Encircling 2
Origins
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Encircling 2 continues Carl Frode Tiller’s “poised and effective Rashomon-style exploration of multiple psyches” (Kirkus Reviews)
Book two of The Encircling Trilogy continues piecing together the fractured identity of David, the absent central figure who has lost his memory. Three very different friends write letters about his childhood on the backwater island of Otterøya. Ole, a farmer struggling to right his floundering marriage, recalls days in the woods when an act of pretending went very wrong. Tom Roger, a rough-edged outsider slipping into domestic violence, shares a cruder side of David as he crows about their exploits selling stolen motorcycles and spreads gossip about who David’s father might be. But it is Paula, a former midwife now consigned to a nursing home, who has the most explosive secret of all, one that threatens to undo everything we know about David.
With a carefully scored polyphony of voices and an unwavering attention to domestic life, Carl Frode Tiller shows how deeply identity is influenced by our friendships. The Encircling Trilogy is an innovative portrayal of one man’s life that is both starkly honest and unnervingly true.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The second book of Tiller's Encircling trilogy serves as a troubling contemplation of the havoc fragile masculinity can wreak. The book alternates between emails sent to central figure David, a Norwegian writer who has placed an ad asking those who once knew him to help him recover his memory, and the psychological drama of its multiple narrators' caustic relationships. Ole grew up with David on the island of Otter ya; Tom Roger, who befriended him after he moved to the nearby town of Namsos, writes to him about their "business" stealing motorbikes. Ole has just had a child with Helen, who once dated Tom Roger and was beaten by him. He is ill-suited to accommodating the irritability Helen's trauma has left her with, though, and believes she means to drag him "down into the black hole." Meanwhile, Tom Roger is abusing a new girlfriend, even as he wonders, "How low can you get? I sicken myself." The actions these warped perspectives lead to only make matters worse; but by closing his novel with a revelation from the midwife who delivered David, Tiller able to renew the reader's interest in his mysterious protagonist by creating doubt about David's amnesia, cleverly widening the scope of his project from a character study into an examination of artistic ethics.
