credence. Mai is an unknown hovering presence, an object of Johan's mental perception, but perhaps it was the author's intention to imply that "another person", even one's sole beloved object, can never be depended upon to be 'known'.

One of Johan's happier memories is of his childhood, of picking wild strawberries with his mother, yet even that memory stirs a fear of abandonment and isolation in him. Wild Strawberries? Haven't we encountered such a scene in another work of art from Scandinavia? Another tale of the approaching death of an old man? Linn Ullmann is the daughter of actress Liv Ullmann and film-maker Ingmar Bergmann, whose film "Wild Strawberries" is among the most poignant portrayals of aging and death ever produced. I can't deny that I sought, bought, and read this novella because of my interest in the artistry of the author's parents. And I have to wonder, reluctantly, whether Linn Ullmann's parentage didn't play a role in the success of her writing career. Would this novel have convinced a publisher to risk money on releasing it if the author's name had been Jana Jonsen? Well, it's not a bad novella ... a little thin at times and awfully doleful. Honestly, it reads like a scenario for a film (and guess who the director might be) in which the characters would develop curves - dimensions - and evoke more empathy simply by being flesh rather than print-face. The director would allow the actors and actresses to improvise their lines, to speak from their own inhabitation of their roles. That was Bergmann's method in his later films. Appreciating this novella requires just that sort of collaboration between the author and the reader.