"MY FATHER, HIS SON"

by Reidar Jonsson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1991

Swedish writer Jonsson offers a farcical sequel to My Life as a Dog (1990) that is neither as unified nor as moving: here, his protagonist struggles through a difficult marriage and remembers his father and his own traveling days as a deckhand aboard merchant ships. ""I do everything too late,"" Ingemar Jobansson tells us, continuing his chronicle of abashed loneliness. This time he begins in 1976 in Algiers, where he and his wife Louise (""Life and death go hand in hand. Always"") are detained. Louise, he says later, is ""a totally instinctive volcano,"" and he's ""a frail piece of wood, accidentally falling into the volcano and burning up."" Jonsson uses memory as structure; a triple-deck narrative tells the tragicomic story of the slapstick life aboard ship, his marriage, and the near-mythological search for his father (""Why did he always have to cut us down to a very small size?""). The shipboard saga (Australia, Nigeria, and other ports of call, plus eccentrics like Eight--""a madman who respects neither life nor death"") is more or less amusing, especially a long story concerning sharks and a wheelchair in 1962 when Ingemar, with his ""overdeveloped sensitivity,"" was a ""crazy paid-by-the-hour laborer."" But such anecdotes become repetitive; the marital squabbles get bogged down; and the search for the seaman father is too episodic to be sustained. Ingemar comes across finally like a neurotic, ineffectual Pippi Longstocking. Overall, this reads like what it is--the second book in a proposed trilogy, not quite here nor there. Occasional picaresque high moments and horseplay, as well as an effective rendering of dislocation, ultimately survive a ballast of soggy hit-or-miss adventures.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991

ISBN: 155970201X

Page Count: 256

Publisher: "Arcade--dist. by Little, Brown"

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991

Categories: FICTION