Maybe this whole 3 volumes, 1200 pages is a case of beware of low-flying sperm. I won’t deny having my suspicion that many years from now I may think I failed a basic IQ test.

But it’s now and I don’t think that. So this is how to start. Go here and listen to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nECoA-uVGfw

The reason we are starting here is that young boy Jonas thinks if there is one thing to take to the extra-terrestrial Vegans to make them think well of human-kind it is this. Jim Reeves singing ‘I love you because’. And here on youtube we have no less than Jim Reeves singing ‘I love you because’ in Oslo on TV there in 1964. Perfect. Listen to it twice. The first time you won’t take it seriously, but you should. It is what this book is about.

Not to mention, while you are listening I have a moment to figure out where to go next. Which, now that I think about it, is near the end.

A couple of times lately I’ve read books that have hurt me. You look at the words on the page and you know you don’t want to read them. I’m in Adelaide at the moment and the other day I was with a friend whose husband is in gaol. She’s in Australia looking after their four young children. He’s in the Californian desert doing six years. It isn’t often you listen to somebody’s problems and find that they are from some other world altogether. Only to discover, upon a little contemplation, that in some ways they aren’t any different from your own. What’s she to do with this husband who is doing something that happens to people in gaol where they lose their sense of what is important on the outside and become alienated from their loved ones. I’m watching that happen to somebody at the moment – it doesn’t, after all, have to be a physical gaol. But what can you do about it? You can only wait, heartbroken, and hope they come to their senses.

This is only part of her problem. The other part is that she has been waiting for him in every sense for three years and she can’t do that anymore. She has decided she has to have sex. And this part of her problem really isn’t any easier than the other. Can she do that? And have it just be sex? And still be waiting for this high-flying corporate husband who has joined a prison gang and sports a stab wound, a black eye and an illegal tattoo at the moment? How do you do this at all, let alone with 4 little kids? She’s asking the questions and I’m thinking can I use my ask-the-audience card?

A couple of days later I am having dinner with a friend. The issue has been lying in the air for way too long as to whether we might have sex and finally we take it off the agenda. The simple fact is that we are each waiting for somebody.

It is another day or two later that I read this excruciatingly painful passage.

p. 374

And so he hesitated. And so he refrained from pulling up her skirt and throwing himself on top of her, even when he felt the gentle press of her hands on his back, like an invitation. He tried to excuse himself to her; he wasn’t ready, he said, whispered breathlessly….Still, though, he was afraid – afraid of this lust, afraid that one day, instead of life, a desire to do the right thing, he would make do with a sex life. It was always there, just under the surface….

Later Jonas would contemplate the choice he had made in this and in similar situations. Because what if sex was life? And what if the life in which he might attain the ‘lofty goals’ toward which he strove was the life of the nether regions?

Where does it come from, this sense that it is right to wait? From the most important relationship of his childhood, from Karen Mohr. Karen, who is alone, but who might not have been. When the young Jonas asks her why she did not take up the invitation to share life with a famous painter she says:

p. 88

‘I did not deem him…worthy,’ she said. That word ‘worthy’ was to become a catchword in Jonas’s life.

‘Did you ever find someone who was worthy?’ he asked, doing his best to pronounce the word with the same gravity as Karen Mohr, stretching the vowels, and rolling the ‘r’.

‘No, I never did.’ And then, anticipating Jonas’s next question. ‘But I have never reproached myself’.

Jonas could not know that many times in the future his eyes would fill with tears at the memory of her face as she spoke of this. She had provided him with a mainstay, one that would stand within him forever; she taught him something about the uncompromising nature of love….Karen Mohr had received an offer from a man admired by half the world, but had not deemed him worthy. Love is no mere bagatelle, that’s for sure, was Jonas’s first thought.

So he has this inspiration of a woman in his childhood life and then too he has the astonishing Mr Dehli. Lucky, lucky boy.

p. 216

Mr Dehli was an expert climber; he would venture out onto the thinnest branches of a line of reasoning, then with a sudden swoop come swinging back to the trunk, possibly on a creeper. This, for Jonas, was more thrilling than the trapeze artists at the circus. Frequently he would sit at his desk, following – heart in mouth, almost – their master’s exposition of a complex topic, with one thought leading to another as he scrawled key words and phrases on the board. And just when Jonas was sure that their poor teacher had lost his way completely, when Mr Dehli, with his hair covered in chalk dust and his bow tie woefully askew, was stammering ‘and…and…and…’, suddenly it would come, that blessed ‘but…’, and a sight of relief would run through the classroom, to be followed by the master’s closing triple-somersault of an argument, which he delivered while circling some of the key words and drawing a couple of connecting lines that made Jonas gasp with surprised understanding.

I was so envious of Jonas, as I read about this perfect teacher. I hated every second of school and I’m sitting here thinking why couldn’t I have had a teacher like that? But maybe I did and never realised. Looking back to what I wrote in my thoughts on The Naked Ape

I spent a year in Marbury, a non-authoritarian school modelled on Summerhill. It was all too weird for words. Next time you wonder why I don't know what continent Spain is in, or why places that are further away have times that are closer or...keep in mind that my geography text book for the year was The Naked Ape.

Well, I say it was that sort of school like it's to blame for my appalling ignorance of geography. If only I'd chosen a normal school instead. But truth be told, the next year I did choose an ordinary school - Methodist Ladies College - and blow me down if the maths teacher didn't turn out to be a girl who made us do things like write poetry. 'Your maths assignment for today is to write a poem in the style of Jabberwocky' It's moot whether my maths is worse than my geography.

Sigh. I wouldn't mind so much if my poetry was any good.

So, maybe I had a Mr Dehli sometime and I simply wasn’t worthy. Maybe. I do have half an idea it is really only possible to learn in a good way when it is too late. Or maybe school is just a completely crap way of educating people.

As for the other supremely important relationship of his childhood, that with Bo Wang Lee, well, best you read for yourself. It is lovely.

So there Jonas is, right from the time he is a small boy, wanting life not to be flat and finding these people, Karen and Bo and Mr Dehli who most definitely also believe that life is not flat. Eventually he decides to make that his life’s work. He decides to reorganise the Dewey classification system into something that has depth. Way to go, Jonas.

Are there not two types of people in the world? The ones who are filers and the ones who aren’t? Me, I’ve always spent my life surrounded by piles of paper feet deep, into which I can dive and find anything at a second’s notice. The moment I think about filing anything, I’m lost. A million times in my life, however, I’ve wanted to file things and how to do it is an insoluble problem. I have thousands of balls of yarn and not a clue how to organise them. By brand? Type? Season? Gauge? Colour? It does my head in. I have a large collection of antique costume jewellery. Do I sort it by what it is: earring here, bracelet there? The colour? The composition? When I might wear it? Where I might wear it? Whether I would ever wear it? Mistakes over there? Period? Right now I’m writing recipes on Goodreads and it’s happening again. How do I categorise them? According to ingredient, type of course, season, what sort of impact it has on the eater, how it is cooked, cultural origin? I can’t do it with something as simple as food and Jonas tries to categorise the whole world as deep as he can. Brilliant.

I was lying in bed last night, contemplating how lucky I was to have been brought up in a family who didn’t think life was a flat thing. My father is dying and it would be such a pity, such unlike his life, if his death is going to be flat. I hope not. Just a week ago I was all but irritated with him as he was telling me about how he had been proposing to my mother’s - his wife’s - sister who has been a nun for merely 50 years. Last night I was thinking that yes, this is his way of making sure life even now, even completely incapacitated and not able to read or write, of making sure that life is not flat. I should have been more gracious than I was about the idea. A bigamist who turned a devoted nun away from the Church. Certainly not flat, that idea, that ambition.

And then later this morning, he dies. Never a flat life, not for one moment.

How to classify things. Of course, most recently, these thoughts here. I have no idea how to lay them out. Not the foggiest.

I could talk about this book forever. What I would like to do, while I still have some close sense of it is to post this now, not being sure when I will get to more of it…Sorry. The book/trilogy is worthy of much more.
( )

Maybe this whole 3 volumes, 1200 pages is a case of beware of low-flying sperm. I won’t deny having my suspicion that many years from now I may think I failed a basic IQ test.

But it’s now and I don’t think that. So this is how to start. Go here and listen to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nECoA-uVGfw

The reason we are starting here is that young boy Jonas thinks if there is one thing to take to the extra-terrestrial Vegans to make them think well of human-kind it is this. Jim Reeves singing ‘I love you because’. And here on youtube we have no less than Jim Reeves singing ‘I love you because’ in Oslo on TV there in 1964. Perfect. Listen to it twice. The first time you won’t take it seriously, but you should. It is what this book is about.

Not to mention, while you are listening I have a moment to figure out where to go next. Which, now that I think about it, is near the end.

A couple of times lately I’ve read books that have hurt me. You look at the words on the page and you know you don’t want to read them. I’m in Adelaide at the moment and the other day I was with a friend whose husband is in gaol. She’s in Australia looking after their four young children. He’s in the Californian desert doing six years. It isn’t often you listen to somebody’s problems and find that they are from some other world altogether. Only to discover, upon a little contemplation, that in some ways they aren’t any different from your own. What’s she to do with this husband who is doing something that happens to people in gaol where they lose their sense of what is important on the outside and become alienated from their loved ones. I’m watching that happen to somebody at the moment – it doesn’t, after all, have to be a physical gaol. But what can you do about it? You can only wait, heartbroken, and hope they come to their senses.

This is only part of her problem. The other part is that she has been waiting for him in every sense for three years and she can’t do that anymore. She has decided she has to have sex. And this part of her problem really isn’t any easier than the other. Can she do that? And have it just be sex? And still be waiting for this high-flying corporate husband who has joined a prison gang and sports a stab wound, a black eye and an illegal tattoo at the moment? How do you do this at all, let alone with 4 little kids? She’s asking the questions and I’m thinking can I use my ask-the-audience card?

A couple of days later I am having dinner with a friend. The issue has been lying in the air for way too long as to whether we might have sex and finally we take it off the agenda. The simple fact is that we are each waiting for somebody.

It is another day or two later that I read this excruciatingly painful passage.

p. 374

And so he hesitated. And so he refrained from pulling up her skirt and throwing himself on top of her, even when he felt the gentle press of her hands on his back, like an invitation. He tried to excuse himself to her; he wasn’t ready, he said, whispered breathlessly….Still, though, he was afraid – afraid of this lust, afraid that one day, instead of life, a desire to do the right thing, he would make do with a sex life. It was always there, just under the surface….

Later Jonas would contemplate the choice he had made in this and in similar situations. Because what if sex was life? And what if the life in which he might attain the ‘lofty goals’ toward which he strove was the life of the nether regions?

Where does it come from, this sense that it is right to wait? From the most important relationship of his childhood, from Karen Mohr. Karen, who is alone, but who might not have been. When the young Jonas asks her why she did not take up the invitation to share life with a famous painter she says:

p. 88

‘I did not deem him…worthy,’ she said. That word ‘worthy’ was to become a catchword in Jonas’s life.

‘Did you ever find someone who was worthy?’ he asked, doing his best to pronounce the word with the same gravity as Karen Mohr, stretching the vowels, and rolling the ‘r’.

‘No, I never did.’ And then, anticipating Jonas’s next question. ‘But I have never reproached myself’.

Jonas could not know that many times in the future his eyes would fill with tears at the memory of her face as she spoke of this. She had provided him with a mainstay, one that would stand within him forever; she taught him something about the uncompromising nature of love….Karen Mohr had received an offer from a man admired by half the world, but had not deemed him worthy. Love is no mere bagatelle, that’s for sure, was Jonas’s first thought.

So he has this inspiration of a woman in his childhood life and then too he has the astonishing Mr Dehli. Lucky, lucky boy.

p. 216

Mr Dehli was an expert climber; he would venture out onto the thinnest branches of a line of reasoning, then with a sudden swoop come swinging back to the trunk, possibly on a creeper. This, for Jonas, was more thrilling than the trapeze artists at the circus. Frequently he would sit at his desk, following – heart in mouth, almost – their master’s exposition of a complex topic, with one thought leading to another as he scrawled key words and phrases on the board. And just when Jonas was sure that their poor teacher had lost his way completely, when Mr Dehli, with his hair covered in chalk dust and his bow tie woefully askew, was stammering ‘and…and…and…’, suddenly it would come, that blessed ‘but…’, and a sight of relief would run through the classroom, to be followed by the master’s closing triple-somersault of an argument, which he delivered while circling some of the key words and drawing a couple of connecting lines that made Jonas gasp with surprised understanding.

I was so envious of Jonas, as I read about this perfect teacher. I hated every second of school and I’m sitting here thinking why couldn’t I have had a teacher like that? But maybe I did and never realised. Looking back to what I wrote in my thoughts on The Naked Ape

I spent a year in Marbury, a non-authoritarian school modelled on Summerhill. It was all too weird for words. Next time you wonder why I don't know what continent Spain is in, or why places that are further away have times that are closer or...keep in mind that my geography text book for the year was The Naked Ape.

Well, I say it was that sort of school like it's to blame for my appalling ignorance of geography. If only I'd chosen a normal school instead. But truth be told, the next year I did choose an ordinary school - Methodist Ladies College - and blow me down if the maths teacher didn't turn out to be a girl who made us do things like write poetry. 'Your maths assignment for today is to write a poem in the style of Jabberwocky' It's moot whether my maths is worse than my geography.

Sigh. I wouldn't mind so much if my poetry was any good.

So, maybe I had a Mr Dehli sometime and I simply wasn’t worthy. Maybe. I do have half an idea it is really only possible to learn in a good way when it is too late. Or maybe school is just a completely crap way of educating people.

As for the other supremely important relationship of his childhood, that with Bo Wang Lee, well, best you read for yourself. It is lovely.

So there Jonas is, right from the time he is a small boy, wanting life not to be flat and finding these people, Karen and Bo and Mr Dehli who most definitely also believe that life is not flat. Eventually he decides to make that his life’s work. He decides to reorganise the Dewey classification system into something that has depth. Way to go, Jonas.

Are there not two types of people in the world? The ones who are filers and the ones who aren’t? Me, I’ve always spent my life surrounded by piles of paper feet deep, into which I can dive and find anything at a second’s notice. The moment I think about filing anything, I’m lost. A million times in my life, however, I’ve wanted to file things and how to do it is an insoluble problem. I have thousands of balls of yarn and not a clue how to organise them. By brand? Type? Season? Gauge? Colour? It does my head in. I have a large collection of antique costume jewellery. Do I sort it by what it is: earring here, bracelet there? The colour? The composition? When I might wear it? Where I might wear it? Whether I would ever wear it? Mistakes over there? Period? Right now I’m writing recipes on Goodreads and it’s happening again. How do I categorise them? According to ingredient, type of course, season, what sort of impact it has on the eater, how it is cooked, cultural origin? I can’t do it with something as simple as food and Jonas tries to categorise the whole world as deep as he can. Brilliant.

I was lying in bed last night, contemplating how lucky I was to have been brought up in a family who didn’t think life was a flat thing. My father is dying and it would be such a pity, such unlike his life, if his death is going to be flat. I hope not. Just a week ago I was all but irritated with him as he was telling me about how he had been proposing to my mother’s - his wife’s - sister who has been a nun for merely 50 years. Last night I was thinking that yes, this is his way of making sure life even now, even completely incapacitated and not able to read or write, of making sure that life is not flat. I should have been more gracious than I was about the idea. A bigamist who turned a devoted nun away from the Church. Certainly not flat, that idea, that ambition.

And then later this morning, he dies. Never a flat life, not for one moment.

How to classify things. Of course, most recently, these thoughts here. I have no idea how to lay them out. Not the foggiest.

I could talk about this book forever. What I would like to do, while I still have some close sense of it is to post this now, not being sure when I will get to more of it…Sorry. The book/trilogy is worthy of much more.
( )

Again, these books defy description.

Each one is multifaceted, complex, and rich, delving deeper and deeper into the life of Jonas, the one-time superstar of the Norwegian TV series, "Thinking Big", the genius, the magical penis, the Winner (book one, with tragedy), the Loser (book two, with hope), and book three, which I'll call the Revelation.

Not too different from "The Discoverer", I'm sure, but at least my title actually pokes at a theme that growls at me. Not a dragon, like in the second book, but a loving daughter who finally realizes who - and what - her father actually was.

And he was all of these things. Every book was accurate but they told the story of Jonas in wildly different ways.

This one is far from being dark like the first or especially the second. It looked to the future. It focused on forgiveness. On discovery, beauty, genius, and all the tiny interconnected pieces of a life juggled helplessly by one masterful sleight of hand. I use these descriptions purposefully - as if taken right from the book. And perhaps I should have quoted, but I'm lazy. :)

This book carries us much further from the events in the first book even though it sheds a lot more light on why and how and especially what drove Jonas to do what he did. No spoilers. But learning this one piece of knowledge is a LONG trek and should be experienced by the reader alone.

It's a transformative book.

I admit it cut me. But alone, I don't think it would have cut me unless I had experienced the first two books. I feel like I know Jonas better than I know myself. It's THAT kind of book.

Do I recommend the trilogy?

Yes. But be aware that it might be a monumental undertaking. :) ( )

Kind of hard for me to understand since it is from a translation, but I thought it was very nicely written!

This is a superb book, written and disorganized as if you are privy to the constant dialogue in Jonas's mind, the neverending discourse all of us cursed or blessed with language have reeling in our brains. Only Jonas's thoughts are more interesting than most people's. I suspect. Utterly fascinating, engrossing, dense, vivid, superb. ( )