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A line of characters has formed outside a writer's house. They are waiting to have their stories told, some patiently, others more importunate. The writer herself perhaps has her own story to tell, but if so, she is keeping it to herself for now and easing its pain with pills and alcohol. All at once, one of the characters appears inside the house, at the writer's bedside. He has jumped the queue outside and now demands that she flesh him out, give him a name, provide him with a story. He becomes Alvar Eide, a monumentally passive, meticulously neat assistant in an art gallery. He is forty-two, he lives alone, and subsists largely on ready meals from the Cash and Carry. But he is stubborn. He keeps turning up unbidden in the writer's study to demand more and more detail about the life he is living and to engage in occasional philosophical discussion. The writer has to do something with him, so she makes him fall in love with a painting of an incomplete bridge, entitled Broken and when he cannot commit to that, she lands him with a sixteen-year-old heroin addict who takes over his life. And a cat. That is pretty much it. From the reader's point of view, the problem with a metafiction of this sort is that engagement with the characters is not permitted. We are always aware of their artificiality, never allowed to believe in their reality, and in this case Alvar is so stupefyingly indecisive that we rapidly lose all patience with him even as an idea. A far more interesting proposition is the "writer," presumably Fossum herself, but she's not going to give all that much away. Many readers who have followed the Konrad Sejer series will be disappointed with this standalone; others may miss Fossum's talent for the small-town portrait in this novel where the Oslo setting is perfunctory. And those who have it confused with another Karin's (Slaughter) recent novel with the same name may be seriously bemused. In truth, this is not a crime novel at all, though the police do show up toward the very end. My guess is that it was intended to serve as a kind of palate-cleanser for Fossum, a way of reinvigorating her creative enthusiasm. If that is the case, let us hope that it has done the trick. The translation by Charlotte Barslund is fluid and unobtrusive, if curiously mid-Atlantic in idiom. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2010
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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