Review: "Encircling 2: Origins" by Carl Frode Tiller

It is safe to say that after reading two books of his proposed Encircling Trilogy, Norwegian writer Carl Frode Tiller has crafted something special: a dichotomous and eye opening look into the dramatic outfalls of our relationship with those around us. Though the eyes of David (someone I am still not quite sure is real or not) and those from his past, Tiller presents the strange, uncovered world that is easy to relate to on this side of the pond, despite the book being so interlinked with the author’s homeland. I’m still amazed at what he is done here with his first book and this one, titled Encircling 2: Origins. He has created a character that contains multitudes but is also an almost pure blank slate. We enter his past through a wide variety of paths but the mystery at the heart of his identity seems to eclipse all of that. He is both his own person with his own history and personality, but he is also us, and acts as a mirror to the way we interact with those around us. Tiller weaves a complex narrative structure out of this seemingly contradictory setup, but he does so by making it as engaging as possible, that forces the reader to linger over passages, to store minor characters away so they can be recalled in an instance once a detail triggers the need. It is an involving read and a draining one, but I felt refreshed and revitalized when I was done, as all good fiction should do. This book is a little different than the first one, which dealt with David’s life as a new adult. This book, longer by about 100 pages, concerns his early life from adolescent to his middle teen years in the mid-80s. Like the first one, it is divided into three sections, composed of first person narration over a few days in July 2006 and an emailed letters responding to David’s add in the paper sent a few days after the corresponding section. The first section belongs to Ole, a struggling farmer living in Otteroya trying to balance life with his younger wife Helen who has just given birth to his first son Daniel, his attempts to connect with Jorgen, Helen’s son from a previous marriage and the relationship with his ailing parents. In the epistolary sections we get a look at David’s life from Ole’s perspective, where we see how deluded Ole was from an early age and how a local tragedy affected the young boys. The second section belongs to Tom Roger, a friend from Namsos, whose inner ramblings give the book a creepy feeling as his relationship to his girlfriend Mona is deteriorating over the course of an awkward family gathering.  In the letters we see a confused Tom who slides effortlessly into delinquency thanks to a careless home life and he speaks of David with the cadence of not-so-hidden jealousy. In the final and shortest section, we see Paula, who is the mother of a minor character in Tom’s section, rotting away in a nursing home, and whose letters harbor a dangerous, disturbing secret. Each section in this book contain certain recurring themes, such as the damage parents inflict on children, past sins coming back to haunt future generations, and the contradictory need of people to both long for company and push said company away. Watching Tiller weave in and out of such ideas and never betraying a misstep is as close to literary bliss as you can get. If you have not checked out these two fantastic books, you are missing out. And it makes me sick with happiness that there is one more book to go. 

Rating: 5/5

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