Customer Reviews

Troll: A Love Story

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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.

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.

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.

This is a completely unique story full of folklore, manufactured scientific research on trolls, and homoerotic man-beast love. There's a larger metaphor at work, equating the secret life of trolls with other disenfranchised subcultures. The troll is not the only kept pet in this story.

Yes, it was creepy, frightening, violent and disturbing.

And I pretty much loved it.

Troll is both more and less than you might think, reading the 'reviews' here on Amazon.

The novel is about a photographer adopting a wild troll. In his world, trolls were discovered to be real in 1907 although encounters with them are so extremely rare that there is very little real cataloguing of habits, eating, mating, etc. Much of the book has excepts from poetry, stories, fables and well-faked scientific treatises.

The story happens in between these excepts.

The story itself is fascinating. Angel is a believable protagonist and, his gayness aside, completely sympathetic. He could be me, were I gay. If I met the troll Pessi, I'd have adopted him too.

It is quite short. I finished it in 3 days of commuting to work and I'm having some trouble getting it out of my mind. If you are looking for an odd love story, this is a good one. If you are looking for straightforward narrative or action, it may not. Sinisalo reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates in her depiction of horror in everyday life and the likability of her characters. If you are an Oates fan, you will like this very much.

What a strange and wonderful tale! Words like "myth", "legend", and "fairy tale" keep springing to mind, but these must be tempered by the very modern setting and situations described in the story. A pretty unique, and sometimes unsettling, mixture. It reminded me of Kirsten Bakis's "Lives of the Monster Dogs", which also mixes the same sorts of strange elements and bizarre juxtapositions.

There's also an interesting narrative technique in the novel in which Sinisalo presents ostensibly "real" (and some may even be) excerpts from legends, medieval bestiaries, vintage newspaper articles, and mythological texts as a way of suplementing her tale of trolls in the modern world. That is, these passages help to establish Sinisalo's conceit that trolls are *real*. One of my friends (another voracious reader) didn't care for this technique, but I liked it very much.

The modern story itself is very strange, and at times disturbing -- this isn't a child's fairy tale (rather, it's much more in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm). Very worthwhile, inventive, and well-written!

Look again, if you missed it. Troll is also an exploration of gender politics. The entire troll story is a skillfully woven veil (parallel to the story of the woman downstairs) to say something very radical about heterosexual sex, love, marriage, the deep roots of sexism (that women's position is the same as the troll's, as not-quite-human) and last but not least ...it's about violent revolution.

I am not surprised that most people miss this point. Despite being "simple" in its style, easy to read, quick-moving and absorbing. It's a book that needs to be taught, and a book that teaches readers how to read, as it can be read on many different levels.

It's difficult to convince people that they should read this book. Begin by mentioning that it is about a gay man who adopts a troll, add that it is pretty erotic and they begin to notice things about YOU that they had never quite seen before, but yes....now that you mention it....hmmm.

This is a kinky fairytale or like a dream gone over the edge.
The protagonist is not Angel, the handsome blonde photographer, but Pessi the troll whom we can't wait to read about, can't wait to see growing and thriving. It is Pessi who rivets us to the end, with his dark presence, his quick moves, his unpredictability, his shadowlike gtace. And it is that shadow quality that might explain the mysterious ending. Cuckoo, cuckoo.

Although the novel is named Troll: A Love Story, the direct translation to it's Finnish print would be Not Before Sundown. Although this would not have sold as many copies in the US, it would have taken some of the suspician away regarding a possible love affair between man and troll.

There are many layers to this story about a troll resuced from a gang of bullies. I agree with another reviewer who cited gender politics as one. There are also undertones of escapism, control and struggle between primitive desires and the rules of society.

The narrator of the book changes between chapters. The reader gets to hear the thoughts and experiences of each main character. There are also chapters of troll legond, encounters and other information. The brief chapters fit perfectly together and create a page-turning, fast read.

The main character, Angel, rescues a troll, Pessi, and nurses him back to health. His neighbor downstairs, a mail order bride who does not speak any of the same languages as Angel, finds out about the troll and assists Angel at times. She develops a crush on Angel and uses his image as an escape from her cruel and abusive husband.

Angel also seeks the assistance of a former lover whom Angel had dumped in order to pursue a heterosexual male. Angel manipulates his past relationship with this man to seek out medical advice and to obtain medication for Pessi.

Martes is the heterosexual male who was the main object of Angel's desire at the beginning of the novel. Angel and Martes worked together at times. Preceeding the novel, Martes and Angel have one intimate encounter. The book begins when the two are dining and Martes denies anything ever happened between the two. This discussion sets a drunk Angel into the night where he finds the troll.

During the novel Martes calls Angel and proposes a work assignment. Angel, a photographer, uses the troll in his shots and Martes then uses Pessi's image in another project without premission.

The relationship between Martes and Angel is always in conflict throughout the story. One uses manipulation over the other at all times to get desired results.

The final important character is a man who admires Angel from afar for the first half of the book before approaching him. Angel uses this character to escape his own primitive desires for Pessi.

Now for the relationship between Angel and Pessi. Pessi is a more primitive form of a human male. Angel is attracted to men. He enjoys caring for Pessi and this, combined with the stature of the troll, causes Angel internal struggle between what he must "HAVE" and what he should have. There is no actual sexual intercourse scene between the two of them.

Pessi is a troll cub. He is a juvenile troll. This combined with Angel's desire may upset some readers. I do not think that Angel is attracted to the youth in Pessi. It is the primitive urges that Pessi brings out in him. The fact that Pessi is a cub makes it more understandable how Angel wanted to care for him and bond to him during that caretaking.

As the plot of the novel thickens, there is a murder, a disappearance and a surprise open-ended conclusion that keeps the reader wondering.

Accepting the premise that trolls really do exist, although they are rarely sighted, and little is known for sure about them, Johanna Sinisalo has created a beautiful love story, as the title suggests. The story is set in Finland one winter through to the spring.
Mikael, a successful freelance photographer affectionately and descriptively known as Angel, for he is very handsome with his head of fair hair, rescues an abandoned and frightened young troll from the attack of a group of loutish drunken teenagers. With no other options, for as we all know an abandoned troll cannot be re-united with its parents; Angel takes the young troll home to care for it. He then embarks on a course of investigation and discovery as he secretly tries to raise the troll, which he names Pressi. At the same time Angel tries to juggle his relationships with his gay lovers: Dr Spiderman, a vet; Martes who is also his business partner and Ecke who absolutely adores the gorgeous Angel. While Dr Spiderman provides some advice, Angel's only other support comes from Palomita, the Filipino bride of the abusive brute who lives in the apartment below him.
The story is told progressively by the various participants, but predominately Angel, and the narration is regularly interspersed with facts, information, and myths and tales, poetry and literature about trolls, sourced from various publications and the internet.
It is truly a lovely story, the relationship that develops between Angel and Pressi is most heart warming as the young troll becomes submissive towards and fiercely and jealously protective of his newfound master. More mysteriously there is something else to the connection between Pressi and Angel, as it appears the young troll exerts a powerful influence that perhaps only a man who loves other men is susceptible to, it certainly has a physical affect on Angel.
Events necessarily come to a climax as Pressi's existence inevitable becomes know to the authorities, but that is not to say that it is any way predicable, far from it. The conclusion of the tale is both moving and satisfying.