the discoverer
THE DISCOVERER
By Jan Kjaerstad
Jan Kjaerstad’s novel The Discoverer completes a trilogy about a Norwegian broadcaster named Jonas Wergeland, which is a relief. If someone hadn’t completed a trilogy about Jonas Wergeland, he might have had something to say about it. The maker of “Thinking Big,” a TV series about Norway’s most illustrious figures, like Ibsen and Grieg - “a feat unparalleled in the history of modern Norwegian thought” - Jonas is a Viking among men, a lifesaver, a lion. Possessed of “a brain as sharp and polished as a great diamond,” he can keep four trains of thought going at once; he also has a magic penis he can shape at will, to bring any woman to the brink of cyclonic orgasm: “I drove into her as if giving a standing ovation.” Standing sounds unwise.
Hey, it’s Kjaerstad’s trilogy. True, the second book in the series found Wergeland standing trial for the murder of his wife, during which time the whole of Norway, we are given to believe, was whipped to heights of O.J.-like hysteria. Given that Jonas makes documentaries about Ibsen for a living - think James Lipton in Viking horns - this seems unlikely, but no matter: the murder charge was a welcome dent in the halo of Kjaerstad’s protagonist.
The conclusion of the trilogy is bent, boringly, on exoneration. The genius really is a genius. A rainbow, endlessly extended, blurs into sludge. Everybody in Wergeland’s world seems to waft around on such unfeasible levels of pre-eminence, from the famous, long-established leader of polar expeditions” to the “internationally renowned and much sought-after fountain designer,” that the reader longs to make the acquaintance of a long-distance truck driver or seamstress.
Kjaerstad is, you realize, just the teensiest bit hung up about greatness. It’s more like 1,500 pages of air guitar in a neo-Nietzschean vein, less a great novel than an overextended riff on greatness’s trimmings and one itinerant soul’s hunger for them. Kjaerstad’s yoyo-ing self-regard is, you realize, perfectly pitched to the devastations and exaggerations of the teenage ego. But to find that tone - preening, self-absorbed, boastful - surviving well into adulthood, unchanged by heartbreak, marriage or even the death of a wife, is to conclude that you have just spent the best part of three weeks in the company of a solipsistic jerk.
Wherever Moore comes from in the literary universe, Kjaerstad comes from the opposite end: megalomaniac, irony-free, possessed of an Olympian disregard for the recognizably human. Kjaerstad has said he wants to leave open the question of whether or not Jonas killed his wife. You could have the book here.
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