The Quiet Girl (2006)

This complex, philosophical, literary thriller with a musical, famous circus clown as its action hero is a dizzying, but riveting read. I'm not sure I've read anything quite like it. Sometimes I felt I was being used as a pin in a juggling act.

Kasper Krone, the clown, is being pursued by the Danish government for his gambling debts and tax evasion, and will face deportation if they catch him. Kasper is 42, brilliant, and possesses an unusual sense of hearing; he can sense a "world of sounds" behind physical sound, including the music within each of us. This special ability has a variety of uses, one of which involves helping children. An unusual young girl is briefly brought to him for help. She has a certain 'silence' that captures Kasper's attention and he knows he must find her. Turns out she and a group of children have been kidnapped. He sets out and is soon being pursued by almost everyone for one reason or another. Circus people have some interesting resources and abilities. His de-facto 'sidekick' is a a former race car driver who now is a legless, for-hire driver. The number of players in this book can be confusing - the ministry, the scientists, the corporation, the doctor, the police, the circus contacts, and family members and ex-girlfriends. Oh, and the nuns (are they really nuns?).

Alternating between action sequences and back story, The Quiet Girl is beautifully written with a wry humor, and is both fascinating and strangely thoughtful. Kasper's musings on sound, music and silence are philosophical and often mystical. It's a challenging read and might not be for everyone, but I found it thoroughly invigorating.

------
Excerpt. In a back story segment, Kasper has told his lover, Stina, how he came to have his unusual hearing and she has asked him what keeps the rest of us from hearing what he hears:

It took him a long time to reply. Only once before had he spoken about this to another person.

In order to live in this world we need to keep an orchestra playing. Way in the foreground. It's a small dance orchestra. It always plays its own melody. It plays the golden oldie 'Kasper Krone.' Which has a series of refrains that are repeated over and over. Again and again it plays our bank account numbers, our childhood memories, our PIN numbers, the sound of our mother's and father's voices. The pale-green strophes we hope will be the future. The black noise we have good reason to suppose will be our actual reality. It plays continuously, like a heartbeat. But when the other sound begins to come through, you discover that you've been standing with your back to the true concert hall the whole time. We live in a sort of lobby. Where we can faintly hear the great orchestra. And that sound, just the embouchure to a sound from the real concert hall, makes the Mass in B-Minor disappear. Like a whisper in windy weather. It's a sound that sweeps away the din of war. It drowns the music of the spheres. It takes away all the sounds of reality. And at the same time as you vaguely hear the great orchestra, you vaguely sense the price of the ticket. When the door to the real concert hall begins to open you discover that perhaps you were mistaken. That Kasper Krone exists only because your ears continue to isolate the same little refrain from the collected mass of sound. That in order to preserve Kasper and Stina we've turned down the input from other channels to pianissimo. But that's about to change. And you can feel it. If you want to go inside, it will be the most expensive concert tickets anyone has ever bought. It will cost you the sound of your own self. ( )

I am comforted that I wasn't the only reviewer that struggled with this book. Finishing it was a personal triumph. I was sorely tempted to pack it in 100 pages in, but I gritted my teeth and around page 200 I started feeling like I had a glimpse of plot to follow. Frankly, I never felt like I knew exactly what was happening, but the language was beautiful and Kasper was just intriguing enough with his weird sense of hearing the musical key of the people and places around him that I persevered. Very glad to have finished it, though. I've always wanted to read Smilla's Sense of Snow...now, I'm not so sure. ( )

tanslators are an underappreciated lot. When they’re bad, we mock them and when they’re good, we ignore them. Nadia Christensen displays all the athleticism of a champion wrestler in pinning down Peter Høeg’s new book, The Quiet Girl, and credit must be paid.
For this reviewer, it’s also a disclaimer, for while the book is a breathless display of language and idea, I couldn’t quite hold onto it. The cityscape of Copenhagen, the blues and blacks and whites and grays of its modern, impersonal architecture, the midnight fringes where outsiders linger – it rears up at you, but I was constantly aware of a language and culture hidden behind the words that I could not reach.
Perhaps this sense of alienation would please Høeg and, indeed, please his main character, a deep-in-debt circus clown named Kasper. Kasper is a genius of sorts, blessed with the ability to hear on a deeper level than any around him. He might be able to tell you the mechanisms of a watch in a pocket, the mood of his lover, or the specific geography of a place.
It’s a clever stylistic move. For as we follow Kasper’s involvement in a bewildering conspiracy to do with a missing girl and a group of special children, we are privy to thoughts and feelings that a normal person would be hard pressed to describe:
“Kasper could hear the intimacy between his parents, and also the passion, the caution. He would not have had a word for it. But he was able to sense that if you want to have the experience of a home that’s meaningful and open and natural, like Bach’s music and the big cats on the savannah, it costs something…”
Kasper’s hearing attunes him to becoming a legendary performer in the ring but it also makes him vulnerable to those who want to abuse his talents for their own gain. Chopping and changing between the past and present, Høeg takes us into a labyrinth of untrustworthy lovers, odd coincidences, show business precepts, child kidnappings, nuns with symphonic personalities, and philosophic musings:
“Balance and prayer are self-confrontational. Behind the muscular and spiritual exertion there must be a point of effortless calm. At that point you meet yourself.”


Using his hearing as a detective tool and taking advantage of skills learned in the circus, Kasper charms, talks, fights, and wriggles his way through the book. While he searches for the titular girl, whose gift of silence is an uncanny counterpoint to the noise that surrounds him, the omnipresent forces of authority and greed try to catch him.
Confused? I was. The book is billed as a taut thriller, but it’s hardly that. A cry against the depersonalizing forces of society, yes; a strange mixture of gratuitous violence and haphazardly funny escapes, sure; an dazzling exploration of sounds in language, quite; but it has none of the crisp bite, the pared pace of a conventional thriller.
Does it matter? Well, if we go by the title, yes, it does. The quiet girl is the hinge on which Kasper’s life changes (and perhaps a literary comment on the recent crimes against children in Northern Europe).
Yet we are only given a few instances when they meet face-to-face and their moments of intimacy are fleeting. A thriller is often a race, but without the understanding of exactly why this girl is so great a prize, it makes it harder to follow the runner.
Høeg was a dancer and actor before turning writer and father, so it’s hard not to cross the line between fiction and reality. Does Høeg manifest the same irresistible magnetism and subsequent uneasiness with women as Kasper? Is Kasper’s tender relationship with his dying father, a small spot of calm in the book’s maelstrom, a reflection of Høeg’s own experiences?
And what should one make of Kasper as professional clown, as the archetype who traditionally stands outside of society and comments on its inadequacies? Surely there’s an argument to be made that Høeg as an author wants to fulfill a similar function.
If this is the case, I might wish to ask Høeg why he chose to combine Kasper’s sensitive exploration of his life and work with an acidic, almost Viking-inspired, focus on bruises and bullets.
Is it an echo of an old Scandinavian sensibility, the same that inspires Hamlet’s bloodbath? Or a modern comment on the dispensability of human life? More importantly, does it make the book, already a fibrous knot of structure and purpose, any stronger?
I’d have to ask him in Danish, of course, after I’ve learned the language, read the book in the original, and lived in Copenhagen for, say, ten years. Until then, as a reviewer I’m remaining dissatisfied, both with the book and my own cultural deafness.
Elinor Teele

weird but wonderful, clowns, science fiction, mystery the works ( )

Abandonded p150

I really wanted to enjoy this as it came highly recommended by a friend whose opinions I usually respect. But I could not seem penetrate the storyline, I never really felt that I understood what was going on.

Kasper Krone is (was?) a circus clown, seemingly quite famous, and also a talented violinist. At some point he has made enough money that the Inland Revenue is after him for tax evasion. He seems to be constantly just ahead of them, just out of reach, thanks to the help of various random people who he phones out of the blue, and a lot of luck.
There is also the Quiet Girl of the title, KlaraMaria, 9 years old, who drifts in and out of his life on some random chronology that I was unable to fathom. He is drawn to her because she has extrasensory abilities. She seems to be living with nuns, has apparently been kidnapped, yet is able to suddenly appear in his caravan, unaccompanied.
Kasper also has the ability to garner all sorts of information about people and places by their musical note, something that I found overused, well beyond the boundaries of believability. On top of this Kasper seems to have this amazing power over women by just flattering them - when actually, as a character he really has no appeal at all.

I'm really not at all clear what is going on, it's like reading a book through a haze. The coincidences are just piling up and my tolerance is failing. Enough is enough, I'm on to my next book! ( )