Jan Kjaerstad's Trilogy

The third part of Jan Kjaerstad’s “Wergeland Trilogy” (The Seducer, The Conqueror and The Discoverer) was recently released in the UK (our edition comes out in September), and Paul Binding wrote a really nice overview of the book for The Independent:

The Discoverer completes the trilogy to which Norwegian writer Jan Kjaerstad’s The Seducer and The Conqueror belong: an enormously ambitious undertaking about an enormously ambitious man – and, beyond him, about ambition itself and humanity’s ambiguous need for it. The matter of all three novels – which contain overlaps, revisitings, and some mind-bending contradictions, with each account plausible – is laid out baldly in the first novel’s first chapter, “The Big Bang”. Jonas Wergeland, who “has risen to heights of fame which very few, if any, Norwegians have ever come close to attaining”, returns from the World’s Fair in Seville (1992), to his house in Grorud, the Oslo borough in which he grew up. And there, on his living-room floor, he finds his wife, Margrete Boeck, venereologist and mother of his daughter, shot dead.

Wergeland is charged with the murder, found guilty, partly through testimony from his own clergyman brother, Daniel, and receives a custodial sentence. None of the novels proceeds linearly, nor is there one consistent narrator. The Conqueror, after the first book’s tributes to his boundless imagination and sexual inventiveness, presents a far more troubled and troubling Jonas. It makes us pretty sure he must have dispatched the woman he so loved. But in The Discoverer we come – via Jonas himself and his devoted daughter, Kristin – to a different conclusion that exonerates this pre-eminent Norwegian, whose main failing may have been precisely that pre-eminence.

But have we reached the truth of the affair? Is this third book the final version? By no means, the author told me recently. Like Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, his trilogy asserts relativity. In one sense only is The Discoverer final: Kjaerstad will write no sequel. [. . .]

The voyage that The Discoverer will impel, thanks to Barbara J Haveland’s lively, fluid and at times sparkling translation, is a return one, to the beginning of the whole trilogy – a work so ample in its riches that further discoveries are inevitable.