Winner of the Nordic Prize 1999 So how do the pieces of a life fit together? Or, to put it another way: do they fit together at all? Jonas Wergeland is a successful TV documentary producer and also something of God's gift to women, with balls of gold, as one newspaper puts it. One day he returns from the world's fair in Seville and discovers his wife dead on the living room floor. What follows is a quest to find the killer but more than that this is a whimsical look at how our hero has arrived at this particular juncture in a life full of twists and turns. Like the time a cruise ship nearly ran him down as a child. 'Now, however, he was on board an old lifeboat, examining a row of union layers arranged on a plate, before finally looking up to meet the eye of an old actor, well-oiled by now, who lit another Camel and was soon enveloped in a cocoon of smoke. "Be a duke," he repeated, but Jonas has lost the thread, he had caught a whiff of danger, although he could not have said what it might be: a drifting iceberg perhaps, or the Skipper Clement, now only a few hundred metres away from them in the darkness and looking, from the shore, like a resplendent floating palace.'
This post-modernist Norwegian novel, an international best-seller and winner of Scandinavia's top literary award, the Nordic Prize, will have you on the edge of your seat, as Jan Kjaerstad weaves his magic wand. Prepare to be seduced.