A fascinating black comedy, from a writer who has made the transition to literary fiction with a giant’s strides.
The eponymous humanlike “monster” familiar from the mythology and folklore of Lapland dominates this prizewinning first novel, the work of a Finnish writer for TV and comic strips.
Sinisalo’s dark fable begins when gay photographer Mikael (a.k.a. “Angel”) Hartikainen returns from a night out to find a “troll-cub” being persecuted by young “thugs” outside his apartment building. Rescuing the troll (which he later names Pessi, after a figure in a famous Finnish novel), Angel begins surfing the Internet for information about this timid, oddly seductive creature. As he and Pessi grow used to each other, Angel averts possible discovery of his new tenant by his downstairs neighbor Palomita (an abused “postal-purchase bride”); a veterinary surgeon whom he mischievously calls “Dr. Spiderman”; sardonic advertising executive Martes (Angel’s sometime lover), and “nerdy” Ecke, the lovelorn gay to whom Angel finds himself helplessly, ridiculously sexually attracted. Meanwhile, Sinisalo juxtaposes brief chapters that record Angel’s increasingly complicated days with excerpts from such varied informational sources as biological and ecological studies, newspaper accounts of troll “sightings,” indigenous poems and stories, and the Finnish epic Kalevala. The clever plot here is driven by Pessi’s effect on Angel (as Dr. Spiderman explains, “your troll’s emitting some very powerful pheromones”). The mystery of Pessi’s appearance deepens as Sinisalo presents conflicting theories: that the troll is an animal species, an unclassifiable hybrid, or an earthly image of Satan—while leading us toward a catastrophic finale that seems to confirm the veterinarian’s suspicion that radical climatic changes are unsettling the balance of nature. Troll offers an ingenious dramatization of the nightmare of blurred boundaries between species, and a disturbing dystopian vision reminiscent of Karel Capek’s classic War with the Newts.
A fascinating black comedy, from a writer who has made the transition to literary fiction with a giant’s strides.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-4129-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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