Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... Tales of Protection (1998)by Erik Fosnes Hansen
   No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) deblemrc | Nov 9, 2018 |   ) martinhughharvey | Jan 21, 2014 | A theme is "seriality" -- concerned with the tendency of events to recur separated by time or space. This can be drawn out from the different threads to some extent, but the reader will lose little by just reading it through and not worrying about this. What stands out for me is intellectual content which is lively and readable, just what I'd hope for in a good novel. (  )1  rrmmff2000 | Dec 29, 2011 | It's rare that i want to re-read a book immediately after finishing it, just to be able to concentrate on some other aspect of it, and I'm not going to do so, for fear of not enjoying it as much, but instead wait a bit. Cleanse the palate, as it were. The book has a weird sort of delicate mustiness to the language and I wonder if that stems from the translated nature of the text, if the flow was different in the original language, or if the original language possesses some flavor i'm entirely unaware of. omnia_mutantur | Dec 15, 2011 |  ) x57 | Aug 13, 2011 |
 To make a multiplicity of coincidences at once startling and cohesive is an extraordinarily difficult task. In narrow terms, I do not think Hansen quite succeeds. The binding story, of Lea and her great-uncle, is too strange to possess the representative qualities that would justify the stories that follow. Both the supporting evidence for the book's theory, and the evocation of its different worlds, are accorded such a wealth of detail as to give the reader an often fatiguing sense of satiation. These, however, are faults of presentation rather than imagination. Hansen is a writer of genuine depth of feeling and width of interest.  The craft of 19th-century fiction and the complexity of 20th-century thought make this a gloriously rewarding novel. Awards
Tales of Protection is a novel about people in different places in different epochs -contemporary Norway, nineteenth-century Sweden, and Renaissance Italy -whose stories are bound together by the author's original and searching enquiry into why things happen the way they do.As the book opens, a dead man lies in his coffin reflecting on the past. Bolt was an eccentric scientist who devoted his old age to a vast research undertaking -collecting random incidents from the history of the species and finding the underlying pattern that connects them. This kind of hindsight, after all, must be a kind of heaven -or a kind of hell.His reveries lead him to tell two other tales -one of a doomed lighthouse keeper on a Swedish island and another of rivalry among Renassiance artists -and finally to tell a startling tale from his own early manhood. All of the tales, in his exquisitely suspenseful narration, demonstrate his theory of 'seriality', which is the opposite of causality.Erik Fosnes Hansen's Psalm at Journey's End was acclaimed as one of the most original works yet about the sinking of the Titanic. In Norway, Tales of Protection has been called a 'Blixenesque' masterpiece; it is a major new work of world literature, and a great leap forward for this gifted young writer. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)839.82374Literature German and related languages Other Germanic literatures Danish and Norwegian literatures Norwegian literature Norwegian Bokmål fiction 1900–2000 Late 20th century 1945–2000LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.06)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English
1