Review: "Encircling" by Carl Frode Tiller

It has been awhile since I have come across something as fiercely original, inventive and fun to read as Carl Frode Tiller’s Encircling, the first in a trilogy I cannot wait to dive deeper into. Though deceptively simple in nature, the narrative, broken up between prose passages and what I assume to be letters or emails, offers up a world of ideas that are seemingly infinite, building on top of one another an ever deepening well of thoughts on subjects as diverse as identity, memory, perception and the shaky bonds of a broken family. While it does mention the series on the back, I couldn’t help thinking about Karl Ove Knausgard’s gigantic 3600 page, six-part self-referential novel My Struggle and how different it is from a book like this. While I liked both, I found My Struggle, at least the first book in the series to be a rather solipsistic experiment whose effects wore off soon after the 100 page mark, but Tiller’s novel sustains its unique breathe and speed, offering new ideas and ways of looking at events that belays the world’s complexity. It reminds me of the first time I read the novels Paul Auster and Daniel Kehlmann: the gleeful feeling of finding an author whose view of the world around them is both compassionate and all-encompassing. At the center of Encircling and what I assume to be the other two preceding novels is the character of David who has recently lost his memory. What sets him apart from any other main character I have come across in recent books is that we never really get to see David really at all, at least not as a flesh and blood character. All we know about him is gained from the letters written by the three people who answered an ad he placed in the paper, Jon his former best friend, Arvid, his stepdad and Silje, his former girlfriend. This setup begs a lot of questions, all which are rich and detailed. Is everything each of the three people say about David true? Are the personal biases clouding their judgment of events? Do they even know David? Is David even a real person? I enjoy books like this that creates such interesting ambiguities that offer rich questions instead of cheap answers. But if the book were only as good as its unique structure I wouldn’t be raving about as much as I am. In between the long letters are passages that give us a glimpse into the shattered lives of each character, all with dates that take place before the letters are written. Jon is a failed musician and closed homosexual who comes home to his mother and is berated by his brother, a successful right wing politician. Arvid is laid up in the hospital and craves human contact. Silje is in a loveless marriage whose only enjoyment is lying to him about affairs she is not having. Each prose section informs on its epistolary counterpart, which crafts a view of the unseen David as both unquestionably faceless and full of an infinite number of possible character traits. A sullen yet funny book about our crushed hopes and dreams, our fractured families and the ones we tend to blame and project our faults onto in the worst of times, this is an explosively fun novel I hope gets wider recognition ASAP. 
Rating: 5/5