Search results for ""Author Stig Sæterbakken""

Inspector Kristian Wold is assigned to a year-old missing person’s case. His superiors’ instructions are clear: one last review before they shelve it. Neverthe- less, when the mother of the 14-year-old missing girl asks to see him, his conscience gets the better of him and he agrees to a meeting; a meeting that has unfore- seen consequences for both of them.

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Edwin Mortens is almost blind, but has good hearing; his wife Erna is hard of hearing, but has excellent eyes. Paralyzed from the waist down, Edwin sits locked in his bathroom all day, every day, trying to liberate his mind from his body. The experiment is going relatively well: nearly all his bodily functions have ceased, his limbs are in a state of decay, and his digestive system is in the process of breaking down. “This body,” he says, “is a sewer.” To pass the time, Edwin dedicates his days to chewing gum and screaming at his wife, on whom he is, nonetheless, entirely dependent; while Erna’s life, despite Edwin’s constant abuse, revolves around her hideous husband. Edwin and Erna live in a state of perfect equilibrium—fueled by habit, cruelty, humiliation, and quite possibly love—until a young maintenance man is called to replace a lightbulb in Edwin’s bathroom, and the “Siamese twins” find themselves embroiled in a new and vicious struggle for power.

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When seventeen-year-old Aksel Morander encounters Amalie, it proves a turning point in his life. Not only does he fall in love for the first time, but he is introduced to a world unfamiliar and unconventional, which places everything around him in a new light. Finding himself raised up from the loneliness and darkness of what has gone before, he is forced to reassess all he holds dear as he is initiated into what makes life worth living. But jealousy and fear of abandonment lurk in the shadow of this first love. An intense novel about loneliness and agonizing passion, employing a reverse chronology that moves toward a fateful beginning.

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The Marquis de Sade is alive and well and living in Sweden—or perhaps author Nikanor Teratologen is the devil himself, sending the English-speaking world a Scandinavian squib to remind readers that such reassuring figures as vampires and serial killers are no more frightening than pixies or unicorns in light of the depravity contained in one quiet suburb. Reading like a deranged hybrid of Deliverance, Naked Lunch, and Tuesdays with Morrie, and rivaling The 120 Days of Sodom in its challenge to our assumptions as to what is acceptable (or not) in literature, Assisted Living presents us with a series of queasy anecdotes concerning an eleven-year-old boy and his grandfather, a monster for whom murder, violence, incest, drunkenness, and philosophy all pass as equally valid ways to spend one’s time. Whether it’s a study in excess, a parody of provincial proto-fascism, a clear-eyed look at evil, or simply a prodigious literary dare, Assisted Living is unlikely to leave you indifferent.

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