Product Description

Barnum and Fred are half-brothers, growing up in the sixties Oslo. Barnum seems to have stopped growing, while his older half-brother, conceived after the rape of their mother and frustrated but learning difficulties, is sent away to a special school. Barnum's father is no better than a con-man, giving the appearance of a travelling salesman; while the three women in the family (mother, grandmother and greatgrandmother - 'the Old One') are all unwed mothers. Then the 'Old one' is killed by a hit and run driver - and Fred become mute as a result. The two half-brothers embark on their separate courses, Fred becoming a boxer and Barnum a scriptwriter, hoping to create a new genre in film, "The Northern" (as apposed to the Western). This literary marvel tells the story of an ordinary family in the 1960's, set apart by extraordinary family members and of two half-brothers leading very different and separate lives until they are brought together again at their mother's deathbed...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #81178 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 768 pages

Excerpted from The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen. Copyright © 2004. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE LAST MANUSCRIPT

The Festival

Thirteen hours in Berlin and I was already a wreck. The telephone was ringing. I could hear it. It woke me. But I was somewhere else. I was somewhere nearby. I was unplugged. I wasn’t earthed. I had no dialling tone, just a heart that went on beating heavily and out of sync. The telephone kept ringing. I opened my eyes, from a flat, imageless darkness. Now I could see my hand. It wasn’t a particularly beautiful sight. It came closer. It felt my face, investigating, as if it had woken up with a stranger in bed – attached to another man’s arm. The stubby fingers suddenly made me queasy. I lay there. The phone kept on ringing. I could hear low voices and, now and then, moaning; had someone already answered the telephone for me? But why was it still ringing then? Why was there someone else in my room? Had I not gone to bed alone after all? I turned round. I could see that the sounds were coming from the television. Two men were forcing themselves on a woman. She hardly looked enthusiastic, just indifferent. She had a tattoo on one of her bottom cheeks – a butterfly – and the choice of site was unfortunate. Her thighs were covered with bruises. The men were overweight and pale, and they barely had erections, but that didn’t stop them – they grunted loudly as they took her from every possible angle. It looked awkward and lugubrious. The woman’s indifference was for a moment replaced by pain; a grimace twisted her face as one of the men slapped his flaccid cock across her mouth and hit her. My hand left my face. A moment later the picture was gone. If I punched in my room number I could watch twelve more hours of pay TV. I didn’t want to see any more. I didn’t even remember my room number. I lay sideways across the bed, with my suit jacket half off, probably after an attempt to undress and go to bed properly. I obviously hadn’t got far before the bulb went in the innermost cubbyhole in the west wing of my head. Yes, one shoe was lying on the window sill. Had I actually stood there admiring the view, or had I been thinking of something else altogether? Possible. Impossible. I had no idea. One of my knees was hurting. I found my hand again. I shoved it towards the bedside table and, as it hung there like some sick, wide-spanned bird above a white rat blinking with one single red eye, the phone stopped ringing. The hand flew back home. The quiet washed back and pulled down the tight zip in my neck, and licked my spine with an iron tongue. I didn’t move for a good while. I had to get myself into water. The green bubble of air had to find calm soon in the capsized flesh, in the hollow of the soul. I could remember nothing. The great eraser had rubbed me out, as on so many occasions before. And the erasers I had already used up were not few. I only remembered what I was called, for who can forget such a name as Barnum? Barnum! Who do these parents really think they are, who condemn their sons and daughters to life sentences behind the iron gates of their own names? Can’t you just change your name, as someone who didn’t know what they were talking about once suggested? But it doesn’t help. A name will pursue you with double the shame if you try to get rid of it. Barnum! For half my life I’d lived with that name. I was on the point of liking it. That was the worst of it. All of a sudden I noticed I was holding something in my other hand, a card key, a plain flat piece of plastic with a number of holes in a particular pattern which one could shove into the door’s cash dispenser to empty the room’s account, so long as it hadn’t been overdrawn by previous occupants who’d left behind only nail clippings under the bed and a hollow in the mattress. I could have been anywhere. A room in Oslo, a room on Røst, a room without a view. My suitcase was standing on the floor – the old, silent suitcase, still not opened, and empty anyway, no applause in it, just a manuscript, some rushed pages. I’d come and gone.!
That’s me. Come and gone and crawled back again. But I could still read. Over the chair by the window the hotel’s white dressing gown was draped. And on it I could see the hotel’s name. Kempinski. Kempinski! Then I heard the city. I could hear Berlin. I could hear the diggers in the east and the church bells in the west. Slowly I got up. The day was in full swing. It had started without me. And now suddenly I remembered something. I had an appointment. The telephone’s red eye kept blinking. There was a message for me. I didn’t give a damn. Who other than Peder could be calling and leaving messages right now? Of course it would be Peder. He could wait. Peder was good at waiting. I had taught him the art. No-one with half a brain had meetings before breakfast on the first morning in Berlin – except Peder, my friend, my partner, my agent – he had appointments before breakfast, because Peder was in charge. It was twenty-eight minutes past twelve. The numbers were illuminated square and green beneath the lifeless TV screen, and became twelve-thirty precisely between two irregular heartbeats. I dragged off my clothes, opened the minibar and drank two Jagermeisters.

Customer Reviews

"How little does it take to save a person?"
One of the biggest, most ambitiously conceived, and richly imagined novels ever, The Half-Brother has already won the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and it has been nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. A haunting story of four generations of a strange Norwegian family, each member of which is "different" in some respect, this is as complete a family saga as you will find. Every character is fully delineated, and all his/her relationships and relevant past history are brought to life here, filtered through the mind of Barnum Nilsen, the son of a circus worker and grifter. Barnum's unusual but ultimately close relationship with his brother Fred, the product of his mother's rape by a soldier, is at the heart of the novel, with Fred being huge, active, and very physical while Barnum is unusually small, more passive, and cerebral. Two halves of the same coin, neither brother is very successful alone.

Four generations of the family live together, and some "absent" characters, who have affected the lives of family members, "live on" through objects that they have left behind with the family. Barnum and Fred often seek a connection to the past by reading the last letter their great-grandfather sent from Greenland before he vanished. Vera's best friend Rakel leaves Vera with a treasured ring, just before she is taken during the Nazi occupation of Norway. Barnum buys a ring for his first girlfriend, and it has meaning for him even when he is middle-aged. "We do not disappear without a trace," Barnum learns. "We leave a wake that never quite disappears, a gash in time."

As this immense story unfolds, the reader finds the action harking backward, forward, and in upon itself, with silence, disappearances, and deaths pervading the action. Vera and Fred both go silent for months as a result of trauma. The great-grandfather and Vera's father never appear, and Arnold Nilsen, Barnum's father, disappears periodically after his marriage to Vera, as does Fred, the half-brother. Permanent disappearance, i.e., death, occurs to the Old One and a host of other characters, and accidents involving still other characters cast a pall over much of the novel, highlighting the "aloneness" of each person, and the quixotic nature of fate. Still, there is much humor here as the characters keep soldiering on.

This is a huge book, but the pages fly by, despite the fact that the author does not insert much paragraphing. Whole pages continue without any breaks at all, and dialogue is simply imbedded within paragraphs. With hundreds of well-drawn, memorable scenes, dozens of carefully presented characters whose entire lives and history you know completely, surprises buried within seemingly ordinary tales, and the creation of a complete and unique universe, this is a novel which will richly reward the reader who is not intimidated by its size. Mary Whipple

A story of life as we all live it!
The Half Brother is a great novel telling the story of a Norwegian family living in the capitol, the city of Oslo. The story begins during the celebration of peace after world war II when a woman gets raped on the attic of the old apartment building she lives in. The celebration turns to grief but the result, a son, is welcomed by the loving family. Later on the same woman marries another man and she gets another son. The two are half brothers, and the book tells of their the family's relationship with eachother. It takes you through pain, anger, distress but also wonderful moments of joy. It is hard to describe what the book is really about, but I guess it tells a story of a group of people that might seem to live a pointless life in a pointless world. But what Lars Saabye Christensen wants to tell us is that no matter how dark it gets, life is a wonderful gift and it is worth living. Even if you have many dark moments in your life and few bright ones, in the end it is all worth it. The few bright ones makes it so. This book is such an amazing experience to read that you are going to want to read it again and again. And we can all recognize all the bizarre and funny moments the family experiences because we go through it all ourselves in our own lives. The Half Brother makes you look at life in a new, different and refreshing way and appreciate all that you've got. But at the same time it lets you know that if you have very little that is ok as well. Whatever you've got, appreciate it!

Wonderfully warm novel that will make it big!
Follow a quite normal, but extraordinary and colourful 1960s family from Oslo, Norway throughout four generations. In the centre of the dramatic story is the oldest of two half brothes Fred, who was conceived during a rape during the liberation celebrations after the second world war and his younger brother Barnum. The story follows the two through their distinctly different childhoods in the 60s and 70s, where Barnum is the artistic soul who more often than not will fail in his ventures and Fred who is the distinctly silent type who often has to save his younger brother. The book describes their every day lives as well as the mystery of Fred's father in a vivid and wonderful manner, with warmth, humor, drama and tragedy packed into the pages.