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MetaxuCafe UpdatesSearching Member Sites
I’ve recently added a search function so that you can limit your Google search to just the blogs that are members of MetaxuCafe. I think that will be a good resource for everyone looking for literary topics online and you’ll find it right on the front page as well as other places on the site. Now if you want to read about, say Orhan Pamuk, but only want to search the litblogs you trust, you can narrow your search right here.
Christian Jungersen: The Exception
by New York Brain Terrain on May 17, 2007
Repressed desire, Jean Francois Lyotard once said, results in a blindness, an “acting-out” that does not know, and in Christian Jungersen‘s latest novel, The Exception (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2007), we see this played out with a devasting and chilling effect. It would not do the novel justice to compare it to Fight Club and Sphere, and although the novel does bear similarities to both works, it is also a very unique work in its own right.
Things start to unravel at a Danish nonprofit (Danish Center for Genocide Information) when two of the four female employees receive death threats. Initially, Serbian war criminal Zigic is the prime suspect; however, the women increasingly start to suspect that someone within the center is sending these emails.
The novel is told from the perspectives of the four women who work at the center, Iben and Malene, the researchers, Camilla, the secretary, and Anne-Lise, the librarian. Iben has recently returned from Africa, where she and three others were taken hostage. She and Malene are college friends, in their late twenties, and although both are smart and well-informed, it soon becomes clear that Iben is the “smart” one and Malene is the “pretty” one. Malene suffers from mild arthritis, and as her boyfriend Rasmus is often out of town, it becomes Iben’s responsibility to take care of her friend. Camilla and Anne-Lise are older, both married, with children of their own. Anne-Lise, we learn, is the victim of a subtle yet brutal system of office politics, as she is ignored and scolded by the three other women in the office. When she is accused as the sender of the death threats, her emotional well-being deteriorates exponentially, and her misery consumes every waking moment. Jungersen portrays Anne-Lise’s insecurities and her inner psychology skillfully, in great detail and, having been a victim of that sort of psychological warfare myself, quite accurately. Iben and Malene rationalize their treatment of Anne-Lise, “she’s thick-skinned, she can handle it”, thus making the point that we are all capable of evil.
Jungersen is also successful at writing from a woman’s point of view. Oftentimes, when I read female characters written by male authors, I feel that the women are just a little too extreme, a little too exaggerated to be real. However, the four women in The Exception all seemed very real to me, with just enough subtle differences in their respective personalities to make each her own unique person.
Another aspect of the novel that impressed me was the substantial information the book presented on genocide. As preparation for writing the book, Jungersen read up on the psychology of genocide perpetrators and became a member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, attending genocide conferences throughout the U.S. and Europe, and we can see the impact of this research on the book. Within the alternating viewpoints and the psychological warfare are reports “written” by Iben and Malene for the Genocide Center on the extermination of Germans post World War II, the war crimes committed in Serbia, and the psychology that leads one group to commit genocide against another. Egoism, Iben realizes at the end, is what drives evil actions.
The one (very small) fault I saw in this book was that Iben and Malene seemed older and more mature than their 28 years showed. But it may be a cultural difference; perhaps Europeans are more mature than Americans at that age. And certainly maturity varies from one individual to another.
The best books, I believe, are the ones that reveal more and more with each reading. The Exception is one of them.
The Exception will be on sale in July 2007.
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