Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
Dalkey Archive (2009), Paperback, 200 pages
Description
A brutally comic portrait of marriage, taken to extremes reminiscent of the work of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard.
User reviews
LibraryThing member BlackSheepDances
Edwin lives in his bathroom. A rocking chair placed within is his world, and a nearby dresser holds his cups of flat soda and boxes of Orbit gum. The floor is wrinkled with wrappers, and while he’s blind, an overhead fluorescent light illuminates his miserable existence. Once an exacting
Siamese examines the inner thoughts and outer actions of this strange pair, in the most intimate of ways. Elna is so involved in Edwin’s death (as it is he is more dead than alive) that she lacks the most basic grasp of common sense, unless it comes to deceiving Edwin. Edwin glories in his demise, cataloguing each symptom and detail with relish. It’s almost as if his decay proves that he existed in the first place, because in his constant reminiscing he often tries to analyze if he really did live. His thoughts are random, vulgar, and filled with hate. He asks himself: “Where is this road heading? What will become of everything? Will the future be like what’s already going on in my head? No, the world’s still out there. Nothing ever goes away, it just accumulates. Especially for me, who can’t see worth a damn, yes, I just sit here with a head full of stupid pictures…”
It’s clear that even in younger days, Edwin was far from kindly. He treated the patients in the rest home with distant efficiency but secretly thought they should be suffocated in their beds. He loses his job just as his sanity lapses: he attacks a nurse. From then on his busy career fades into the small, smelly room where he ruminates about prior patients and coworkers and pleads for Death to arrive soon to release him from his thoughts:
“Take it all, I mean it, don’t leave so much as a bedroom slipper behind, annihilate me, smash me into kindling, into dust, then vacuum me up, leave no evidence, I don’t want to be remembered for anything…I long for you to come and beat my thoughts into submission…they’ve plagued me long enough, do nothing but torment me,…all they can think about, all they remember, is themselves…But I don’t want to think about them anymore…letting them have their way with me is a worse defeat than death.”
Elna, for her part, remains distant from Edwin, as his still breathing corpse is no company and company is what she craves. A broken light bulb, necessitating a visit from the building’s young superintendent, finally gives Elna a chance. And the malevolent force that enters their miserable life changes everything.
Siamese is not a mystery novel, but at times I had to remind myself to breathe as the suspense built. A character study of two deeply connected but polarized individuals, it is fascinating to read and see how their actions push each other into reactions that are both ugly and frightening. It’s also terribly frightening: the helplessness and lack of contact along with the certainty of impending death gave me chills.
The novel was originally written in Norwegian and was translated by Stokes Schwartz.
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businessman, overseeing a convalescent home of deteriorating elderly people, he now sits in his own waste, deteriorating slowly as he chews gum and has conversations with Death. Screaming at Elna, his wife, is his only source of distraction from his roving thoughts. Siamese examines the inner thoughts and outer actions of this strange pair, in the most intimate of ways. Elna is so involved in Edwin’s death (as it is he is more dead than alive) that she lacks the most basic grasp of common sense, unless it comes to deceiving Edwin. Edwin glories in his demise, cataloguing each symptom and detail with relish. It’s almost as if his decay proves that he existed in the first place, because in his constant reminiscing he often tries to analyze if he really did live. His thoughts are random, vulgar, and filled with hate. He asks himself: “Where is this road heading? What will become of everything? Will the future be like what’s already going on in my head? No, the world’s still out there. Nothing ever goes away, it just accumulates. Especially for me, who can’t see worth a damn, yes, I just sit here with a head full of stupid pictures…”
It’s clear that even in younger days, Edwin was far from kindly. He treated the patients in the rest home with distant efficiency but secretly thought they should be suffocated in their beds. He loses his job just as his sanity lapses: he attacks a nurse. From then on his busy career fades into the small, smelly room where he ruminates about prior patients and coworkers and pleads for Death to arrive soon to release him from his thoughts:
“Take it all, I mean it, don’t leave so much as a bedroom slipper behind, annihilate me, smash me into kindling, into dust, then vacuum me up, leave no evidence, I don’t want to be remembered for anything…I long for you to come and beat my thoughts into submission…they’ve plagued me long enough, do nothing but torment me,…all they can think about, all they remember, is themselves…But I don’t want to think about them anymore…letting them have their way with me is a worse defeat than death.”
Elna, for her part, remains distant from Edwin, as his still breathing corpse is no company and company is what she craves. A broken light bulb, necessitating a visit from the building’s young superintendent, finally gives Elna a chance. And the malevolent force that enters their miserable life changes everything.
Siamese is not a mystery novel, but at times I had to remind myself to breathe as the suspense built. A character study of two deeply connected but polarized individuals, it is fascinating to read and see how their actions push each other into reactions that are both ugly and frightening. It’s also terribly frightening: the helplessness and lack of contact along with the certainty of impending death gave me chills.
The novel was originally written in Norwegian and was translated by Stokes Schwartz.
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LibraryThing member JimElkins
Exactly how black can writing get?
At first it seems Saeterbakken is mainly indebted to Beckett: the blind old man's hopeless, self-imposed situation, sitting in a chair in a bathroom for years on end while his circulation shuts down and he slowly decomposes, would not have been possible without
But Saeterbakken has an imagination of his own, and it comes out in an amazing continuous invention of his characters' inner lives. The man's wife is an excellent study in emotional paralysis. I can imagine the Joyce of 'The Dubliners' enjoying the way she passively and inaccurately mulls over the many things she hasn't quite said or understood. The man himself is not just desperate or angry, because in the past he was a compulsively accurate record-keeper, and that compulsiveness has an unresolved relation to his current intermittent dementia. The usual way novelists balance irascible senility is with moments of sentiment and lucidity; those do occur here, but they don't do much work. What matters instead is the puzzle of how the middle-aged irritating micromanager chose his muddled but constant wife, and how he then became the old man in the novel.
There are a few problems that I would like to assign to Saeterbakken's age: he was only in his thirties when he wrote this. First, it is often possible to tell when he is recording things he learned in hospitals and old age homes. Sudden precise details from the world of hospitals and critical care facilities take me out of the novel and remind me Saeterbakken must have kept real, or mental, notebooks in preparation for this novel. Second, there are set-piece scenes that a greater novelist, like Bernhard, would have washed away in a flood of anger, nihilism, or some other driving concern. One is the first meeting between the man's wife and the superintendent of the building, which reads like a sketch by Ibsen about some claustrophobic and embarrassing domestic life. And third, the relentless inventories of the man's body are clearly intended to shock, but as Roland Barthes knew, shock quickly becomes 'shock,' which in turn becomes irritation. A purer version of this book could have done without them. And fourth, there are attempts at black humor and campy funeral-parlor jokes, like the old man's diet (Orbit chewing gum by the case, Coke, and meatballs): they also go from funny to 'funny' to irritating. Better here to follow Beckett, and let things like food be forgotten. 'Black humor' is a rum category, because it pretends it isn't serious about what it actually most serious, its ambition to be as dark as possible.
Those are flaws, because they are less than total blackness, and once blackness appears it wants to be total.
At first it seems Saeterbakken is mainly indebted to Beckett: the blind old man's hopeless, self-imposed situation, sitting in a chair in a bathroom for years on end while his circulation shuts down and he slowly decomposes, would not have been possible without
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scenes in Beckett, especially the man in 'The Unnamable' (1953) who has been sitting so long he cannot be sure he still has legs. And then it seems Saeterbakken is more indebted to Thomas Bernhard, because of the vitriol, the petty paranoia, the hatred and spite, the disgust that pours from the old man's imagination like one of his many pustulent infestations, imagined intestinal worms, scabs, psoriasis, boils, blackheads, pellet-like shit, or powerful farts.But Saeterbakken has an imagination of his own, and it comes out in an amazing continuous invention of his characters' inner lives. The man's wife is an excellent study in emotional paralysis. I can imagine the Joyce of 'The Dubliners' enjoying the way she passively and inaccurately mulls over the many things she hasn't quite said or understood. The man himself is not just desperate or angry, because in the past he was a compulsively accurate record-keeper, and that compulsiveness has an unresolved relation to his current intermittent dementia. The usual way novelists balance irascible senility is with moments of sentiment and lucidity; those do occur here, but they don't do much work. What matters instead is the puzzle of how the middle-aged irritating micromanager chose his muddled but constant wife, and how he then became the old man in the novel.
There are a few problems that I would like to assign to Saeterbakken's age: he was only in his thirties when he wrote this. First, it is often possible to tell when he is recording things he learned in hospitals and old age homes. Sudden precise details from the world of hospitals and critical care facilities take me out of the novel and remind me Saeterbakken must have kept real, or mental, notebooks in preparation for this novel. Second, there are set-piece scenes that a greater novelist, like Bernhard, would have washed away in a flood of anger, nihilism, or some other driving concern. One is the first meeting between the man's wife and the superintendent of the building, which reads like a sketch by Ibsen about some claustrophobic and embarrassing domestic life. And third, the relentless inventories of the man's body are clearly intended to shock, but as Roland Barthes knew, shock quickly becomes 'shock,' which in turn becomes irritation. A purer version of this book could have done without them. And fourth, there are attempts at black humor and campy funeral-parlor jokes, like the old man's diet (Orbit chewing gum by the case, Coke, and meatballs): they also go from funny to 'funny' to irritating. Better here to follow Beckett, and let things like food be forgotten. 'Black humor' is a rum category, because it pretends it isn't serious about what it actually most serious, its ambition to be as dark as possible.
Those are flaws, because they are less than total blackness, and once blackness appears it wants to be total.
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LibraryThing member stillatim
Is there something wrong with me? I thought that, far from being a grotesque descent into the depths of human hideousness, this was a fairly touching novel about how two people, even in the absolute depths, can get along okay. The invalid doesn't do anything too bad to his wife. The wife doesn't do
If I want to be disgusted, I'll read Swift's poetry. That way, I get way more disgusted, but amused, as well.
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anything too bad to his husband. Perhaps the obviously Beckettian set-up made me expect something a bit colder; perhaps the translation doesn't really do justice to Saeterbakken's prose, which seems, on the evidence here, to be quite jaunty. Perhaps I'm just not interested in physical disgust unmediated by intelligent reflection.If I want to be disgusted, I'll read Swift's poetry. That way, I get way more disgusted, but amused, as well.
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Language
Original publication date
1997
Physical description
200 p.; 8.04 inches
ISBN
1564783251 / 9781564783257