The first novel in the acclaimed ""History of Bestiality"" trilogy. Living high in the Alps in a German principality, our narrator tells us he's dutifully fulfilling his obligations as a Servant of Justice and acting as a daily witness to injustice masquerading as a court of law. One day he notices that the judge is much too engrossed in looking at pornographic photographs showing various other pillars of the town engaged in a variety of sexual activities with minors. The incident propels him on a mental journey back through his life: black-humor fantasies and suicidal drinking binges; the Roman catacombs, warm summer nights in Brooklyn; brothels in Stockholm, his childhood in Norway, and wanderings in Germany. But aside from court records he has been keeping his own long and detailed account of man's cruelty to man in a massive twelve-volume study he calls his History of Bestiality. Acknowledging his Germanic past, the narrator realizes that all his attempts to perceive order in life lead only to his acceptance of the chaos of life. We see him striving to live uncoerced by power, unpersuaded by friends, to take for himself the liberty of stating his critique in order to live in his own moment of truth, to stand ""far out at the edge of the abyss."" ""Harshly comic and richly disturbing fiction."" Kirkus Reviews

Moment of freedom: The Heiligenberg manuscript

Bjørneboe, Jens

Norton

Moment of Freedom: The Heiligenberg Manuscript

Literature & Fiction

Dufour Editions

The second novel in Bjorneboe's ""History of Bestiality"" trilogy. The story is told by Jean, a janitor in a mental hospital in southern France. Jean keeps protocols, keeps for himself a written record of those events occurring around him. Also in the hospital are a strange cast of characters, any of whom could have committed the executtion-like hanging of an ex-German SS member around which the plot, which is akin to a mystery or espionage potboiler, revolves. It's hospital policy that everyone can give a lecture and a large portion of the book is taken up with three lectures: the narrator talks about witch symptomatology; Lacroix, a Belgian executioner, offers up a powerful, Foucault-like piece on the history of execution, executioners, and capital punishment; and the acid-dropping Dr. Lefévre discusses heresy and heretics. ""Exudes the intermittently charming hippie disaffection of the '60s."" Publishers Weekly

Powderhouse: Scientific Postscript and Last Protocol

Short Stories & Anthologies

As with the first two books of this trilogy, The Silence also rejects the traditional modes of fiction to posit instead an essay-like novel of ideas, philosophy, and argumentation. Here the inquiring narrator explores not just European history, as he did in the first two novels, but the crimes committed by Europeans against the rest of humanity in the name of expansion and conquest. Set in northern Africa, the narrator is looking at Europe from the outside. With his friend Ali, an African revolutionary intellectual, he discusses in epic fashion the history of colonialism. He engages in imaginary conversations with Columbus, Robespierre, God, and Satan. He becomes totally immersed in what he perceives as the world's wickedness. Despite its presentation of horrors and man's inhumanity to man, and its grim portrayal of the narrator's long plunge into the tunnel of depression, The Silence does not depress. It praises man's immeasurable capacity for good. ""A riveting work of experimental fiction."" Library Journal

The Silence: An Anti-Novel and Absolutely the Very Last Protocol

Genre Fiction

Comic novel that follows the exploits of a community of expatriates living off-season in a small Italian fishing village: their lives, loves, and interactions with the locals, including involvement in a dispute between the fishermen and the town fathers who wish to promote the tourist industry. English translation of Vinter i Bellapalma by Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe.

Winter in Bellapalma

Literary

Frayed Edge Press

Powderhouse (Series B: English Translations of Works of Scandinavian Literature)

Murer, Esther Greenleaf (translator)

Contemporary

Norvik P.

The Silence

Norvik Press

Drama. Theater. Translated from the Norwegian by Solrum Hoaas and Esther Greenleaf Murer. The Norwegain iconoclast Jens Bjorneboe described this work as "a wild, almost surrealistic play--partly sinister, partly comic...directed against those forms of society that do not allow room for people who think differently from those in power." In the horrible world of AMPUTATION the dissident individual who cannot be normalized by conditioned reflexes may yet serve society--in the medical sense. Bjorneboe wrote two versions of the play, and both are included here, along with supplemental texts.

Amputation: Texts for an Extraordinary Spectacle

Dramas & Plays

Xenos Books

Set at the end of the 19th century, The Sharks is a thrilling tale of mutiny and shipwreck. The narrator, Peder Jensen, is both a competent second mate and an unworldly philosopher. Through his eyes, we follow the dismantling of the rigid power structure on board as a community begins to emerge. This is also the story of mankind's voyage into the 20th century, dreadfully aware of our potential for self-destruction but clinging to a belief in the preservation of a fragile humanity. This 1974 novel is the last by Jens Bjorneboe (1920-1976), one of Norway's most original, outspoken, and controversial modern writers.

The Sharks

British & Irish

Norvik Pr

The first novel in the acclaimed ""History of Bestiality"" trilogy. Living high in the Alps in a German principality, our narrator tells us he's dutifully fulfilling his obligations as a Servant of Justice and acting as a daily witness to injustice masquerading as a court of law. One day he notices that the judge is much too engrossed in looking at pornographic photographs showing various other pillars of the town engaged in a variety of sexual activities with minors. The incident propels him on a mental journey back through his life: black-humor fantasies and suicidal drinking binges; the Roman catacombs, warm summer nights in Brooklyn; brothels in Stockholm, his childhood in Norway, and wanderings in Germany. But aside from court records he has been keeping his own long and detailed account of man's cruelty to man in a massive twelve-volume study he calls his History of Bestiality. Acknowledging his Germanic past, the narrator realizes that all his attempts to perceive order in life lead only to his acceptance of the chaos of life. We see him striving to live uncoerced by power, unpersuaded by friends, to take for himself the liberty of stating his critique in order to live in his own moment of truth, to stand ""far out at the edge of the abyss."" ""Harshly comic and richly disturbing fiction.""-Kirkus Reviews

Moment of Freedom (B)

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