A Fairy Tale

January 13, 2014
The latest from Danish author Bengtsson (Submarino) focuses on the relationships between fathers and sons. A young boy bounces around Copenhagen with his father, a loving but seemingly unstable man who moves restlessly from apartment to apartment and job to job. The boy, who shows a talent and love for drawing, is homeschooled and nourished on elaborate fairy tales involving a king and a prince searching for the “White Queen,” a stand-in for the boy’s mother. After his father’s fixations turn violent, the boy is shuttled off to his mother and her new husband. Only as a young man does he begin asking questions about what led to his father’s actions. His search for answers leads to his paternal grandparents, then back to Copenhagen, where he begins working at a post office and, for the first time, goes by an assumed name, Mehmet Faruk. In Copenhagen, he achieves a modicum of happiness, finding both love and artistic recognition, but then the mysteries of his past resurface. The early, child’s-eye-view sections are filled with somewhat improbably precocious wisdom, but, on the whole, the book’s short, lively chapters create a resonant catalogue of life.

February 15, 2014
Dad knows best. Or does he? A boy's unconventional upbringing skews his worldview in this Danish author's third novel (but first U.S. publication). Dad is upset. He's sobbing. He is reacting to the news that a progressive Swedish politician has been murdered. This is how we first see the young father with the shoulder-length hair--through the eyes of his 6-year-old son, the narrator. (Neither father nor son is named.) The politics, the violence, the emotional vulnerability, they all presage the novel's key moment. It's 1986. The novel's first and longest section follows father and son through the next three years, in dozens of short takes. Life is not easy. In Copenhagen, they are constantly moving. Dad is a jack-of-all-trades, working as a butcher, a gardener, a bouncer at a strip club, a stage manager at a failing theater, though never for very long. His son takes it all in stride, though, as kids do, and Dad is affectionate, protective and fun. He tells the boy a fairy tale, in installments; disturbingly, for the reader, it shows a paranoid streak. He encourages the boy's talent for drawing though resists his pleas to go to school. His life lessons are unorthodox: Steal from stores if you're in need; don't save money, spend it. Eventually, Dad loses it. At a rally, he threatens a politician with a knife and is wrestled to the ground; his motivation goes unexplained. We move forward. In a topsy-turvy middle section, the boy is 16, living with his mother and stepfather, and is now a gifted but troubled high school student. There's a visit to a dying grandfather, who hints darkly that he abused the boy's dad. By 1999, he's a profile in alienation. He has adopted a Turkish identity and has a nothing job; his only hope of salvation is his painting talent. Is this the father's story or the son's? Bengtsson's ambivalence proves fatal, yielding a broken-backed narrative.

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March 15, 2014
Every night, the boy's father tells him a little more of the same fairy tale, in which a king and prince are the last people who can see the world as it truly is. Their goal is to find the evil White Queen and kill her. Clearly the boy and his father are the king and prince, but who is the White Queen? And does the father actually see the world as it really is? Answers of a sort come when the boy is eight, and the father perpetrates an act of shocking violence and is taken away. The novel then follows the boy's troubled life until he is 19 when he performs a similarly shocking act of violence. Danish author Bengtsson's first novel to be published in the U.S. is a purposely joyless, emotionally distant coming-of-age story told in the unnamed boy's first-person voice, which, though flat and affectless, nevertheless has an almost hypnotic power to draw readers into the narrative and hold their attention until its melancholy ending.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)