5.0 out of 5 stars
Where is David Lynch When You Need Him?, August 17, 2006
This review is from: When Life Went Hectic: The Incredible Journey of Quentin Borg, A True Story (Paperback)
I have recently reread for the fifth time the book "When Life Went Hectic." This story, taking place in 1985 and 1986, is a first person account of Quentin Borg, an older Swedish man from Wisconsin, who decides he is going to move to Florida because it has become too difficult for him to handle the cold winters.
Quentin is very poor however. He is the type of guy who one might know in a very small town, selling vegetables on a table to make loose change. Indeed, he describes selling eggs and milk to neighbors by bike. Both his parents have passed away and he is very poor. In addition, he describes himself as having a weak constitution and belongs to a strange Swedish-Christian religion called Ohapse, which I had never heard of.
His sojurn to the sunny state of Florida takes him across America, including a detour to California. Everything is told very matter of factly and without fanfare...be it sleeping in a dumpster, being bitten to death by ants, making a gay friend at a catholic charity for the homeless, and finally, upon arriving in Florida, a middle-aged female heroin addict from Germany who uses him for cash. And he's still looking for good work as a security guard. He falls in love with this woman but understands early on that nothing sexual can come of it...he describes this as a basic fact of his life, and is willing to be "her friend." At least until her arrest and conviction and removal back to Germany. (She leaves him the cat).
Some of the weirdest aspects of this book are the photographs. All the photos are black and white. A picture of a barn in the snow has under it the caption, "I Liked Wisconsin, but it was too cold." Another picture shows a locked shed and under it the caption reads, "I locked everything up and prepared for my move." It's like the Straight Story with a bit of Twin Peaks mixed in.
I think that the basic review of the book above is rather incorrect. Quentin does learn a few things about his life and goes through various personal traumas (including the passing of an outrageous number of kidney stones by drinking a concoction of olive oil mixed with vinegar, described in detail!) but overall he seems to know everything from the very beginning with his folksy, realistic and small town background. The actual "lessons" and "changes" he makes in his life, though maybe they do sometimes occur, are small and certainly don't justify this man's strange journey.
Candide? The Odyssey? I think that anyone trying to raise Quentin Borg's journey and narration to this kind of mythos deserves some criticism. But on the other hand, whose life is like an epic or a myth? More often than not, we crawl through our lives with a basic hope and some basic values and lessons. Let Quentin Borg be an answer to those who think life is more than it is. Quentin Borg shows us life is basic but weird in and of itself.
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