From Publishers Weekly
This slim, grim novel—Ullmann's third—tells a chilly tale charged with the moral ambiguity surrounding euthanasia. Terminal illness stories are often exploited for emotional payoffs, but Ullmann (
Stella Descending;
Before You Sleep) skirts the sap factor by casting a cold, hard light on her characters. The story begins in a doctor's office, where Johan Sletten, retired journalist and paragon of mediocrity, learns he has six months to live. As his health deteriorates, Johan muses on the major events in his life. His first marriage to Alice was almost cartoonishly unhappy, and resulted in a son he barely tolerates. Two years after Alice is run over by a car, when Johan is 47, he marries Mai, a 30-year-old pediatrician. Despite her brisk manner and penchant for unnecessary lies, she represents everything that is good in Johan's life. Through all of this, one detects the chilly side of Milan Kundera's influence; like him, Ullmann is a sharp chronicler of life's horrible ironies. The trouble is that no larger picture, no wealth of incident or even variety of secondary characters galvanizes this bedroom drama. Worse, the book's unidentified first-person narrator remains shrouded in opaque omniscience and half-amused aphorisms. Ullmann's exclusive commitment to exposing life's banality, combined with her condescending tone, lock the reader out of a story that was forbidding to begin with.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Booklist
Relieved--in fact, pleased--by the accidental death of his irritating first wife, horselike Alice, the mother of their adult son, Andreas, Johan is remarried to the significantly younger Mai, the love of his life and beautiful to him, though colleagues on the newspaper for which he is literary reviewer think she is "a dog." But she is his grace and comfort, even after he is fired for going to press with a review plagiarized from a tiny German journal. Well, he had become supererogatory after 40 years, so his leave-taking is reframed as early retirement. Now, five years later and facing his own death, Johan recalls his mother's refusal to be at his dying father's side. Surely Mai, his virtual physician in her steadfast love, won't waver when he asks her to be his angel of death by enabling a graceful demise? Wrenching in its straight-ahead simplicity, lucid in Haveland's smooth, elegant translation, Ullmann's short novel resonates with a reader's inner, subliminal fears of deterioration in the face of death. Wonderful and chilling.
Whitney ScottCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
