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5.0 out of 5 stars
Horrifying and Delightful, April 5 2003
POWDERHOUSE is the second installment of Bjorneboe's trilogy,
generally known as "The History of Bestiality." The narrator is
a "renovation worker"--i.e., "sanitation engineer"--at an asylum
for the criminally insane in the south of France. The
institution occupies the buildings of La Poudriere, a former
munitions depot with a stone tower (the powderhouse), which is
surrounded by a large park; the renovation worker occupies one
of the outlying peasant cottages and has a delightful little
sunlit garden. Here he rests from his daily chores, eating
simple but satisfying meals, drinking a variety of wines,
entertaining guests, sometimes smoking hashish, sometimes taking
a hit of [a chemical substance], sometimes enjoying the embraces of a little brown
nurse and every night feeding a friendly hedgehog. His chief
occupation after cleaning the grounds is writing The History of
Bestiality, and his discussions with visitors deal either with
this theme or with the doings of madmen, yet the halcyon air of
the garden lends a pastoral atmosphere to the proceedings, an
idyllic enchantment to recitations of the most zealous campaigns
of carnage in history. Thus paradise, realized here and now, is
contrasted with the hell that has become the wide earth, and the
reading is oddly both horrifying and delightful at the same
time.Bjorneboe gives more attention to form in this novel. He draws
a series of colorful characters with independent roles, creates
a bit of a ... mystery and devises a mechanism for the
insertion of factual horrors: Dr. Lefevre, the chief of staff,
believes that it is good therapy for residents of the
Powderhouse to deliver and hear lectures on themes that disturb
them. Thus three long lectures are laid out in chronological
order and provide a solid structure to the six-chapter novel,
leaving no gaps, expanses of uncertain time or cessation of
forward movement as in MOMENT OF FREEDOM. The centerpiece is the second lecture, delivered by an inmate
named Lacroix. It has no title, but might be called "Sympathy
for the Executioner." Speaking from experience, Lacroix reminds
his audience that executioners carry out the will of society;
they are hired for their "special qualifications," paid with
taxpayers' money and approved for their performance. They
execute criminals legally condemned to [end of life] by a court, yet
they are shunned and despised by society. He then bemoans the
difficulty of killing people neatly, especially when they turn
to the executioner and ask for a speedy dispatch. Each method of
execution designed to be merciful, such as long-drop hangings,
beheadings and firing squads, proves to be unreliable, so that
the executed may struggle to live for a long time. For the
executioner these experiences are ultimately debilitating; the
profession brings physical and mental illnesses and often leads
to suicide. Approved by society, the executioner nevertheless
bears the blood of the human race and stands guilty before
humanity and before God; but who, Lacroix cries out in despair,
who thinks of him? The speech is nothing less than a masterpiece of world litera-
ture, as piercing in its humor as Voltaire's Candide (1759) and
as consistent in its wrong logic as Desiderius Erasmus' In
Praise of Folly (1511). It takes the reader into an extreme
reach of black humor which passes beyond definition--something
way over the top, revoltingly gruesome and wildly hilarious and
close to the quick at the same time. After this, the novel tends
to get preachy, yet it deserves to be read for its entrancing
mood and its flashes of bitter genius. Once again, the work is
beautifully translated by Esther Greenleaf Murer.
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