The Seducer, by Jan Kjaerstad

The Seducer (Forføreren) is the first book in a trilogy about Jonas Wergeland that was originally written in the mid-1990s. It made waves in Norway when it was published, and Jan Kjaerstad (Kjærstad) later won the Nordic Council Literary Prize with this book.

Jonas Wergeland, the main character in The Seducer, is a television documentary producer. He comes from middle-class background, and has grown up in an Oslo suburb. He is “Norway’s greatest television talent of all time,” and has created of an innovative and exceptionally popular TV series about great Norwegians called “Thinking Big,” dealing with the lives of, among others, Ole Bull, Fridtjof Nansen, Gustav Vigeland, Per Spook, and Knut Hamsun, all of course, from “a different angle”.

Jonas is a craftily built character, rich and mysterious. As it turns out, his professional success is not nearly the most remarkable thing about Jonas, only one of many. For one, he has strong sexual instincts and is drawn towards adventure. And he is endowed with a penis which not only makes him irresistible to certain women but also turns his encounters with them into moments where the grandest of orgasms and life-altering events are produced. So Jonas Wergeland seduces his Norwegian audiences as well as women. He also has a nose for detecting undervalued works of art.

As Henrik Ibsen with his Peer Gynt, Kjaerstad makes vastly exaggerated and sometimes even somewhat comically exalted claims on behalf of Jonas Wergeland. As well, he lets him be blessed by good fortune and luck.

Thus his fall, and his problems, becomes all the larger when he meets with misfortune and tough challenges. The event that starts the book is such an event. Jonas comes home from abroad and finds his wife dead on the living room floor in their apartment in Oslo. The chapter where this happens is appropriately entitled “The Big Bang”. And it is a big bang for Jonas. It blows his world to pieces, shatters the world he has created for himself, and forces the creation of a new universe.

The book from this point on consists of past reflections, memories of childhood and coming of age, family interactions, reflections about his career, and sexual encounters.

It is a powerful book, traveling back and forth freely in time and space, driven by, seemingly, Kjaerstad's enourmous joy of writing. Also, it is a very ambitious project by Kjaerstad, and, indeed, one that has been mostly viewed as successful. However, personally I feel at times that the book is a little too long, that Jan Kjaerstad at times wants to tell us - or maybe even sometimes teach us or show us – a little too much. There is comedy here, there is social commentary and historical reinterpretations, there is ethics, eroticism, philosophy, and much more - perhaps even too much more. Also, the somewhat one-sided focus on Jonas Wergeland is at times so strong that I get the feeling of moving up and down and around while all the time standing still.

But the book is interesting, somewhat intriguing, at times breathtaking, sometimes very lyrical, and always engaged and full of reflections. Jan Kjaerstad is an author with great skills and a talented storyteller. And The Seducer is a wonderful, quite demanding and, as well, rewarding novel that very likely will seduce you!

Order The Seducer (Jonas Wergeland Trilogy 1) by Jan Kjaerstad from amazon UK.