In the Shape of a Boar
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- 65,00 kr
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- 65,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
“One of the year’s most imaginative and challenging novels” from the acclaimed author of John Saturnall’s Feast (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Lawrence Norfolk’s In the Shape of a Boar is a juggernaut of a novel, an epic tour de force of love and betrayal, ancient myths and modern horrors. The story begins in the ancient world of mythic Greece, where a dark tale of treachery and destructive love unfolds amid the hunt for the Boar of Kalydon—a tale that will reverberate in those same hills across the millennia in the final chaotic months of World War II, as a band of Greek partisans pursues an S.S. officer on a mission of vengeance. After the war, a young Jewish Romanian refugee, Solomon Memel, who was among the hunters will create a poem based on the experience, which becomes an international literary sensation. But the truth of what happened in the hills of Kalydon in 1945 is more complicated than it seems, and as the older Sol reunites with his childhood love in 1970s Paris, the dark memories and horrors of those days will emerge anew.
“An epic achievement . . . stitching together classical Greek culture and twentieth-century barbarism, the nature of human evil and the ambiguity of storytelling itself . . . Dazzling.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Brilliant and exhaustively researched . . . In the Shape of a Boar is a Herculean task accomplished with bravado and style, but more than that, it’s storytelling of the highest echelon.”—The Hartford Courant
“Wonderfully complex . . . a fascinating story built from layered narrative lines.”—The Washington Post Book World
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this novel, which begins in myth-shrouded ancient Greece and ends on a Paris film set, the boar of the title takes many shapes: first it is a savage animal, then an SS colonel during WWII, then the symbol of competitiveness between writers, then history itself. A complex vision binds the threads of the novel together and simultaneously defines each metaphorical strain. The book's first half takes place in ancient Greece, where a band of hunters chase after a mythical boar, their quest complicated by internal romantic and psychological struggles. Footnotes are sprinkled liberally throughout this section, detailing the location of relics or giving textual references, and occasionally tediously crowding out the actual text. The book then jumps to the contemporary story of poet Solomon Memel, a German Jew who was imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp during WWII, switching between tales of Solomon's life before the war, descriptions of his wartime torture and interrogation, vignettes from the his postwar literary career, and stories from the making of a film. The film's subject is the hunt for the boar described in the first section of the novel, which in turn is revealed to be Solomon's first published book, an allegory based on his wartime experiences. The footnotes in the first section, it turns out, are the responses of a fictional scholar to the work, designed to prove it historically inaccurate. Throughout, the book maintains a confidence and poetic cadence that pushes it forward, giving gravity to every event. Figures like Atalanta, a Greek huntress whose thirst for the Boar of Kalydon gives her unquestioned allure, or Solomon, perpetually persecuted and searching for a way to express himself, are timeless while also believably vulnerable. Norfolk's new work is a challenging and exhilarating read, matching his first two novels the critically acclaimed Lempri re's Dictionary and The Pope's Rhinoceros in intellectual reach, and surpassing them in storytelling passion and intensity.