Troll: A Love Story [Paperback]

Johanna Sinisalo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 19, 2004

Everyone has their rough nights, but things have clearly taken a turn for the surreal when Angel, a young photographer, finds a group of drunken teenagers in the courtyard of his apartment building, taunting a young troll. Trolls are known in Scandinavian mythology as wild beasts like the werewolf, but this troll is just a small, wounded creature. Angel decides to offer it a safe haven for the night. In the morning Angel thinks he dreamed it all. But he finds the troll alive, well, and drinking from his toilet. What does one do with a troll in the city? Angel begins researching frantically. Angel searches the Internet, folklore, nature journals, and newspaper clippings, but his research doesn't tell him that trolls exude pheromones that have a profound aphrodisiac effect on all those around him. As Angel's life changes beyond recognition, it becomes clear that the troll is familiar with the man's most forbidden feelings, and that it may take him across lines he never thought he'd cross. A novel of sparkling originality, Troll is a wry, peculiar, and beguiling story of nature and man's relationship to wild things, and of the dark power of the wildness in ourselves.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A young Finnish photographer makes a pet of an orphaned troll in this strange, sexually charged contemporary folk tale, a hit in Europe. Mikael, nicknamed Angel for his stunning blonde good looks, finds the troll behind some dustbins after a night of drinking, and feels compelled to bring it home ("It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen... I know straight away that I want it"). The troll is small and black, thoroughly wild but also oddly human, with an overpowering, arousing juniper-berry smell. Obsessed by his new companion, whom he names Pessi, Angel sets out to learn everything he can about trolls, which in the novel's world are a real but extremely rare species. Much of the book is composed of excerpts from reference works and novels, the most valuable of which is a rare volume by Gustaf Eurén, called The Wild Beasts of Finland. This book is supplied by Ecke, Angel's nerdy, fervid suitor; Angel also coerces help from a veterinarian ex-boyfriend; an advertising art director who buys his photographs and rejects his advances; and an abused Filipino mail-order bride who lives downstairs. Sinisalo's elastic prose is at once lyrical and matter-of-fact, but this is not a comfortable novel. The troll brings out Angel's animal instincts, representing all the seduction and violence of the natural world. As the troll becomes ever more unmanageable, the sense of doom grows; the ferocious ending is thoroughly unsettling.
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Troll won the Finlandia Prize for the best novel published in Finland, and has garnered worldwide attention. Sinisalo draws upon Finnish folklore to create a sharp modern novel that explores the wild beast that lurks in each of us. The Washington Post reminds us, “[T]he runty dark creatures of our fairy tales are little more, symbolically speaking, than surrogates for our own darker urges.” Though Pessi is the only truly feral creature, Angel and his friends all reveal their baser natures as well. While the main drama surrounds Angel and Pessi, a host of engaging characters populates the novel, including a Filipino mail-order bride. Sinisalo takes the stuff of fantasies and twists it into a sophisticated parable for the 21st century.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1ST edition (February 19, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802141293
• ISBN-13: 978-0802141293
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #587,750 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Novel Will Give You Pause!, May 15, 2004

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Troll: A Love Story (Paperback)

By definition, a troll is a supernatural creature from Scandinavian folklore that lives in caves or in mountains. It is stumpy, mishapen, and can be as big as a giant or a small as a dwarf. It has been known to abduct children. Trolls have made appearances in such literary works as BEOWULF, LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER. With that in mind, you should be prepared for the unexpected in this novel by the Finnish author Johanna Sinisalo. You will not be disappointed. This writer has crafted a bizarre but strangely moving love story between Mikael, nicknamed Angel, a young Finnish photographer, and a troll whom he rescues from a pack of hoodlums one midnight as the young man staggers home from a night of drinking and unrequited lust for one Martes, who says he is only looking for "good conversation." Angel takes the troll in, nurses him back to health and starts down a path from which there is no return. With each passing day, Angel finds himself becoming more hopelessly attached to the troll with the juniper-berry smell-- whom he names Pessi-- and having to hide his new housemate from his friends and neighbors. As you would expect, a novel about a love affair between a man and a troll will not have a happy ending. Even so, I was not quite ready for the explosive finale.

Ms. Sinisalo's prose is both concise and evocative: "I look him [Martes] in the eyes. His face wears a friendly, open, and understanding smile. He seems at once infinitely lovable and completely unknown. His eyes are computer icons, expressionless diagrams, with infinite wonders behind them, but only for the elect, those able to log on." The author raises questions about man's relationship with wild creatures-- how much we know or don't know about them and what they know about us. She seems to say something about the animalistic tendences that lie deeply hidden in the most civilized of us just waiting to be let loose.

Although on one level, TROLL is just a great story that you cannot stop reading, on another it asks questions about the very nature of us all.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Dive Into the Jungian Psyche, March 28, 2005

By 

Steve R. - See all my reviews

This review is from: Troll: A Love Story (Paperback)

Johanna Sinisalo's 'Troll' can hardly be left for comparison to the fables of Tolkein or the dark fairy tales of Grimm. Instead, it is a shrewd take on Jungian psychology disguised as a mythological love story.

In 'Troll,' Sinisalo peels back the societal labels of 'relationships' and dives into the darkest parts of our psyche. Through many relationships which at first seem as far apart as possible - between a mail order bride and her neighbor, between an attractive gay man and the men he needs, between a troll and his caretaker - the author looks at what drives our attractions and desires, what raises sexuality and hunger in ourselves, and what about 'love' compels us to rise above convention and risk our physical and emotional well-being for another.

'Troll' is written in simple, clear language, but beneath the surfce reveals a complex and universal question about attractions - fatal or otherwise.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Strange and Captivating, November 1, 2004

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Troll: A Love Story (Paperback)

This strange, captivating novel, winner of Finland's top prize for fiction, is set in a familiar world just slightly askew from our own. The basic premise is quite simple, in the book, trolls are real creatures found primarily in northern reaches of Scandinavia and Russia, and are treated as a rare species of animal. They were definitively "discovered" in 1907, but have since remained elusive to science, and little is known about them. Although they tend to keep far away from human settlements, the book opens in a city (presumably Helsinki) with a good-looking young gay photographer (Mikael) coming across a sick young troll late a night. Stumbling home drunk and depressed from a failed night of wooing, Mikael's judgment is poor and he brings the creature into his apartment.

Rising the next day, he finds it wasn't all a hallucination, and starts trying to nurse the ill young creature back to health. Of course, the notion of keeping a troll as a pet is unthinkable (not to mention illegal), and so he must conceal his new housemate at all costs. The problem is that he doesn't know anything about trolls. Fortunately, through the power of the internet, he is able to call up all manner of fables, scientific journal articles, poems, and bits of information about them. These wholly believable extracts are interspersed throughout the book with chapters headed with the name of the person from whose perspective it's written. In addition to the photographer, narrator's include his unrequited love/creative partner (Martes), a former love and nebbish bookworm (Ecke), and a Filipino mail-order bride who lives in captivity in an apartment one floor down (Palomita). Mikael rather clumsily uses his physical charms to seduce both Ecke and another former lover into providing key bits of information about trolls. As the nursing succeeds, the troll grows healthier and stronger, and there becomes a noticeable juniper-berry odor in the apartment. This is the scent of the troll's pheromones, and Mikael becomes steadily more infatuated with the creature, who reciprocates and treats him as the Alpha-maleóalas Mikael is slow to realize the consequences of this, with horrible results.

The author does a thoroughly convincing job of portraying the troll and its behavior, as well as the narcissistic photographer and his little world. Three strong subplotsóone about the mail-order bride, one about a job creating a photo for a new line of blue jeans, and one about his realization that Ecke is a good catchóall buttress the story and give it depth. The book does a nice job of using fairy tales and becoming one itselfóan entertaining fable on the relationship of the natural world to man's world.