The Scapegoat

If I had to describe The Scapegoat in one word, that word would be 'substantial'. The book isn't long nor is its prose dense, but it's packed with implicit questions, speculations, and observations. You could with justice call it a novel of ideas. You could with equal justice call it an existential novel: Borgen addresses the choice to be made between action and inaction, the way that that choice changes us, the nature of personal freedom, and the quest for authenticity. But since he also deals with fracturing of the self, with a need for guilt so strong that only punishment can relieve it, and with confusion between past, present, and future, you could just call it a book of great substance.

The Scapegoat is divided into three sections. show more In the first part the protagonist, Matias Roos, stands near his remote cabin in a forest watching himself walk away to fetch the motorcycle he'll ride into the city, perhaps colliding with and killing a child along the way. The Matias who left home is in the second and longest portion of the book on the run because of a different crime and hoping to cross a frontier. Refused permission, he is given a bed in a nearby boarding-house, a stiflingly and memorably hellacious place. There Roos is subjected to figures from and memories of his past. And the final section of the novel shows Matias finally having his guilt accepted, wrongly, by others before he returns to the cabin in the woods where Matias awaits him. And, in keeping, the reader has choices to make (or refuse to make): Was part of this story hallucinated? dreamed? a fantasy? was it all unreal? did Matias in fact never leave home?

Because I fear I might have made Scapegoat seem difficult to follow, I'm giving an excerpt to show the simplicity of its prose and the--at least occasional--directness in the presentation of its themes:

'Events repeat themselves. Sometimes I ask myself, are we all repeats? Don't we pass through life more and more like shadows, first of ourselves, then of the shadow? Our individuality, where does it go? It turns into a caricature. I, Antoinette Skarseth, must have been somebody once, unique. . .[but now seem] a caricature, a simplification. What is left? Bigotry. And what is left of me? . . . . An echo all my life perhaps, for all I know.'

If this all sounds unappealing you might consider reading Borgen's Lillelord--it too is very good but its content is more straightforward and traditional. show less

I had to give up on this. I left my bookmark in place if I ever return, but it just did not sustain my interest. Disappointing.