Encircling 2: Origins

by Carl Frode Tiller

Overview

Encircling 2 continues Carl Frode Tiller’s “poised and effective Rashomon-style exploration of multiple psyches” (Kirkus Reviews)

Book two of The Encircling Trilogy continues piecing together the fractured identity of David, the absent central figure who has lost his memory. Three very different friends write letters about his childhood on the backwater island of Otterøya. Ole, a farmer struggling to right his floundering marriage, recalls days in the woods when an act of pretending went very wrong. Tom Roger, a rough-edged outsider slipping into domestic violence, shares a cruder side of David as he crows about their exploits selling stolen motorcycles and spreads gossip about who David’s father might be. But it is Paula, a former midwife now consigned to a nursing home, who has the most explosive secret of all, one that threatens to undo everything we know about David.

With a carefully scored polyphony of voices and an unwavering attention to domestic life, Carl Frode Tiller shows how deeply identity is influenced by our friendships. The Encircling Trilogy is an innovative portrayal of one man’s life that is both starkly honest and unnervingly true.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555978013
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	03/20/2018
Pages:	448
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Carl Frode Tiller is the author of five novels and four plays. Books in The Encircling Trilogy have won the Brage Prize and the Norwegian Critics Prize, and have been translated into multiple languages. He lives in Trondheim, Norway.

Editorial Reviews

01/15/2018
The second book of Tiller’s Encircling trilogy serves as a troubling contemplation of the havoc fragile masculinity can wreak. The book alternates between emails sent to central figure David, a Norwegian writer who has placed an ad asking those who once knew him to help him recover his memory, and the psychological drama of its multiple narrators’ caustic relationships. Ole grew up with David on the island of Otterøya; Tom Roger, who befriended him after he moved to the nearby town of Namsos, writes to him about their “business” stealing motorbikes. Ole has just had a child with Helen, who once dated Tom Roger and was beaten by him. He is ill-suited to accommodating the irritability Helen’s trauma has left her with, though, and believes she means to drag him “down into the black hole.” Meanwhile, Tom Roger is abusing a new girlfriend, even as he wonders, “How low can you get? I sicken myself.” The actions these warped perspectives lead to only make matters worse; but by closing his novel with a revelation from the midwife who delivered David, Tiller able to renew the reader’s interest in his mysterious protagonist by creating doubt about David’s amnesia, cleverly widening the scope of his project from a character study into an examination of artistic ethics. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

[Tiller] cleverly widen[s] the scope of his project from a character study into an examination of artistic ethics.”—Publishers Weekly

“[Encircling 2: Origins is] filled with Tiller’s intense and psychologically acute scenes. . . . Bombs dropped in the final pages ensure hot anticipation for the final installment.”—Booklist

“This volume stands alone well and has a twist climax that sets up more questions about David for the third book while also making this one satisfying in itself. A canny exploration of how much we reveal about ourselves when we talk about others.”—Kirkus Reviews

“The translation of Norwegian superstar Carl Frode Tiller is a giant and invaluable gift to English-speaking readers everywhere.”—Rebecca Dinerstein, author of The Sunlit Night

From the Publisher

2017-12-24
The second installment in Tiller's penetrating three-part novel about the varied perceptions others have of us, emphasizing the gaps in Norway's class ladder.This volume of Tiller's trilogy (Encircling, 2017) follows the format of the first: three people respond to a letter that a man named David has placed in the paper asking for details about his life—he's had an accident-induced bout of amnesia—while relating details of their own lives. We hear from Ole, a childhood friend who is flailing at his efforts to manage his drug-dealing teenage stepson; Tom Roger, a friend from David's teen years with a history of criminality and domestic abuse; and Paula, a friend of David's mother who has a few clues about the novel's central question of the identity of David's father. Of the three narrators, Tom Roger is at once the most gripping and troubling: his section is thick with scenes of him battering his current girlfriend and ex-wife as well as memories of David's own dark history. (He poisoned a dog as an act of revenge, for instance, and his grandfather was an infamous bootlegger.) It's also the most revealing about the distinctions between Tom Roger's lower-class station ("a family of drunks, benefit scroungers and petty criminals") and the higher rungs; he's tense about the "ice-smile" judgment of his girlfriend's well-off mother and rants to David about how the airbrushed MTV version of the 1980s hardly resembled the hardscrabble one he lived through. There are difficult scenes throughout (a raped and murdered child, sexual molestation, and allegations of incest), though the narrators in this volume tend to be more long-winded, which blunts the impact of their revelations. Still, this volume stands alone well and has a twist climax that sets up more questions about David for the third book while also making this one satisfying in itself.A canny exploration of how much we reveal about ourselves when we talk about others.

Kirkus Review