Aug 152013
 

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Herewith is “Us.” I’ve chosen this excerpt of Through the Night (Dalkey Archive Press), translated by Seán Kinsella, to illustrate the power of Sæterbakken’s prose, particularly his narrative voice and control of the moment. “Us” comes early in the novel, and is perhaps the origins of Karl and Eva’s eventual separation. But as this section makes clear, Karl poses many existential questions on love and fidelity, which are paralyzing, and for him unanswerable. This rather prismatic questioning of life is repeated throughout the novel, adding to the novel’s overall tension and psychological terror.

Jason DeYoung

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Us

“Do you think the two of us will always be together?”

We’d eaten a late dinner, and I was pouring Eva some wine from a newly opened bottle, after she had, surprisingly enough, asked me to check and see if we had one. I felt a smile cross my face as I stood in the closet with the bottle in my hands, Eva had that carefree air about her, the one she usually had, in fact, when circumstances suited her, and as I stood in the kitchen cutting off the bottle’s seal with the tip of the corkscrew, I couldn’t help but smile again, as if it were our very first night together.

“Do you think the two of us will always be together?”

The question gave me a start and I tightened my grip on the bottle, anxious about where she wanted to go with this. Why did she ask? Because she figured, no matter which way she looked at it, that the answer had to be yes? Or because she figured, no matter which way you looked at it, that the answer had to be no? And I thought about how often the questions we asked each other were in reality the questions we wanted to be asked ourselves.

“Do you think the two of us will always be together?”

I looked at her. Her neck, her shoulders. So beautiful, everything! Sometimes in the evenings I massaged her while she watched TV. I felt like a sculptor when I did it. This was what a sculptor must have felt, I imagined, when he had finally gotten a piece just as he wanted it, standing there running his hands over his finished work. And, in fact, she now placed her hand on her own shoulder, there at the table, and began to rub at it, without being aware she was doing so, which was usually an expression of exhaustion, self-pity, of wan despair, but which now seemed more like a self-caress.

“Do you think the two of us will always be together?”

In order to avoid answering, I raised my glass and clinked it against hers, and asked for her own opinion on the matter. The subject could hardly be coming up out of the blue, it occurred to me, when I actually thought about it: it was only a few days since one of Eva’s old friends, whom she hadn’t heard from for years, had called her up and described in detail—they’d been on the phone for almost three hours—the last few years of her marriage, a marriage that had lasted since the days she and Eva had been at school together, but was now over, as it had turned out that her husband, who had been her childhood sweetheart, was jumping into bed with practically every woman who had come his way, most recently with his sister-in-law, something that of course had come out, by and by, and had in turn triggered an absolute avalanche of confessions. This friend told Eva that she felt that her entire life had been ruined. All those years she’d regarded him as her one and only, believing him to be regarding herself as his . . . She’d said she would have felt better if she’d been the one who had done it, if she’d been the one who had lied and cheated, the one who now had to put up with the accusations, the one racked with shame and regret. She’d embarked on a few reckless escapades after she’d found out, she confided to Eva, as a revenge of sorts. But it was too late. There was nothing to be gained from it, neither for her nor for him. Nothing for her to win, nothing for him to lose. Everything was ruined. And she had never even had any fun of her own!

“Do you think the two of us will always be together?”

I looked at Eva. I remembered when I had gone back to her place for the first time, how amazed I’d been at how neat and tidy it was. It was like a household already, just as though the apartment was furnished for the life she wanted but had yet to acquire. It was a home, just standing there waiting for its family to arrive. And I remember thinking with horror about my own one-bedroom apartment, which she still hadn’t been to, how hopelessly juvenile and unfinished it would appear to her compared to all the things she kept around her. The chairs she had were comfortable to sit in, in the kitchen she had good quality knives on a magnetic strip above the range. She wasn’t a student! She was a complete person! There was something extremely appealing about it. I’d been filled with admiration as I looked at her standing there with a bottle of wine in each hand, asking me which I’d prefer; I wanted to move in with her right away, abandon everything I had, take nothing along, just advance to the start, her start, and begin there, over again.

So what did I think? Did the fact that I hesitated, that I didn’t have a ready-made answer, mean that the answer was no? Or was it just that I hadn’t formed any particular opinion yet? In which case it must mean that one outcome was just as likely as the other? Why hadn’t I thought it through properly? Was it because I was so certain that nothing would ever happen that could threaten us, our relationship, the vows we’d made?

I looked at her, the lovely renewed Eva. The just right level of tipsy Eva. The slightly nonchalant, amenable Eva. Whenever I dreamed of her, she was wearing the red dress she’d had on the first time we went out, to that Chinese restaurant. Yes, I think the two of us will always be together, I thought. What else could we possibly want? Her hair, which had grown and was long, fell across her face every time she turned her head, but it was as though she wanted this to happen, since she liked to rake her hand through it, gather it, pull it back behind her ear in a fresh futile attempt to fix it in place, the most beautiful of power struggles.

I looked at her and thought: Now it’s turned into the kind of night where anything can happen. Now we can say anything, anything that comes to mind, without either of us being hurt. At this moment we can take anything. And I remembered a film I’d seen, where you could enter another dimension through a hole in the atmosphere that was only open at certain times, and even then only to those who knew the secret formula. It was there now, the wormhole. It was right in front of us, the possibility to say anything we wanted, exactly what we had on our minds, without the need to take anything else into consideration. At this moment we ourselves didn’t need to be taken into consideration, neither of us. Right now we were the opposite of jealous. At this moment we were equally strong and could tolerate everything.

There and then I felt the need to do it, reveal something, confess something, anything at all, in order to affirm the new intimacy that had arisen (and that would soon vanish again), the candor that now existed between us (and that I knew would soon close again, like a flower that only blooms at night, which folds together as soon as the first rays of the sun fall on it). I despaired. Did I really have nothing to say? No, it seemed that I didn’t. No confessions. No admissions. Nothing to answer for. My conscience was clear. I felt ashamed at the thought. Because it was true, there really was nothing. Nothing other than some altogether insignificant episodes, some embraces that perhaps lingered beyond the merely amicable, some too-close dances, some fleeting touches, one or two kisses that were so innocent that I’d only make a fool of myself if I told Eva about them.

I thought: What in the world have I actually gotten up to in all these years?

A thousand thoughts, a thousand possibilities tumbled around in my head—I had to act quickly, our night was in danger, it could collapse at any moment, and if it did, then nothing could save it from the wan abyss, from the greedy maw of everyday life—but none distressing enough to take advantage of this opportunity, this potential for a new sort of relationship between us. No, to my horror, I had to face the fact that I had nothing to say. My God, if only I’d deceived her one single time! And I cursed myself, my honesty, my excessive caution. My sole sin: omission. Time was up, but there was nothing. She was ready, and I had nothing to offer her.

And a new anxiety pierced through me. What if she now came out with something? What if she now felt the same as I did, that the time had come to admit things, and that she, in contrast to me, actually had something on her conscience, something she now wanted to take the opportunity to unburden herself of? How then would I deal with that? I didn’t have anything to offer her in return, nothing of my own to balance the books with. And for a moment I felt helpless, terrified of what I might hear. I looked at her, waited for her mouth to open, for her to say the words, in an oddly toned voice, which would constitute the introduction, accompanied by a somewhat fearful glance, uncertain of exactly how open she could be.

“Why did you fall in love with me?” she asked before I could think of anything to say, and what I initially took as being a tender thought, a romantic invitation, was in reality, I realized, as I was about to answer, a challenge, a provocation, there had been something aggressive about the way she’d posed the question that only sank in afterward, like a delayed sting. And before I had time to answer, she continued, “Why us exactly? Why didn’t we both end up with other people? Why is it the two of us, in particular, sitting here?” And then she made a gesture with her hand: surrounded by all this. “Why you and me exactly? Why did you decide that I was the one? What was it that made you take that decision?” I searched for something to say, something to stay her with. Because I could see where this was going. But I couldn’t think of anything. And why should I? She wasn’t looking for answers anyway. Her eyes had that slightly glassy look about them, as if they weren’t being used to see anymore.

“Why?” she asked again, pausing before she continued, “Why did you marry me? Why didn’t you wait until you met somebody else? What was it that was so special about me? Was it really impossible for it to have been, just as easily, someone else? Did it only just happen to work out that way, that it was me? Was it just that I was at hand, that I was around when you thought the time was right?”

I said her name, but she didn’t hear me. She was far away. How am I going to get her back? I wondered. If I can’t get her back now, the evening will be lost. Then it was as though she came to life, her cheeks were crimson and a flame danced all the way up along her neck, it looked like her collarbone was on fire, the way her skin flushed and tightened over her throbbing veins.

“Am I the love of your life, Karl? The love that only comes along once in a lifetime? Am I?

“And does it only come along once in a lifetime? What do you think? Maybe it comes along a few times? Or is it something you can use up? What do you think?

“What about you, Karl? Could you love more than once? Is there anything left in you? Or have I taken it all?”

I should have stopped her, defended myself. But the way she’d worked herself up, I knew the only way to get her to stop would be to let her exhaust herself. She was like a riverbed in a spring flood. Any obstacles in her path would only increase the pressure.

“Why don’t you answer me? I’m only asking a few simple questions. What else can I do but ask when you don’t give me anything to work with? You never answer! What is it you don’t want to say? Are you hiding something? Are you hiding something from me, Karl? Are you keeping secrets from me? You don’t have any secrets you’re keeping from me, do you, Karl?”

She looked out of her mind, with her flaming red neck and the purple blotches all around her eyes and cheeks.

Then her head tipped forward, her face hidden by her hair. I didn’t know what to do, only that I’d be wise to wait a little longer before doing it. It looked like she was asleep, but I knew that her eyes were open, that she was sitting there struggling to collect her thoughts. Yes, best to wait, I thought. I took her hand, it was freezing. I warmed it up in my own, and after a while I felt it twitch a little. And then, at long last, she lifted her head and looked at me, fixed her eyes on mine, tried to lift herself up using only our eye contact as a prop. And now the glassy look had vanished, now her eyes sparkled, the light deepening, her look of despair finding expression, her lips regaining their color, the person in her returning, all her wrinkles and lines slipping back into place.

I stood up, still holding her hand, got down on my knees in front of her, and stroked her hair. She sat there for a long time just looking at me, smiling, rather contritely, it seemed. Then she grabbed me by the arm and stared into my eyes with an almost parodic over-seriousness: “Whatever you do, Karl,” she whispered, “whatever you do, don’t lie to me! Do you hear me? I think I’d be able to forgive you almost anything. No matter how idiotic. But not if you lied to me. Not if it turns out that you’d lied to me. Will you promise me? Promise me that you’ll never, ever lie to me?”

I promised, swore a solemn oath. Unconditionally, right there and then, I promised. I felt a pang of conscience as I said it. But then it vanished. Does it matter what you say, what you promise? I remembered how scared I used to be, at the time we were first getting to know each other, of her demands. It was as though she wanted us to live in a way the era in which we lived simply wouldn’t allow us. It was as though marriage was one of the antiques she’d collected, one she felt a particular attachment to. We had friends who’d already divorced and remarried, it was like a perpetual round dance, fueled by the same desires and the same disappointments at every point in the circle. They sought out marriage in order to realize their dreams, and they broke out of marriage in order to realize their dreams—which is to say, they married and divorced for the same reason. All the same, it didn’t occur to me to protest against the old-fashioned boundaries Eva set. Maybe she was right? Maybe it needed to be that strict if it was to mean anything at all? What would be left of fidelity once it was broken? All or nothing, wasn’t that how it had to be? If it happened once, what was to prevent it happening again? Was breaking your marriage vows five times any worse than breaking them twice? Is it better or worse to go to bed with ten different people or to do it ten times with the same person? Is the sin made greater when it’s repeated? Does fidelity even have any meaning in cases where it’s not absolute? And what value does it have if it’s going to be violated someday anyway? The smallest crimes are the largest. By perpetrating them you demonstrate that you are capable of anything.

What had bothered Eva’s friend wasn’t that her husband was unfaithful, but that she herself hadn’t been. Since she herself had refrained, when he did not, all of her years of fidelity became an object of shame. Her entire attitude, her devotion, her marital investment were all taken from her in one fell swoop. Her life-choice became a mockery, retroactively. Her outlook held up to ridicule. Her commitment a waste of time, when all was said and done.

Eva sat staring at me, with a look of either joy or despair, it was hard to say which. Then she tossed her head, sighed heavily, and shook off whatever it was that either delighted or distressed her. All at once she seemed completely sober. The transformation was almost uncanny, as if she’d only been pretending to be drunk.

“Does it make any difference,” she asked, watching me from inside that part of her brain she’d managed to keep on dry ground, away from the alcohol that had been flowing through her, “whether you do it or not, if you really want to do it?”

I asked her what she meant.

“If you meet someone you find attractive, someone you’d like to go to bed with, someone you know you could go to bed with, if you wanted, and then you don’t, out of consideration for me, have you been unfaithful to me anyway? What difference does it make, if it leaves you thinking about how nice it would’ve been to do it? Is there any difference? Does it affect our relationship any less, if you don’t go through with it? Is there less damage being done to our marriage if we do it in our heads and not in reality?”

For the umpteenth time that night I was again at a loss for words. All the same, I was aware that I was enjoyed talking to her about this. I liked the danger of it, the delicacy of it, liked the fact she was on a roll, that she was challenging me, I liked the way it all gushed out of her, how months of constantly recycled thoughts were suddenly being given vent, how everything that was usually concealed was now frolicking so openly between us. Oh, darling, why don’t we do this every night? Why don’t we sit like this, night after night, filling the cup till it overflows, talking about ourselves and our relationship, repeat things we’ve said a hundred times before, tell each other stories we both know by heart, let the familiar mill grind down the corn of our solidarity? Why does such a long time have to pass between each time we do it? Why does such a long time have to pass between each time we find our way to one another like this? What’s the point in everything we do if it doesn’t lead us here, the only place worth being? This is what we live for! This is the purpose of everything we do! The nights that make our days pale by comparison, which bathe our intimacy in a glow, the nights when it’s obvious and evident we can sit across from one another and tell each other everything. Why don’t we do this all the time? Why isn’t every night like this? If there’s a price, then let’s pay it: forty days of silence for one voluble night! As though it all runs by clockwork, gears turning us so slowly, impelling us, cogs that have to make a full revolution before their teeth again connect, slip into one another in precisely the right way, falling into the position needed to set the clock striking. And then come the beautiful, delicate sounds. And everything becomes melodious and obvious. Before the cogs move on, beginning the next long, slow revolution.

“Eva?”

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

—Stig Sæterbakken, Translated by Seán Kinsella

Aug 142013
 

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Equal parts fantasy, horror, and domestic drama, Through the Night is a confident and spacious novel, touching on familiar themes in Stig Sæterbakken’s work—grief, loss, isolation. It tells the story of one man puzzling out his incessant and insidious sorrow over his son’s death against a surreal backdrop of terror. It is a novel with a stirring combo of artistic ambition and moral ambiguity, steeped in the spirit of Céline, Beckett, and Kafka. —Jason DeYoung

 

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Through the Night
Stig Sæterbakken
Translated by Seán Kinsella
Dalkey Archive Press, 2013
259 pages, $15.00

GOD PLEASE FUCK MY MIND FOR GOOD snarls the disquieting music in the rather sinister nightclub Neusohl near the end of Through the Night. EVERYTHING’S BACKWARD! EVERYTHING’S BACKSWARD! the song urges. Our narrator, Karl Christian Andreas Meyer, a fractured, grief-pierced family man, is here to get the key to the house where “hope turns to dust.” In reversal of the typical quest story, Karl is questing for pain, a long-desired punishment for his familial betrayals which he believes led to his son’s suicide. This house is where you’ll be confronted with your greatest fears, where cocky, self-assured men are carried out, turned into babbling ruins and devastated by what they’ve seen. Karl hopes to see his son once again. As we’re told, punishment is a sort of medicine.

Equal parts fantasy, horror, and domestic drama, Through the Night is Stig Sæterbakken’s final novel. Compared to the other two translations of his work Dalkey Archive Press has published, Through the Night is downright baggy narratively and straightforward. The other two, Siamese and Self-Control, are taught, claustrophobic novels, pushing against the smallness of the lives of their characters, with very little in the way of backstory. In fact, Self-Control reveals so little of its protagonist’s history that when it does in its final sentence readers are confronted with near-total reassessment of whose story they have been following. Although Through the Night touches on familiar themes in Sæterbakken’s work—grief, loss, isolation—it spreads out. It’s a confident and spacious novel, with a narrator seeking a kind of genealogy of guilt while limning his own stratums grief.

Before he took his own life in 2012, Stig Sæterbakken was renown as one of Norway’s best living novelists—as well as one of its most infamous.  As a writer, Sæterbakken insisted “that literature [be] a free zone, a place where prevailing social morals should not apply…[that] literature exists in a space beyond good and evil where the farthest boundaries of human experience can be explored.” His novels investigate much of what is unflattering about human behavior. In Through the Night there is no filter on the narrator’s thoughts, and because of this the novel is unyieldingly intense and heartbreaking—we see how startlingly pathetic, confused and human Karl is.  It is a novel with a stirring combo of artistic ambition and moral ambiguity, steeped in the spirit of Céline, Beckett, and Kafka.

Through the Night opens after the suicide of the narrator’s son, Ole-Jakob. Karl’s betrayal is hinted at but not revealed in these opening few pages, instead we are lulled by Karl’s narrative voice, thoughts on sorrow and escape, and we witness how distraught his family has become after Ole-Jakob’s death. Eva, Karl’s wife, cleaves the family’s television set with an axe in response to Karl’s binge viewing. Stine, his daughter, goes mute after the funeral until finally she breaks her silence with GOD DAMNED FUCKING SHIT and a stream of more complex profanities. “I felt a pang of happiness,” Karl says, “the first sign of life from someone we’d thought was lost to us.” This first section also sets up the lore of the mysterious house. Karl’s friend Boris[*] Snopko, a sort of failed novelist, tells the story:

Boris told me about the mysterious house, someplace in Slovkia, he didn’t know excacly, where if you contacted the right person and paid a sufficient amount of money, a staggering sum apparently, you were given a key and a scrap of paper with an address on it, where you, if you were to let yourself into the house at exactly that time, would be confronted with your greatest fears….where hope turns to dust.

The first section concludes with the retelling of Prince Unknowing, a fairy tale Karl told Ole-Jakob as a bedtime story. Although Karl’s profession is dentistry, he published Prince Unknowing, a story about a young man who is unaware of his royal heritage. The title of the novel comes from Karl’s tale. When the prince is reunited with his father, he asks “Will you look after me, no matter what happens?”  His father, the king, replies: “You have nothing to fear, may son….No matter what happens, I will be there to look after you. No matter where the road my take you, I will be by your side to protect you. Through the night and into the day.”

Alas, Karl is no fatherly king. But the retelling of Prince Unknowing sets up a motif in the novel.  Secondary stories abound in Through the Night.  Plots of films are retold, Karl attends a showing of The Ape Planet, a kind of art student attempt at avant-garde theatre, and there are two novelists—Boris and Karl’s sister—whose novels are recounted. As Karl says early in the novel about his television viewing: “I’d become part of that second reality, where pain doesn’t exist.” The stories are a form of escapism, but strangely enough they also add a sense of mimesis to Through the Night, acknowledging that Sæterbakken’s characters  live in a world where they too tell stories to one another to explain their lives.

The second section of the novel takes up the history of Karl and Eva’s marriage, the birth of their children, and the eventual extramarital affair Karl has. Because of the novel’s first person point of view, culpability for the collapse of Karl and Eva’s marriage is put into question. Yes, Karl has an affair, but Eva initially questions their marriage and fidelity. Either way, after Karl’s return from his “fairy tale affair,” as Eva calls it, disharmony reigns in the Meyer house, and Eva, Stine and Ole-Jakob are emotionally wounded and distrustful of Karl. In an act of inexplicable and extreme teenage defiance Ole-Jakob steals his parent’s liquor and then their car and drives it head on into a tractor-trailer. After Ole-Jakob’s death, Karl thinks:

I had gone from knowing everything to knowing nothing. I hadn’t seen that my boy was in danger. Whatever was needed in order to keep things going had deserted him. He’d gotten to the end, and I wasn’t there to hold him back. Was that why he did it? Because I didn’t have any idea? Because I didn’t have a clue about what was going on? Was that his way of saying it, of drawing the attention of the whole world to it, that I hadn’t understood goddmaned fucking shit? Was it was his final protest against the unsuspecting bastard of a father he’d been saddled with?…And I though of the beautiful girl who had been on her way to meet him an who would have kissed him and said that she loved him and made it impossible for him to wish for his own death.

After the funeral, Karl leaves his family again, this time traveling to Redenburg, Germany, which he calls Christmastown—“as I couldn’t help but call that place, overwhelmed by all the details, all the finesse, that served to reinforce the idyllic impression of a closed world free of anxiety and suspicion.”  In Redenburg he meets Caroline, whom at first he thinks is trying to kill herself by jumping off a bridge (in fact Karl sees potential tragedy everywhere he looks).  She is a photographer, working on an exhibition of photographs paring images of water with facial wrinkles. Caroline is also the name of one of characters in Prince Unknowing and Redenburg shares numerous similarities to the illustrations in the published manuscript, all of which lead Karl to feel an affinity for the small town, and it releases him somewhat from his guilt. He listens to a harpist in the town square, and realizes it’s the “first piece of music…[he’d] been able to perceive as beautiful” since his son’s death. He agrees to Caroline’s request to take his picture and sees her on multiple occasions, as she becomes an emblem of survival for Karl after she recounts her brother’s suicide. These opening few chapters of part three are off-plot but reveal the state of Karl’s soul, so to speak. Enticing as it is, however, Karl cannot stay in Redenburg: “it all seemed hopeless from beginning to end, everything I’d gotten myself into, in the enchanted hope of finding another life, another place, in believing in a fresh start, in believing in anything at all….Dear Ole-Jakob, can you forgive me?”

With the idyllic Redenburg behind him, he starts his quest for the house. He travels to Slovkia, finds the nightclub Neusohl and its owner Zagreb, who has the key to the house at Skubínska Cesta 64. Neusohl is a shit-smelling club and Zagreb turns out to impossible to read. Is he evil or good? By this point it doesn’t matter really, as Zagreb’s little speech on ‘reality’ reveals:

God may be a bastard. But someone is watching over us, I don’t think anyone can be in any doubt about that. The Black Death. The Holocaust. AIDS. Hurricanes and typhoons. People have turned religious over far less. Auschwitz and Hiroshima and the Gulag, they’re God’s winepresses! He uses them to crush us and squeeze out the juice needed to survive, Imean for the ones who’re left!…If you look at it like that, the house is no more mysterious than what’s going on around us all the time, it’s just that the house is on a smaller scale, actually.  It can’t compete with the world, after all…Look at whatever’s waiting for you there, whatever it might be, as your own private miniature Holocoust!

Sæterbakken’s descriptions of the interior of the house are exquisite; if it were a film, it would be a long-take, five minutes or more of silence, image after image of a home devoid of life. He takes us through each of the rooms and the attic. We see how common, drab, almost dull this house of horrors is. Atmospherically, however, it’s stunning with the plumbing emitting a “plaintive howl” and “the light from the lamp in the staircase growing dimmer.” At first Karl finds nothing in the house and assumes “the only thing [the others had] found, and which made them lose their minds, the ones who’d been in the house before me, was themselves, their own spooky emptiness, I thought, overwhelmed, suddenly, by a despair so intense that I couldn’t manage to restrain a scream, drawn-out and as unfamiliar to me as a the voice of another man.”  Against the advice of everyone he has spoken to about the house, Karl falls asleep, and it is upon waking that his true horror is revealed to him.

Bleak, complex, and precise, Through the Night is a masterful novel of ones man puzzling out his incessant and insidious sorrow.  The surreal textures of the novel provide a backdrop of terror for Karl’s existential questioning: how much is he to be blamed for the end of his marriage, how much is he to blamed for Old-Jakob’s death, how does one heal after the death of a child. Mid-way in the novel, the narrator thinks: “It was over. Yet it continued.” What this “it” is isn’t clear. His marriage, his sorrow, his existence? A fate worse than death is life seems to be the conclusion. In the end Karl’s all-consuming guilt takes him. The novel’s last pages speak ambiguously about a fire that Karl swears he did not set. But there is no clear fire in the novel only a neglected frayed cable in his son’s room, but there is longing for obliteration; Karl frequently wishes that his home would burn down, he desires to drown, he wishes to “arrive without a trace.”  Obliteration, as he sees it, is the only escape from his labyrinth of moral shame.

—Jason DeYoung

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Jason DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia.  His fiction has appeared or forthcoming in REAL: Regarding Art and Letters, New Orleans Review, The Los Angeles ReviewNuméro Cinq, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

Jason DeYoung


Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. There seems to be a definite nod to Andrei Tarkovsky in Through the Night.  Boris is one of the names of the Strugatsky brothers who wrote the novel Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker was based upon. The movie tells the story of three men traveling to another mysterious room, this time in a place called the Zone, where their greatest desire would be granted. Other similarities with Tarkovsky—notably all the fire and water imagery in Through the Night—make enticing fodder for consideration.
Feb 052013
 

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Self-Control is a disquieting novel of Beckettian stasis that simmers in that prolonged “state of emergency that answers to the name of Humankind.”  Its narrator, inexplicably possessed by sadistic thoughts, off-putting desires, and weaknesses, lives in a constant state of dissatisfaction in a world that seems to take little notice of him. He is man intoxicated by his own pain, an agony that has dulled him to the point of despair, and throughout the novel we witness his (initial?) efforts to confront his reality only to have them thwarted either by those closest to him or by his own self-control.   —Jason DeYoung

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Self-Control
Stig Sæterbakken
Translated by Seán Kinsella
Dalkey Archive Press, 2012
$13.50
154 pages

In response to the question how can we enjoy something sad, Stig Sæterbakken writes in a short essay titled “Why I Always Listen to Such Sad Music”:

I believe disharmony and asymmetry correspond to a disharmony and an asymmetry within us, because we ourselves are not whole, or complete. Because we are never fully and completely ourselves. Because our lacks, our weaknesses, and our fears make up an essential dimension within us. Because our wounds are meant not only for healing, but also the opposite, to be kept open, as part of our receptivity to that which is around us and within us. And because there is also relief in this, not to be healed, not to be cured, melancholia satisfies us by preventing us from reaching satisfaction, it clams us by keeping our anxiety alive, it gives us peace by prolonging the state of emergency, the state of emergency that answers to the name of Humankind.[1]

Self-Control is a disquieting novel of Beckettian stasis that simmers in that prolonged “state of emergency that answers to the name of Humankind.”  Its narrator, inexplicably possessed by sadistic thoughts, off-putting desires, and weaknesses, lives in a constant state of dissatisfaction in a world that seems to take little notice of him. He is man intoxicated by his own pain, an agony that has dulled him to the point of despair, and throughout the novel we witness his (initial?) efforts to confront his reality only to have them thwarted either by those closest to him or by his own self-control.

Influenced by writers such as Poe, Celine, and Georges Bataille, Stig Sæterbakken doesn’t write pretty books nor does he write novels that close with an upstroke of sweetness.  Instead, his novels remind us that there are fates worst than death, namely life—long, horrifically normal life, in which people do not know you and you do not know yourself.  Life in which we cannot find congruence with one another, even though that is what we yearn for the most.

Before he took his own life in 2012, Stig Sæterbakken was renown as one of Norway’s best living novelists—as well as one of its most infamous.  As a writer, Sæterbakken insisted “that literature [be] a free zone, a place where prevailing social morals should not apply…[that] literature exists in a space beyond good and evil where the farthest boundaries of human experience can be explored.” His novels investigate much of what is unflattering about human behavior—evil, which he called “the most human condition of all.” [2]

This exploration of evil bled over into his professional life as the Content Director of the Norwegian Festival of Literature in 2008, when he invited the controversial author and Holocaust denier David Irving to be the keynote speaker for the 2009 festival. The Norwegian press demanded Sæterbakken disinvite Irving and even Norway’s free speech organization Fritt Ord asked that their logo be removed from all of the festival’s publicity. Sæterbakken refused.  He called his colleagues “damned cowards.”  Although reviled by some as a stunt, the David Irving invitation has been seen by others as within keeping with Sæterbakken’s examination of evil.[3]

For all this talk of evil, however, Self-Control is not an evil novel—or I do not perceive it to be—but it does delve into unattractive human behavior, specifically our indifference to the pain of others.  Self-Control is the second novel in Sæterbakken’s S-trilogy, so called because the title of each book starts with an “S”.  The trilogy starts with Siamese, which Dalkey Archive Press published the first English translation of in 2010, and concludes with Sauermugg (not yet available in English). The S-trilogy novels are linked by their exploration of male identity problems, and a “disgusting descent into the hell of human flesh”[4]

Outraged by the complete indifference and self-centered behavior of the people around him, Andreas Felt, the narrator of Self-Control, begins a series of deliberate actions to defy the social norms he sees as the barriers between us. His rampage (of sorts) starts with a lie he tells his daughter that he and her mother are divorcing, a lie that is spontaneous, meant to puncture the “cool…arrogant attitude” his daughter has adopted. Only briefly does his daughter seem touched by this news.

During the second scene of the book, Andreas carries his rampage into his boss’s office.  His boss is a man “five to ten years” his junior, and Andreas thinks to himself that their whole relationship is built upon formalities: “we only need to leave the premises and go to another place…in order to see how ludicrous…how implausible” it all is.  He walks into the office and without provocation calls the man a “little shit” and a “miserable bastard.” He tells him that he is “one of the worst imaginable types of creeps that crawls on the surface of the earth,” reminds him that he got his job through fraud, and that he “probably couldn’t put two words together if someone came up and asked what it is we actually do here.”

Andreas expects dismissal or some sort of reproach.  Instead his boss says simply: “My wife is very ill.”  His boss wants to discuss his wife’s illness, not Andreas’s tantrum.  As with his daughter, Andreas’s expectations are rebuffed, this time by an exchanged of one outpouring of pain for another.  A quick search through this slim novel (154 pages) reveals that the word “expect” shows up fourteen times, and its close cousins “usual” and “usually” appear fourteen times and sixteen times respectively. Self-Control is a novel that shows how our lives are ruled by the “familiar” (a word that appears eleven times), by “habit” (a word that appears eight times), by route and routine (a variation that appears six times).  Granted it is a translated text—but this is a novel of spurned expectations.

What Andreas wants is for our usual, familiar, habitual behavior to go away—a full extirpation of all our hideous decorum. Of a houseguest, Andreas says: “His discretion has always irritated me.”  He imagines leaping upon this man and biting his nose; this thought he says, “cheered me up.” As Georges Bataille writes: “Society is governed by its will to survive…and based on the calculations of interest… it requires [savages] to comply with…reasonable adult conventions which are advantageous to the community.” [5] In Self-Control, characters are govern by social norms, and will not tolerate Andreas.  Where he breaks with custom, others rebuke with conventionality.

Reappearing like a compass heading throughout the novel is the disappearance of a sixteen year-old girl.  The girl goes missing on the same day as the novel begins and lends a sense of imminent tragedy to the narrative.  But the presiding sense of doom in the novel also manifests in Andreas’s almost worshipful attitude toward disaster and catastrophe. When observing his colleague Jens-Olav, who has lost his wife and house and most of his possessions in a recent fire, Andreas thinks: “I didn’t know if it was compassion or envy I felt most. Grief like that…I couldn’t imagine to think of it as anything other than liberation, liberations from all the trivial things that otherwise have such power over you.”  At other times, he lies in bed fantasizing about living through war.  He also desires misfortune on others: “I thought that if I could only mange to find out who [carved an obscene word into the lavatory wall at work] then that person would undergo a transformation, right before my eyes, and it would be a lasting change.”  But his obsession with tragedy is part and parcel with his desire for change. Late in the novel while watching a movie in a theatre for the first time in years, he thinks:

I didn’t want it to end. I wanted a new beginning. Everything over again…fresh and unfamiliar…without any clues as to how it was going to go…what was going to happen…no end. Only beginnings. One after the other. That was the way I wanted it. To know that everything was in front of me. That nothing was decided.

Andreas covets his own sovereignty, but he is fearful of taking real action toward obtaining it. Instead he longingly looks upon tragedy as a source of freedom—“It was as though I was close to exploding with joy over something that in reality was dreadfully sad.”   This promise of tragedy invades his decision making as he put faith into chance occurrences: “if [the traffic light] changes to green while I can still see it then a disaster is going to take place” (page 12); “if a taxi drives by the department store next…then I’ll call [home]” (page 86); “if the next person who goes by the window has a hat on I’ll make the call” (page 90); “if a female newsreader comes on the radio at the top of hour I’ll leave [my wife]” (page 153). When he finally sees someone who has what he wants it is a bum seated a few table over from him, farting:

[T]he power in the eyes of a man who has given up on everything…at least that was what I thought I’d seen in them…one who has nothing left to lose…who has no interest in the workings of the world…and so take people for what they are, not for what he wants them to be… a look so pure and hard and clear that I felt it in the pit of my stomach. Inferior, I felt completely inferior… I felt like a fool, like someone whose development has been at a standstill since his youth and has never been corrected, who’s never been made aware of the grotesque disparity between reality and his perception of reality.

For all his desire to “freshen” life, to be “transformed,” to change the “usual” course of things, Andreas is a man boxed in by self-control, too.  If the reader stops listening to Andreas’s flat, rather monotone torrent of thought for a moment, and thinks about his actions, what we discover is that he is really very similar to those around him.  After he rants to his boss, his boss confesses that his wife is ill.  Andreas can’t show any compassion toward the man, who so clearly desires it, but he does asks “politely” what’s wrong with her, and many of the other “usual” questions one perfunctorily asks when told such news.  During a diner party, Andreas’s guest so plainly wants to enliven the mood. Andreas refuses to play along.  After a meal in a restaurant, where Andreas over tips the waitress, the waitress begins to go on and on about how hard her work is, and she wants to show Andreas the kitchen, which is a terribly confined space, where a sick person, wrapped up like a larva, lingers in a corner.  Again, the social norms are tested—what he seems to want—but our flummoxed narrator retreats.

I’m resisting the urge to spoil Self-Control, because there is a profound silence in it—an important character who doesn’t speak. What I will say is that the final sentence of this novel reveals that one of the worst tragedies that can befall a person has already happened to Andreas, and the end of Self-Control blossoms with complexity only suggested on the previous pages. It is a line that attacks and shakes you from compliancy in Andreas’s nightmare. It is testament of Sæterbakken’s great skill as a writer, too, that he manages to withhold its information for so long and uses it to obliterate our perception of his narrator, to show how insidious Andreas’s stasis is and perhaps how impossible to overcome.

                                                            —Jason DeYoung

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Jason DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia.  His fiction has appeared most recently in Corium, The Los Angeles ReviewNuméro Cinq, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

Jason

 


 

 

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. “Why I Always Listen to Such Sad Music” by Stig Sæterbakken. Literature & Music. Vol. 1, Fall 2012.
  2. “Stig Sæterbakken—Between Good and Evil” by Gabriella Håkansson, Transcript.
  3. I am not trying to defend Sæterbakken’s decision or ethics here, but to give a sense of his character. He does seem to be a person who lived by a code near to Terence’s “I am a human and consider nothing human alien to me.”
  4. “Stig Sæterbakken—Between Good and Evil” by Gabriella Håkansson, Transcript.
  5. Literature and Evil, Georges Bataille. Trans by Alastair Hamilton. Marion Boyars, 1988.