Jonas Wergeland, a successful TV documentary producer with a touch of God’s gift to women, returns one evening for the World’s Fair in Seville to find his wife dead on the living room floor. What follows is a quest to find the killer, encompassing by turns a picaresque and endlessly inventive look at the conditions that have brought Wergeland to this critical juncture in life. From his hair’s breadth escape form a ravenous polar bear while filming in Greenland to a near-death experience aboard a passenger ferry in the icy Baltic, the Tom Jones-like experiences that comprise the narrative of Wergeland’s life, relayed in Kjaerstad’s veneered and acutely observant prose, provide a fascinating portrait of a media icon at the crux of his journey as an artist.
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From the Publisher
An international bestseller and winner of Scandinavia’s top literary award, the Nordic Prize, The Seducer is a suspenseful and endlessly provocative novel that continually thwarts readers’ expectations, rewarding them with a uniquely compelling and enriching reading experience.
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About the Author
Jan Kjaerstad was born in Oslo in 1953 and made his debut as a writer in 1980 with a short story collection, The Earth Turns Quietly. He has been awarded the Nordic Prize for Literature, Germany’s Henrik Steffen Prize, the Norwegian Literary Critics’ Prize, and the Aschenoug Prize.
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13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Infinite Possibility,
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This review is from: The Seducer: A Novel (Hardcover)
Constructed as the biography of Jonas Wergeland, Norway's very popular TV documentary producer, the novel begins with a strange Publisher's Forward that explains that the biographer remains anonymous. Written in the first person by an author who knows more about Wergeland than Wergeland himself, the enigmatic author tells an enigmatic story. Non-linear in form, the biographer relates the story telling to a bicycle wheel, a story told as a "spinning narrative in which I keep picking spokes at random, which is something which I can do because I know that all of the spokes run from the outer rim to the centre and that chronology is not the same as causality." Cause and effect magically become effect generating its own cause.
The story begins with Wergeland coming home to find his wife, Margrete, murdered. But this is most certainly not a murder mystery. Instead, it's a story about storytelling itself, the possibilities of life, and the reader`s own imagination. Wergeland is the both subject and of the story and the teller to Norwegians of stories about world-famous Norwegians. He is the seducer of women and of a nation, and I, for one, have also been seduced. Like a rug described in the book, The Seducer presents a world of infinite possibility.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Most Entertaining Book in Years,
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This review is from: The Seducer: A Novel (Paperback)
I just want to set the record straight :: This book is NOT only about sex. Was the negative reviewer expecting a steamy romance novel? This book is about philosophy, and memory, and socialism, and our individual and collective unconsciousness(es). The writer's got style to spare so that EVERY page is a joy to read and can be savored again and again. Yes, it IS postmodern. To paraphrase Madonna: We are living in the postmodern world, and I'm a postmodern girl. This is definitely a desert island book...and the the trilogy would be a luxury and a blessing.
5.0 out of 5 stars
What is the most crucial story in your life?,
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This review is from: The Seducer: A Novel (Paperback)
"Is this the most crucial story in Jonas Wergeland's life?" Like Karosawa's 'Rashomon,' the novel tells stories, one after the other, in the form of short chapters that fit together (the whole mosaic makes sense) and don't fit together (each glows on its own). The stories are spiced with a luscious sexuality ("The one thing the women who made love to Jonas had in common was that they all instinctively sat astride him."). Good sex seems to flow to him, like the prom king you hated in high school, without much effort. And each sexual event permeates his being with a new sense of who he is.
The sustenance of book, though, is the story of Norway, what it is now, a nation of comfortable (indeed VERY comfortable) risk-averse, xenophobic social democrats watching TV, smug at times, breaking into a sweat not very often (perhaps only during Nordic races). "When do we see who we are?", asks the narrator. The author brilliantly, and often comically, keeps the reader engaged in cliff-hanger moments that rivet attention: Jonas as a child is trapped inside a snow fort and left for dead by his cousin, and the next chapter begins with Jonas as a teenager talking about Dostoyevsky's description of sable eyebrows and the Russian ideal of beauty. Disconnected? Yes. Totally effective in creating a can't-put-it-down novel? Definitely! The erudition of the author is impressive, his cliff-hanger style engaging, and his comments on present day Norway hilarious and thought-provoking. He is so in love with details his protagonist vomits when he sees his hometown at altitude and can't make out the beloved familiar texture of it. I loved reading this book, beginning it as a 'have to read it for book club' task and then finding I couldn't get enough.
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