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ISBN-10: 0-393-08719-0
ISBN-13: 9780393087192
Publisher: Norton
Country:
Year: 1975
Edition: Translated from Norwegian
Number of pages: 217
Binding: Unknown Binding
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Jens Bjorneboe, Esther Greenleaf Murer (translator)
Norvik Press; 1999
Paperback
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description
The first novel in the acclaimed History of Bestiality»"«" trilogy. Living high in the Alps in a German principality, our narrator tells us he's dutifully fulfilling his obligations as a Servant of Justice and acting as a daily witness to injustice masquerading as a court of law. One day he notices that the judge is much too engrossed in looking at pornographic photographs showing various other pillars of the town engaged in a variety of sexual activities with minors. The incident propels him on a mental journey back through his life: black-humor fantasies and suicidal drinking binges; the Roman catacombs, warm summer nights in Brooklyn; brothels in Stockholm, his childhood in Norway, and wanderings in Germany. But aside from court records he has been keeping his own long and detailed account of man's cruelty to man in a massive twelve-volume study he calls his History of Bestiality. Acknowledging his Germanic past, the narrator realizes that all his attempts to perceive order in life lead only to his acceptance of the chaos of life. We see him striving to live uncoerced by power, unpersuaded by friends, to take for himself the liberty of stating his critique in order to live in his own moment of truth, to stand »"«"far out at the edge of the abyss.»"«" »"«"Harshly comic and richly disturbing fiction.»"«" Kirkus Reviews
reviews
Somewhere in this book Bjorneboe wrote: »Within 10 years my knowledge of the world will be so big that it must lead to self-destruction.« Exactly 10 years later, he committed suicide. A remarkable fact that shows which atmosphere this novel breathes. It is a semi-autobiographical story about absolute freedom and absolute loneliness – two sides of one coin. About depression, about 20th century Europe and about the bestiality of mankind. Despite its pitch-black vision on humanity, it is also a very funny book. A masterpiece in irony and cynism!
Jens Bjorneboe is the greatest failed novelist of the twentieth century. His masterwork is considered the trilogy roughly called »the History of Bestiality«--roughly, because the title actually belongs to a twelve-volume project of his autobiographical narrator, which is unfinished. The trilogy therefore does not present such a history itself, but rather the experiences of that profoundly disturbed character, along with his morbid reflections, painful memories and alarming dreams, plus recitations of horrible happenings drawn from his grisly research. Not one of the novels is without structural flaws, but each communicates a rage against cruelty and brutality with a force that is rare in fictional literature.
MOMENT OF FREEDOM (1966) is the first of the three novels and is virtually formless. It seems that the author cannot master his material--the whole history of man's inhumanity to man--with a calm analysis or fit it into a standard artistic structure, but rather recoils in pain, retreats into dismal reflections, indulges in sarcastic tirades, describes petty officials and deranged villagers as monsters, relives the atrocities of the Nazis and Communists, remembers himself wading through blood and most of all intoxicates himself, all without any apparent order. The effect is disorienting, but at the same time invigorating, since it brings an electric awareness of being caught up in something horrifyingly real. Here is someone violently disturbed, speaking straight from the heart, grabbing you like a bloodied, but eloquent victim of an attack. You can't expect his urgent report to be neat and tidy.
You must simply follow the narrator-guide, the lowly »Servant of Justice« of the mythical Swiss town of Heiligenberg, a man so burdened by a mind-numbing past that he can't remember his own name, as he records the filthy injustices of the court, denounces the sanctimonious townsmen with his drinking buddies at an inn called »Zum Henker« (»Go to Hell«), or wanders through bleak memories and unidentifiable towns. Don't try to keep track of the time, or where you are going, or whether the landscape is real or hallucinatory. After the journey you can go back and retrace your steps, read critical studies, then some things will fall into place, but not all.
One pointer I will give is that the »moment of freedom« is not an episode or a single event, but more like a category--an opportunity for truth and contact with reality that is most often missed. Bjorneboe relates it to the bullfighting »moment of truth« before the sword goes through the bull's shoulder blades. His thought is that freedom is not a relief or a liberation from duty (there is a frightening scene of murderers breaking out of prison), but rather an insight that brings commitment and love for another. To deny it is to deny the responsibility of being human, to commit a sin against the Holy Ghost and therefore to negate »the meaning of the earth and of the starry heavens: individuation--coming into being.«
Bjorneboe believes that in the moment of truth one can take the liberty of speaking: »An author can only fulfil his human and social duty when he is completely and unreservedly honest. Only when he tells the truth which only he can tell, even if it deviates totally from the officially accepted one, only then is he contributing anything of value at all.«
This novel contributes something of value. If you are seeking escape from celebrity books and potboilers, and wish to renew contact with the spiritual source of real literature, start here. The translation is perfect--so rich and flowing, you'd think the novel were written in English. Bjorneboe told the truth that only he could tell, and therefore is one of the greats.
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