Encircling 3: Aftermath

by Carl Frode Tiller

Overview

The Encircling Trilogy comes thundering to a close as the man at the center is revealed


The final book in Carl Frode Tiller’s groundbreaking Encircling Trilogy is here. In Barbara Haveland’s powerful translation, two new letters circle closer than ever to David, who allegedly lost his memory. One is from Marius, who has led the life of wealth and privilege that David was meant to live. And yet Marius does not appreciate it—desperate for attention, he lies to his girlfriend, with disastrous consequences. The other comes from Susanne, an ex-lover whose affair with David led to the breakup of her marriage. Humiliated by David’s unflattering portrayal of her in his novel, Susanne is determined to exact revenge on him in the most painful possible way.

Last of all we come face-to-face with David himself: a frustrated writer whose early successes have faded. His therapy sessions seem to reveal a dangerous and violent individual bent on getting what he wants at any cost. With David’s own story told, the last piece falls into place, and his true character is unveiled. But as with books one and two, there are twists and turns that upset expectations and leave the reader wondering whom to believe. Across three books, Tiller’s incisive character portraits lay bare the inequalities of class and excesses of wealth in Norwegian society. With Encircling 3: Aftermath, Tiller sounds the unexplored depths of David’s life, in the culmination of this astonishing feat of psychological realism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450581
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	07/13/2021
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Carl Frode Tiller is the author of six novels and four plays. Books in the Encircling Trilogy have been adapted for the theater and translated into multiple languages. He lives in Trondheim, Norway.


Barbara J. Haveland is a leading translator of Norwegian and Danish. She is the translator of all three volumes of The Encircling Trilogy by Carl Frode Tiller, and her recent published works include The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann and new translations of Ibsen’s The Master Builder and Little Eyolf. She lives in Copenhagen.

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/24/2021

Tiller’s fascinating and revelatory final volume in his Encircling trilogy turns everything readers thought they knew on its head. The series began with a simple premise: a writer named David, having lost his memory, placed an ad in the paper in search of clues to his identity, prompting old friends and acquaintances to send him letters. Now, David learns he was accidentally switched at birth with a man named Marius Rosendahl; Marius has lived the life of privilege intended for David and is heir to a salmon-fishing fortune. Meanwhile, Susanne, a once-devoted environmentalist and leftist who came to question her beliefs during an affair with David that left her life in ruins, bitterly describes their sexual rendezvous in letters to him, recounting how she’d initially found him sexually and socially liberating, but came to see him as a “living, breathing cliché,” with his red wine and pipe tobacco next to the computer keyboard. In the final section, Tiller reveals how low David has fallen in his life, and the strange, amoral things he will do to battle his sense of inadequacy. Tiller has created a polyphony of intriguing characters and a brilliant inquiry into the construction of personhood. This strong series couldn’t have gone out on a better note. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Tiller’s pointillistic approach gains power as it goes along. . . . A surprising, emotionally intense character study that elevates everyday anxieties into epic form.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Encircling 3 holds plenty of revelations while meditating deeply on class, social responsibility, and the legitimacy of fiction.”—Booklist

“Tiller’s fascinating and revelatory final volume in his Encircling trilogy turns everything readers thought they knew on its head. . . .Tiller has created a polyphony of intriguing characters and a brilliant inquiry into the construction of personhood. This strong series couldn’t have gone out on a better note.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“The Encircling Trilogy is by turns hilarious, deadly serious, playful, and a profound chronicle of wealth and class. It is, without question, one of the most profound and enjoyable reading experiences of my life.”—Peter Geye, author of Northermost

“The translation of Norwegian superstar Carl Frode Tiller’s The Encircling Trilogy is a giant and invaluable gift to English-speaking readers everywhere.”—Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

From the Publisher

★ 2021-04-14
The concluding volume in Tiller’s three-part novel about class and identity, thick with provocative twists and ill will.

Tiller’s Norwegian domestic saga closes by following the pattern of the first two books, published in English in 2017 and 2018. David has taken out an ad asking friends and acquaintances to share memories about him following a bout of amnesia; the replies say something about David, a witty, sour writer, but also about the respondents and broader Norwegian culture. Hanging over the narrative is David’s search for his father’s identity, which this volume resolves, but happy feelings of closure are hard to come by. In the first section, Marius reveals the truth about David’s father and unspools a remembrance of his own insecurities growing up in a wealthy family and competing with his brother. Susanne, a college friend, had an affair with David after her marriage began to crumble, but her relationship with David became poisonous as well. Finally, David himself weighs in, chafing against his stalled literary career and neuroses about his wife’s family; scenes of him sabotaging a family dinner are paired with transcripts of him parrying with his therapist over his fears. If those talk-it-out scenes are a little pat, Tiller’s sense of his characters’ pressure points is acute; he grasps how competitive Marius and David are and how desperate Susanne is to buck against domestic roles. And though scenes sometimes stretch on, Tiller’s pointillistic approach gains power as it goes along. (In David’s section, a bouillabaisse and some Q-tips spark an epic interior explosion over feelings of failure as a husband and father.) David is hard to like, but Tiller’s prismatic approach captures him from a multitude of angles; he and his cohort become fuller, if not necessarily more likable, as the story progresses.

A surprising, emotionally intense character study that elevates everyday anxieties into epic form.

Kirkus Reviews