Psalm at Journey's End: A Novel

by Erik Fosnes Hansen, Joan Tate (Translator)

Overview

This European bestseller tells of seven members ot the Titanic's European orchestra, unfolding their fascinating life story while painting a fascinating portrait of the intricacies of life on board the supposedly unsinkable ship, from the glamour of first class to the crowded fear of steerage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466814486
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/31/1996
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	250
File size:	442 KB

About the Author

Erik Fosnes Hansen, born in 1965, is the author of Psalm at Journey's End, which was a number-one bestseller in his native Norway. He lives in Oslo with his family.

Erik Fosnes Hansen, born in 1965, is the author of Psalm at Journey's End, which was a number-one bestseller in his native Norway. He lives in Oslo with his family.

Editorial Reviews

Skilled research and impressionistic prose are expertly mixed into a poetic, absorbing story in Norwegian writer Hansen's second novel (his first to be published here). As in the recent Maiden Voyage by Cynthia Bass, the stage is set on the doomed Titanic's voyage from Southampton in April 1912. Hansen's characters are the band musicians, celebrated in Titanic lore, who continued playing as the ship went down. Rather than speculate about the actual people, whose names and lives are known, he has invented characters assembled from diverse parts of Britain, Russia and the continent. The complex past of five of these musicians is woven into the tale of the fateful crossing. These are men drowning in emotional turbulence and desolation, a metaphorical foreshadowing of their actual fate. Their stories are ablaze with the drama of love gone awry and talents not fully realized, but Hansen also uses them to speculate on the larger themes of responsibility and fate, reason and faith. He writes with fierce energy, creating emotional landscapes that may make one think of the evocative scenes and brilliant colors of Turner paintings. In all, it's a brilliant piece of storytelling. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

An oddball assortment of characters make up the orchestra aboard the Titanic on her maiden voyage in April 1912: the English bandleader, Jason, scarred from the early death of his parents; Alex, the maudlin Russian "crushed by serfdom of the emotions"; Spot, the German child prodigy turned cocaine addict; David, a youth from Vienna fleeing love; and the deranged Italian, Petronius, whose double bass has whispered to him their collective doom. While the Norwegian novelist Hansen makes a valiant effort to sustain interest and variety in each, their personal histories, recounted in turn, begin to blur distressingly against the larger drama of the sinking of the great, ill-starred vessel, whose telegrams for SOS convey the heartbreak lacking in the final view of our strangely wooden musicians left on deck to perish with 1,495 others. In his English debut, smoothly translation by Tate, Hansen displays impressive powers of observation and research; he is a young European author to watch. For comparative literature collections.Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"

Library Journal

Although Hansen takes as his starting point the fatal maiden voyage of the "Titanic" in 1912, he has imagined the lives of the seven musicians who played Handel's "Largo" while the ship foundered and sank. Starting slowly, the novel gradually gathers steam as Hansen reveals how the sorrows of failed personal and professional lives led each of these musicians to a dead-end career entertaining wealthy passengers on ocean voyages. Many readers will have difficulty connecting with this thoughtful yet emotionally cold novel. (The eventual deaths of the musicians seem rather a relief, given the sadness of their lives.) Those readers who persevere will be rewarded with an atmospheric novel laced with unexpected humor and insights into the political and social climate in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century. Comparisons of the Norwegian Hansen with Peter Hoeg, another Scandinavian novelist, are inevitable, but this is no "Smilla's Sense of Snow" (1993). The novel, the author's second, is the first to be published in the U.S.

Nancy Pearl