The Exception

An ambitious effort that often succeeds. At the broadest level, it's about the human capacity for genocide. Closer in, it's about the psychological determinants - individual and group - that make specific instances of genocide possible. Closer in again, it's about a group of people working for a NGO that studies and raises awareness about genocide. At the level of the group that works in the NGO, it's about the group dynamics that drive relatively ordinary people to extreme cruelty. At the level of the individuals within the group, it's about who's crazy and who's not, and how we can ever hope to know the difference.

Super ambitious, and does leave you completely unbalanced, in the "what just happened?" sense. Well done!

For me personally, this is a 5 star book, though it is not a book I would recommend to just anyone. Subject matter can at times be harsh.
I would lump this in a Secret History/The Likeness/Natsuo Kirino's Out category. The category of a "normal" or good person doing evil things and how that manifests within them. This was a very slow book to start and patience will win out. There are some very tense parts of the book and at times I felt there were some very Hitchcock like moments. The slow simmer builds and reaches a full boil that has left me now after finishing putting the sequence of events/reality of events together. The articles within on genocide are at times hard to read due to their harshness, but at other times very interesting show more in their psychology, and they definitely run parallel to the main story. I am expecting this to be optioned for a movie and will hope that it is a foreign film (at least first, ala the Stieg Larsson books). I expect I will re-read this, in whole or part, to see it through new eyes. This one will stay with me for a while. show less

I'm somewhat surprised at the rather negative reviews of what I found a riveting read. The German edition has 666 pages but I still finished the book within a couple of days -- it's a real page-turner. The story is told from the POV of Iben, Malene, Anne-Lise and Camilla, four employees at a genocide information centre in Denmark. All of them are unreliable narrators to some extent and it's fascinating to watch the same events seen from different perspectives. While some aspects of the ending are a bit over the top (methinks the writer had painted himself into a corner somewhat), I finished the book profoundly grateful for the fact that I'm self-employed and don't have to share an office with anyone.:)

But apart from the workplace show more situation and all the office politics, the book raises questions about the nature of friendship and relationships between men and women. I often found myself asking what I would have done in Anne-Lise's situation, for example. If you have ever been at the receiving or the giving end of a mobbing situation (and having gone to school, who hasn't?) or lost a best friend or feared losing her or been in a relationship where the power balance was severely out of whack, this book's for you. show less

A slow slog that left me feeling unconnected (and unconcerned) with any of the characters. I get the themes and the connections that the author was trying to make (human capacity for evil (and good) in extraordinary or stressful circumstances) but the execution didn't wow me. And the end made me feel like this book couldn't decide if it wanted to be a page-turning best seller or deeper commentary on humanity so it decided to do both but poorly.

Four women work together in a genocide information centre in Copenhagen. One day, two of them receive emailed death threats. At first, they assume the threats are from one of the mass murderers they've written about, but then booby traps appear in the office, and they start to mistrust each other. As the relationships between them deteriorate, things get worse and worse...

In a nutshell, the novel argues that all of us have deep-rooted fears and concerns, which if played upon can lead us to irrational behaviour - and when taken to extremes, this is what leads to genocide. It's an interesting idea, but I have two problems with it:

- first, the execution. The book's focused on its didactic intent, and everything is just so implausible - show more from the main story development to the little details (if you thought you were being victimised by work colleagues, would you really start reading about the psychopathology of evil?). Also, the writing (or the translation) is very clunky, and the characters are pretty annoying.

- secondly, I don't really buy the proposition that, say, reacting irrationally if you think your more attractive friend is interested in the same guy you are is *really* on the same spectrum as clubbing your neighbours to death. Or if it is, it's so far the other end of the spectrum as makes no difference.

So, an interesting rather than enjoyable read for me.

Recommended for: someone who is interested in ideas about the nature of evil. show less

Four women work at the Danish Centre for Genocide Information. Iben and Malene are old friends from University who are now project officers at the Centre, Camilla is secretary to the Centre’s Director and Anna-Lise, the newest member of staff, is the librarian. Iben and Malene receive death threats via email and attempt to work out whether the source of the threats was one of the war criminals they have written about as part of their work or someone within their own office. Chapters told from each of the women’s point of view build up a picture of how psychological stress impacts on a fairly closed micro-environment.

This turned out to be one of those books that, for several reasons, sounded like a better idea than it turned out to show more be in reality. For a start I have a vague uneasiness about books in which all the female characters are portrayed with varying degrees of mental instability, especially when the book is authored by a bloke. Although I don’t really think that in this instance anything sinister is meant by the depictions, it wasn’t that many years ago when ‘all women are crazy’ was considered a legitimate medical opinion (I read loads of such sentiments in my days as an archivist). A good deal of the behaviour depicted here would have had misogynists everywhere nodding sagely and murmuring about women staying at home where they belong. So while the psychological breakdown of each character was well done I would have preferred that at least one of the women had turned out not to be a sex-obsessed, blithering mess (or worse).

Also, as is often the case these days I thought the book was too long. At many points in the story a load of detail about some minor tangent was incorporated and even though some of these were interesting most did nothing to progress the story. At 300-350 pages and minus trivia about who sat next to whom at a conference and how many meals of frozen cod were microwaved I would have found the book far more suspenseful.

I read a good deal of translated fiction and normally don’t notice it except to marvel at a skill I could never hope to achieve. However in this instance I found the language to be rather formal. I know we Aussies have a tendency towards laziness with our particular adaptation of the lingo but I don’t know of any place where English is the primary language that would talk of someone ‘fixing herself a portion of cereal’ for example. It felt to me as if the book had been translated into a sort of dictionary version of the language that no one actually speaks and this gave it a quite unnatural quality.

Finally there was my all too familiar disappointment with the ending. Even allowing for the slightly fantastical element provided by a psychological melt down the ending wasn’t in keeping with the rest of the book. A fairly standard thriller-ish conclusion was bolted on to three quarters of a psychological suspense novel in a way that didn’t suit either style and I found this quite unsatisfying. It did keep me guessing though so I have to give some marks for that.

The structure of the book, which included several articles supposedly written by Iben about the psychology of evil in addition to the different points of view, worked surprisingly well and I was both fascinated and horrified by the parts of the book that dealt with all the genocides in our planet’s history. However this made me more tempted to seek out some non-fiction about yet another subject I appear to be woefully ignorant of rather than keen to read another book by this author. show less

Another in the ever expanding sub-genre of Scandinavian thrillers with incredibly stilted dialog, terrible translation, improbable coincidences, pop psychology, insufferable hi-tech and current event references, and self-absorbed intellectual proselytizers out to save the world. Too bad since the premise is interesting and the story does kind of grow on you by the end.