The Quiet GirlThe Quiet Girl
[a Novel]
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Audiobook CD, 2007
Current format, Audiobook CD, 2007, , No Longer Available.Audiobook CD, 2007
Current format, Audiobook CD, 2007, , No Longer Available. Offered in 0 more formatsWith his cool intelligence, James Gale is an ideal choice to read Hoeg's latest intellectual thriller. Like Smilla's Sense of Snow, Hoeg has created a Fellini-like world of bizarre and dreamlike landscapes and events. Gale wisely underplays just enough to make listeners eager to find out more. In a flooded part of Copenhagen, Kasper Krone-a famous clown, psychic and passionate lover of the music of Bach-has run afoul of the tax authorities and faces deportation. But a bureaucrat from the Kafkaesque "Department H" promises to make the charges disappear if Krone will help them locate a young girl who was once Krone's pupil, now being looked after by a society of nuns. Gale guides the characters through a tangled tale of music and mystery without missing a beat or overstating a point. Gale makes Krone a wonderful mixture of motives and passions, and his villainous bureaucrat reeks with the banality of evil. Simultaneous release with the FSG hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 3). (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
A circus star with magical hearing tries to find a missing child. IN hot pursuit of cold-blooded kidnappers, the Danish clown Kasper Krone - the hero of Peter Hoeg's new novel - is shot in the stomach, has his head split open and breaks a wrist and several teeth. Yet as he lies in his hospital cot, slurping soup and leering at an African nun (how could he resist, since her sensuality projects "the energy of an Olatunji drum solo, of a gnu trampling through the rain forest"), he's able to transcend his physical pain and ponder the transmigration of bouillon: "It was beef soup; it tasted of eternal life and of the fact that all living beings consume one another." There hasn't been a day in 20 years when Kasper hasn't longed to "give up," to leave Copenhagen for good - to "withdraw his savings. Take off for the Fiji Islands. Develop an opium habit. Listen to cello sonatas on the stereo and fade out on the beach." You have to wonder what stopped him. An ordinary person hesitates to leave everyday life and run off to join the circus. But if you're already in the circus, what's holding you back? "The Quiet Girl" is the sort of foreign fiction that makes literary translation such a shaky enterprise, sentencing worthy unseen works to the slush pile and dooming the world's linguists to penury and part-time restaurant jobs. The tragedy of the appearance of this Danish volume on our shores, in our tongue, is that every time a book like "The Quiet Girl" surfaces, sputtering, from foreign seas, the chances diminish that a future work of broader appeal - say, a deftly calibrated thriller like "Smilla's Sense of Snow," Hoeg's muchadmired earlier novel - will make the journey. "Smilla's Sense of Snow," an international best seller and later a film, was a Rubik's Cube of sub-Arctic secrets, translated into crystalline, complex, sharpedged English by Tuna Nunnally. Run through her laconic legato, Hoeg's images shimmered. A snowy roof shone with "a diffuse glitter like brilliant little gray beads," while Denmark's wintry sea "enclosed the salt water in pockets," its icy tendrils extending "like the veins of a tree through which the liquid slowly seeps." Can it be entirely the fault of Nadia Christensen, the translator of "The Quiet Girl," that the book's English incarnation, like a restaurant menu Hoeg describes in its pages, is too often "thoroughly spiritualized, shocking and on the border between equilibristic and unconscionable"? The blame must also reside with the author, but the translator hasn't helped. In her gloss, a woman is "blond as a glacier," the light over gardens is "special" and the African nun Kasper ogles is, at one point, referred to as "the little black sweetie." Priding himself on a tolerant, even (as he sees it) saintly, nature, Kasper is predisposed to forgive other people's missteps. "Who," he asks himself, "has the right to be another's executioner?" After all, he reflects, "who says the universe isn't just one big hurdy-gurdy?" Even early on, the impulse to grab a hurdy-gurdy and bash him over the head becomes nearly overpowering. The premise of the novel is that Kasper has a preternaturally keen sense of hearing, attuned to microscopic physical and emotional nuances. At the time we meet him, a band of psychic prepubescent children has been terrorizing Denmark (or vice-versa; first causes are never completely revealed), playing havoc with the Copenhagen real-estate market. Because Kasper's human-dog-whistle qualities grant him an eerie rapport with the magical moppets - particularly a 10-year-old nymphet named KlaraMaria - an occult government office, in league with a cabal of venal thugs, wayward nuns and stern midwives, begins to hound him. As if by design, the creepy clown and the clairvoyant kids start to bump into one another. During a chance meeting, while feeding KlaraMaria pasta, Kasper senses her entry into puberty: "He could hear her body's growth processes, tissue building up, the future reprogramming of her hormonal system - still a few years away, but nevertheless begun." His powers also work on riper prey. While tracking a villain named Kain, Kasper eavesdrops on the man's libido. "It was more than interesting," he notes. "Masculine, with a strong feminine overtone. He would have been able to get any woman. And most men." Kain's emotional register sounds "broad, nuanced and explosive" and also "very light and very dark, evenly divided, as in the case of Mozart." At night, pondering the imponderable during a lull in the manand-child hunt, listening to the "strain on the electricity grid decrease, the water usage diminish," Rasper gently mocks himself: "Do we ever hear anything other than our own monstrous ego and the immense filter of our personality?" Good question. THERE'S no fair reason to protest an author's decision to mingle the real and the supernatural, the savory and the unsavory, the secular and the religious. Yann Martel's shaggy-tiger story, "Life of Pi," took many such liberties without exhausting the reader's patience, and Thomas Pynchon has played similar games for decades. But Hoeg isn't Pynchon. Nor, in this case, is he the Hoeg his readers might have expected. He has written five previous works of fiction. "Smilla's Sense of Snow," his third, was the first to be translated into English, and this novel is his first in a decade. (His last novel, "The Woman and the Ape," received modest critical acclaim.) Hoeg's sustained powers of invention aren't in dispute. But, lacking the economy of characterization and rationing of coincidence that gave "Smilla's Sense of Snow" its quirky potency, "The Quiet Girl" comes off as senselessly convoluted and thuddingly portentous. Overburdened with embarrassing truisms ("Part of the secret of love is concentration and setting voluntary limits"; "Hell: It's not a place. Hell is transportable"), the narrative frequently lurches toward pedophilia and other unwelcome displays of sexual perversity. When Kasper first meets KlaraMaria, he offers her Neuhaus chocolates and jokes, "Have a child-molester candy." Later, grievously wounded and in a wheelchair, he discourses on mortality with an august septuagenarian he calls the Blue Lady, then somehow rises up and positions himself "astride her, the way a woman might straddle a man. 'Will you let me touch your breasts?'" he asks. Encountering a group of children who may cause earthquakes through their paranormal powers, Kasper sees them as "10-to-14-year-old sex offenders who have been caught in the act." Weirdly, they summon thoughts of "beach fleas on a whale of submerged powers we can't control." More than a decade ago, Smilla, on her journey through the frozen north, compared the Danish sun to the face of a clown, "both menacing and full of laughter," who turns his countenance on children, "alien, gruesome and joyous." Her queer rapture translated to the wider world. But can the wider world share in the fantasy of Hoeg's menacing clown? Or is Rasper's fantasy like the frigid Copenhagen April that wraps "Siberian sadness" around his heart, something that "could be only in Denmark"? If so, perhaps it should have stayed there. The hero of Hoeg's novel has a strange rapport with a band of psychic children. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
A circus star with magical hearing tries to find a missing child. IN hot pursuit of cold-blooded kidnappers, the Danish clown Kasper Krone - the hero of Peter Hoeg's new novel - is shot in the stomach, has his head split open and breaks a wrist and several teeth. Yet as he lies in his hospital cot, slurping soup and leering at an African nun (how could he resist, since her sensuality projects "the energy of an Olatunji drum solo, of a gnu trampling through the rain forest"), he's able to transcend his physical pain and ponder the transmigration of bouillon: "It was beef soup; it tasted of eternal life and of the fact that all living beings consume one another." There hasn't been a day in 20 years when Kasper hasn't longed to "give up," to leave Copenhagen for good - to "withdraw his savings. Take off for the Fiji Islands. Develop an opium habit. Listen to cello sonatas on the stereo and fade out on the beach." You have to wonder what stopped him. An ordinary person hesitates to leave everyday life and run off to join the circus. But if you're already in the circus, what's holding you back? "The Quiet Girl" is the sort of foreign fiction that makes literary translation such a shaky enterprise, sentencing worthy unseen works to the slush pile and dooming the world's linguists to penury and part-time restaurant jobs. The tragedy of the appearance of this Danish volume on our shores, in our tongue, is that every time a book like "The Quiet Girl" surfaces, sputtering, from foreign seas, the chances diminish that a future work of broader appeal - say, a deftly calibrated thriller like "Smilla's Sense of Snow," Hoeg's muchadmired earlier novel - will make the journey. "Smilla's Sense of Snow," an international best seller and later a film, was a Rubik's Cube of sub-Arctic secrets, translated into crystalline, complex, sharpedged English by Tuna Nunnally. Run through her laconic legato, Hoeg's images shimmered. A snowy roof shone with "a diffuse glitter like brilliant little gray beads," while Denmark's wintry sea "enclosed the salt water in pockets," its icy tendrils extending "like the veins of a tree through which the liquid slowly seeps." Can it be entirely the fault of Nadia Christensen, the translator of "The Quiet Girl," that the book's English incarnation, like a restaurant menu Hoeg describes in its pages, is too often "thoroughly spiritualized, shocking and on the border between equilibristic and unconscionable"? The blame must also reside with the author, but the translator hasn't helped. In her gloss, a woman is "blond as a glacier," the light over gardens is "special" and the African nun Kasper ogles is, at one point, referred to as "the little black sweetie." Priding himself on a tolerant, even (as he sees it) saintly, nature, Kasper is predisposed to forgive other people's missteps. "Who," he asks himself, "has the right to be another's executioner?" After all, he reflects, "who says the universe isn't just one big hurdy-gurdy?" Even early on, the impulse to grab a hurdy-gurdy and bash him over the head becomes nearly overpowering. The premise of the novel is that Kasper has a preternaturally keen sense of hearing, attuned to microscopic physical and emotional nuances. At the time we meet him, a band of psychic prepubescent children has been terrorizing Denmark (or vice-versa; first causes are never completely revealed), playing havoc with the Copenhagen real-estate market. Because Kasper's human-dog-whistle qualities grant him an eerie rapport with the magical moppets - particularly a 10-year-old nymphet named KlaraMaria - an occult government office, in league with a cabal of venal thugs, wayward nuns and stern midwives, begins to hound him. As if by design, the creepy clown and the clairvoyant kids start to bump into one another. During a chance meeting, while feeding KlaraMaria pasta, Kasper senses her entry into puberty: "He could hear her body's growth processes, tissue building up, the future reprogramming of her hormonal system - still a few years away, but nevertheless begun." His powers also work on riper prey. While tracking a villain named Kain, Kasper eavesdrops on the man's libido. "It was more than interesting," he notes. "Masculine, with a strong feminine overtone. He would have been able to get any woman. And most men." Kain's emotional register sounds "broad, nuanced and explosive" and also "very light and very dark, evenly divided, as in the case of Mozart." At night, pondering the imponderable during a lull in the manand-child hunt, listening to the "strain on the electricity grid decrease, the water usage diminish," Rasper gently mocks himself: "Do we ever hear anything other than our own monstrous ego and the immense filter of our personality?" Good question. THERE'S no fair reason to protest an author's decision to mingle the real and the supernatural, the savory and the unsavory, the secular and the religious. Yann Martel's shaggy-tiger story, "Life of Pi," took many such liberties without exhausting the reader's patience, and Thomas Pynchon has played similar games for decades. But Hoeg isn't Pynchon. Nor, in this case, is he the Hoeg his readers might have expected. He has written five previous works of fiction. "Smilla's Sense of Snow," his third, was the first to be translated into English, and this novel is his first in a decade. (His last novel, "The Woman and the Ape," received modest critical acclaim.) Hoeg's sustained powers of invention aren't in dispute. But, lacking the economy of characterization and rationing of coincidence that gave "Smilla's Sense of Snow" its quirky potency, "The Quiet Girl" comes off as senselessly convoluted and thuddingly portentous. Overburdened with embarrassing truisms ("Part of the secret of love is concentration and setting voluntary limits"; "Hell: It's not a place. Hell is transportable"), the narrative frequently lurches toward pedophilia and other unwelcome displays of sexual perversity. When Kasper first meets KlaraMaria, he offers her Neuhaus chocolates and jokes, "Have a child-molester candy." Later, grievously wounded and in a wheelchair, he discourses on mortality with an august septuagenarian he calls the Blue Lady, then somehow rises up and positions himself "astride her, the way a woman might straddle a man. 'Will you let me touch your breasts?'" he asks. Encountering a group of children who may cause earthquakes through their paranormal powers, Kasper sees them as "10-to-14-year-old sex offenders who have been caught in the act." Weirdly, they summon thoughts of "beach fleas on a whale of submerged powers we can't control." More than a decade ago, Smilla, on her journey through the frozen north, compared the Danish sun to the face of a clown, "both menacing and full of laughter," who turns his countenance on children, "alien, gruesome and joyous." Her queer rapture translated to the wider world. But can the wider world share in the fantasy of Hoeg's menacing clown? Or is Rasper's fantasy like the frigid Copenhagen April that wraps "Siberian sadness" around his heart, something that "could be only in Denmark"? If so, perhaps it should have stayed there. The hero of Hoeg's novel has a strange rapport with a band of psychic children. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
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- New York : Audio Renaissance, p2007.
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