Customer Reviews

The Quiet Girl

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

The new novel by the author of SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW is demanding, elliptical, tangential, confusing, and not always grounded in reality. In other words, it's difficult to read. Set in Copenhagen in the near future, after a natural disaster has destroyed much of the city, it concerns Kasper Krone, a 42-year-old circus clown/violinist/psychic healer/gambling addict/con artist/womanizer/tax dodger/Bach fanatic (I'm not making this up) with a rare form of ESP: he can "hear" the natural "music" that emanates from everyone and everything (I'm not making this up, either). He is particularly good at psychic healing, and his gift works best on children. One child in particular--a little girl who shares his powers of ESP, who is being held against her will by a secret government organization that wants to use her abilities for sinister purposes. She gets a message to Kasper, and he decides to locate her and rescue her from the bad guys using all of his talents (listed above), with the help of his dying father, some weird circus colleagues, and at least three angry ex-girlfriends. Meanwhile, some *other* sinister people are trying to deport him or imprison him, apparently for unpaid taxes. Did I mention the group of kids straight out of VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED who can manipulate the time/space continuum? Well, he has to rescue them, too....

As you can see, the plot is convoluted, and Hoeg's writing style is not always easy to follow, even in Nadia Christensen's (presumably) faithful translation from Danish. And Kasper Krone is, by any definition, a creep and a loser. But--like Smilla before him--he's oddly fascinating, and his story is full of surprises. I stayed with this offbeat novel long after I would normally have given up in despair, and I'm glad I did. It's not as enjoyable as SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW (which is why I gave it 4 stars instead of 5), but it's definitely worth a look. If you're in the mood for a bizarre, maddening, challenging, exciting suspense story unlike anything else on the market, try it.

Peter Høeg's previous novel, SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW, is on my top ten list of all time favorite novels. THE QUIET GIRL won't be, not because of the plot but because of the English language. SMILLA was translated by Tiina Nunnally for the US market and GIRL by Nadia Christensen. SMILLA'S US translation turned the unknown Høeg into an international best-seller and won Nunnally the top prize given by American translators, a prize not given every year. I happened on a copy of the UK translation of SMILLA in London a few years ago and read it to compare to Nunnally's. Nunnally's English was more fluid, less awkward and beautifully poetic in places, that all-too-rare synchronicity of author and translator. Logic would have dictated that Nunnally should have translated GIRL but Høeg, who does not speak English well, had not liked Nunnally's translation so another translator was chosen. A large mistake, I feel, for the same problem of language that is awkward, flat or imprecise that marked the UK edition of SMILLA afflicts GIRL. An author is always at the mercy of a translator; it's too bad that Høeg didn't appreciate the "mercy" Nunnally showed SMILLA.

Peter Hoeg's first novel in ten years takes the reader on a trip through an almost psychedelic world of circus clowns, children with mystical abilities, powerful nuns, evil financiers, mysterious security agencies, and bizarre foundations. Kasper Krone, a circus clown, has discovered that "SheAlmighty has tuned each person in a musical key," and he is able to hear the music that SheAlmighty has created for each person. By tapping into the music of people's psyches, he can understand their moods and thoughts. Often the music he hears emanating from those around him is that of Bach, the ebb and flow of a person's inner spirit paralleling the changing moods of specific Bach masterpieces.

Complex and sometimes mystifying, The Quiet Girl builds its non-linear "story" through impressionistic scenes, presented seemingly at random from the past, present, future, and even the imagination. It is up to the reader to create a narrative from scenes-out-of-sequence as the thinly drawn characters overlap and additional information is revealed, an often frustrating effort.

Kasper is being investigated for tax evasion and is about to be deported from Denmark to Spain. As he deals with governmental officials from Department H and other mysterious departments, people from the circus who may or may not want to help him, and the mysterious Rabia Institute, a convent of Praying Sisters, he, like the reader, tries to make sense of the world around him. When he sees a small girl, KlaraMaria, with her "family," she claims, almost telepathically, that she has been kidnapped and wants Kasper to help her. Eventually, he learns that the nuns from the Rabia Institute have been protecting a group of children, including KlaraMaria, believing that "Some children are born with a gift for coming close to God faster than others." All are possessed of mystic gifts, and a group of evil men, wanting to use these children for their own unstated purposes, have kidnapped six of them from around the world. The nuns seek Kasper's help.

As he searches for the missing children, Kasper encounters mortal dangers. He does not know whom he can trust, and neither does the reader. A large cast of characters, none of whom are fully developed, keeps the mystery high but the reader's ability to identify with Kasper low, and when the grand finale finally occurs, and the loose ends get tied up, the reader may feel a sense of letdown by the coincidences. Hoeg's exploration of the science of sound as the key to understanding man's connections to the universe shows us a reality that is often violent and discordant. Love is fragile and fraught with peril, and the answers to life's biggest questions are often tantalizingly out of reach. Still, man must soldier on, trusting that SheAlmighty has a grander plan, a greater symphony underlying our individual fates. n Mary Whipple

The Woman and the Ape
Borderliners: A Novel
The History of Danish Dreams
Smilla's Sense of Snow

Take a map at 1:25 scale of human experience. Place the point of your compass on the Circus and draw a circle with a 3-mile radius. Now find Bach and draw another circle of the same radius. Now find the city of Copenhagen and its environs; locate the pivot arm on its historic center heavily enough to make it drop 10 feet and let the water in. Draw the next circle. Continue with the science of acoustics, with hydrology and city sewer systems, with insurance and real estate, with the Russian Orthodox Church. Overlay a map of literary experience on the same scale, and draw a small circle around Sherlock Holmes's Moriarty and a big one around all the stories in which the hero wants to protect the weak and ends up getting beaten to within an inch of his life but keeps going. Smilla's Sense of Snow, for example, which fits nicely also over the map of Copenhagen.

At this point, you might as well toss the maps and read Peter Hoeg's The Quiet Girl instead, which takes place where all these circles overlap.

As a thriller, it is an odd one. I guessed a couple of main plot points long before they were revealed at the end, but the revelation still left me gasping. No, no, not possible--this did not make any sense at all. I had to start rereading the book and sure enough the plot is all there, more than there. There is a huge amount of sleight-of-hand in the book, so you follow one ball and think you know where it's going but in fact you get it mixed up with several others. I guess in a sense it is two books, the one you read the first time and the one you read the second time. Maybe another the third time--I haven't gotten that far. The first time, it was a plunge into a different version of the world.

Apparently Hoeg incorporates some of the teachings of a Danish New Agey writer/philosopher named Jes Bertelsen, but with big, significant changes that naturalize them, and with a compassion that keeps the action on the level of comedy, with all the normal, untranscended human pain that implies. The book is very funny.


Whether you like this book or not may depend on whether you would like to have Harpo Marx sit on your lap--or you would like to be Harp Marx thinking about sitting on a woman's lap.

The hero, Kasper Krone, is a great artist. He is a world-famous clown, recognized in the streets, a man who makes two thousand people at a time feel he loves each of them personally. He improvises sweet talk, blackmail, or physical force to fit any situation. He is a good enough violinist to record commercial CDs. He is a great poker player, until one night when he is in his early 40s, when he abruptly loses track of how to win. He loves cars and taxis, good food and champagne, beautiful women. He can on the other hand live for days, evidently, on Armagnac and espresso, with no possession of value except the pen with which he signs autographs.

Kasper has the ability to hear sounds with extreme clarity, so that he has a side business as an acoustics consultant. This ability extends to being able to hear the musical key to which each human being is tuned, by his personal Supreme Being, SheAlmighty; so he also has a side business as a therapist for children and young people, whose confusion he can sort out by careful listening. The constant barrage of noise is troubling to Kasper but makes him a wonderfully physical, reactive hero. It is also a handy plot device at times, a kind of James Bond gadget which he can deploy as needed. His idol is Bach, whose fifteen hundred compositions provide for him an all-purpose guide to the world as he hears it. The best part of the book, to my mind, is this sharing of what the world as Bach sounds like.

For those who do not want to read the book twice, I will offer this guidance: Most of the action takes place during two periods of Winter into Spring, a year apart. In late September between these two periods, the historic center of Copenhagen suffered an earthquake and dropped 10 feet, and became flooded; the area around it is barricaded. In the first period, Kasper meets KlaraMaria; in the second, he must save her from unspecified dangers. A third major period in his life which is narrated in scattered chapters of the novel took place some years earlier, when he had a three-month-long relationship with a woman named Stina, whom he still loves. In between the first meeting with KlaraMaria, when he is working as a clown in Copenhagen and booked up throughout Europe, and the following year, he has forgotten how to win at poker, sold his assets without paying taxes, cancelled his clown contracts, and come to live hand-to-mouth.

There is a lot of repetition in the situations. For example, Kasper asks his father to trace a license plate each year. KlaraMaria draws two pictures showing what is happening to her. Kasper falls badly twice. He takes off his clothes as an improvised response to imminent arrest twice. As in a recurring dream, he comes up against one luscious, athletic, utterly self-composed woman, often behind her own desk in her own office, after another--the Blonde Woman, Asta Borello, Lona Bohrfeldt, the Aristocratic Lady, Andrea Fink, the African, the Blue Lady, Kain's sauna supervisor, and of course Sonja and Stina. From all of these he needs to get information, by theft, snooping, payment, or seduction--always by surprise, by throwing her off guard in her own territory, if possible.

The repetition is dizzying but builds to the point where it kind of turns inside out. It is as if we had a whole series of Kasper Krone thrillers, each with this kind of scene, all rolled into one, and at some point you have to question a little the pleasure you get from these confrontations. Hoeg is in a happy spirit here, though, and doesn't probe too deeply. "The cosmos is not especially romantic" but Kasper lets you imagine he wants to sit on your lap and listen to you for two minutes.

This is one of the least engaging books that I have read for a long time; fragmented, disjointed and in parts verging upon the incoherent. As one reviewer wrote, "as if out of every few sentences or paragraphs, for instance, there is one missing." The cleverness or "art" that is supposedly exhibited in this book is well and truly clouded by the impenetrable plot, the implausible coincidences and fragmentary nature of the narrative. It really is, in parts, like listening to one side of a phone conversation; something is happening, something is being discussed, you're just not sure what, nor its significance. Time frames blend and shift without acknowledgement, things happen without any reference to anything else and events are left without explanation.

The bizarre set of characters that populates the novel is clever only in the same way that the backward speaking dwarf in Twin Peaks was clever; interesting to begin with but wore thin quickly; the conveniently strange character of the double amputee, constantly praying, ex-circus trick driver, taxi driver is just so wooden and under developed that I struggled to see what the point of the character was. Most of the female characters seem to be cardboard cut-outs of each other with only the superficial semblance of depth or characterisation. There are elements of a "stream of consciousness" style that Joyce might have recognised as being borrowed from him along with the repeated attempts to describe the "indescribable".

Overall, this is the sort of book a person says they have read, just to stand around at a wine and cheese evening, and say that they read it and loved it, etc, etc even if they only got 25 pages in and put it down in frustration. If this book was submitted for publication by an unknown author I have no doubt that it would have been rejected many times over on the grounds that it is arguably poorly expressed, incoherent, confused, convoluted and in parts clichéd and unoriginal.

Loved Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow but after trying his other books, I realized the translator of Smilla deserved equal credit for its brillance.

I have no idea what was happening in this book. The real should've been somehow distinguished from his imaginings (or hearings?) by italics or something. very confounding, confusing. I guess I'm not up to this esoteric kind of book.

Like a spider spinning its web to entice its prey, author Peter Hoeg slowly but adroitly entices readers to suspend their belief in ordinary reality as they enter a world of illusion, mystery, and suspense to join Kasper Krone in his search for the quiet girl. Bach's music, the mysticism of Gurdjieff, the synchroncities of Jung, the spirituality of the Orthodox Church, and high technology intermingle in this fast-paced novel. The book begins slowly as the author moves forward and backward in time to develop the characters but quickly springs into high speed action.

How can a music-lover not be intrigued with a mystery novel whose opening page ends like this? "They reached the center of the courtyard, and Kasper got his first sense of their musical key. It was D-minor, at its worst. As in Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor. Great fateful pillars of music. Then he recognized the little girl. At that precise moment the silence occurred." On the other hand, if this passage puts you off, be warned; it is typical of the whole.

I called this a mystery novel. Actually, there are at least four layers of mystery here. First, as with any whodunnit, those things that the police must find out: the authors of a crime -- in this case the kidnapping and murder of some small children. Second, those things that the reader must find out: the back-story of the principal character -- a renowned Danish circus clown named Kasper Krone. Kasper is brilliant, but has built up a load of trouble with unpaid gambling debts. He is also still searching for the great love of his life, a woman called Stina, who left him a decade ago after a three-month affair. For the first half of the book at least, the reader spends more time piecing together Kasper's back-story than solving the crime, but it is all essential to Høeg's intricate narrative style.

The third layer of mystery is that of Kasper's genius itself. Judging from this and SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW, Høeg seems to like building a story around a character with unusual perceptions. In addition to Kasper's extraordinary ability to manipulate audiences as a performer, he is an accomplished violinist and is gifted with abnormal powers of hearing. These enable him, for instance, to place the source of a phone call from the faint sounds in the background. They also give him an uncanny intuition into what people are thinking and feeling by listening to their minds. Music has become his particular reference point and metaphor, especially the works of JS Bach; the musical writing in this book is pervasive and often exceptionally good.

A fourth layer is the mystery of what makes the missing children special. In addition to being unusually bright, they seem to have psychic abilities which verge on the occult. Also floating in the background, and somehow connected with the children, is an unusual group of nuns, an offshoot of the Eastern Orthodox church. The heady mixture that results -- science and religion, action adventure and near-fantasy -- puts me in mind of TROPIC OF NIGHT by Michael Gruber, another highly intelligent writer who is sometimes too complex for his own good. In Høeg's case, I went along gladly for the ride, but admit to getting a bit tired when the book seemed to be approaching an end for the third or fourth time, only to strike off in yet another direction.

But one thing that the children do have is the secret of silence. When I first read the passage quoted above, I assumed that this silence was a negative quality, a disruption in the fabric. By the end of the book, I realized that it is what Kasper had been seeking all along, as a respite from the noisy adventures of his own life. As a metaphor for an almost religious vocation, it is not at all bad.

With a protagonist, Kasper Krone, who has the ability to hear sound in amazing detail (he can even discern your inner character!), I began the book with high hopes. And the plot seemed intriguing, too, revolving around a group of children with (seemingly) extrasensory abilities. But before long the tale devolved into a metaphysical mishmash of religious gobbledygook: in his plodding towards salvation Kasper loves tossing out obscure religious quotes and facts in even the most awkward of circumstances, which, although initially captivating, becomes extremely tiresome after about the thousandth occurrence. And what's more, the plot seems to veer off-course time and again, and often characters are so poorly sketched that I couldn't keep track of who was whom.

Too long by at least 100 pages. Too cute, by half, with its attempts at religious earnestness. Why the heck did I buy this book?

This book is a stinker. Page after page, who is this person, what are the rules, what is the game, for pity's sake? Polished steel, black windows, gleaming dark wood, burnished stone- endless corridors, tunnels, secret back entrances. Good settings for this book is about the best I can say. Psycho-tech, a new genre? I didn't finish the book; I found I didn't care about the clown or the kids, or anything else about this book. A good music appreciation course would have been useful, at least- one can't hear it in this book. Not psychic enough, I guess...
Wallace Stegner, the great novelist, said an author does research and only uses about 20% of it, if he/she is good. This author and collaborator dumped it all in this book. Not good.