[.ca] The Half Brother (ISBN 1559707593)

"How little does it take to save a person?":
One of the biggest, most ambitiously conceived, and richly imagined novels ever, The Half-Brother has already won the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and it has been nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. A haunting story of four generations of a strange Norwegian family, each member of which is "different" in some respect, this is as complete a family saga as you will find. Every character is fully delineated, and all his/her relationships and relevant past history are brought to life here, filtered through the mind of Barnum Nilsen, the son of a circus worker and grifter. Barnum's unusual but ultimately close relationship with his brother Fred, the product of his mother's rape by a soldier, is at the heart of the novel, with Fred being huge, active, and very physical while Barnum is unusually small, more passive, and cerebral. Two halves of the same coin, neither brother is very successful alone. Four generations of the family live together, and some "absent" characters, who have affected the lives of family members, "live on" through objects that they have left behind with the family. Barnum and Fred often seek a connection to the past by reading the last letter their great-grandfather sent from Greenland before he vanished. Vera's best friend Rakel leaves Vera with a treasured ring, just before she is taken during the Nazi occupation of Norway. Barnum buys a ring for his first girlfriend, and it has meaning for him even when he is middle-aged. "We do not disappear without a trace," Barnum learns. "We leave a wake that never quite disappears, a gash in time." As this immense story unfolds, the reader finds the action harking backward, forward, and in upon itself, with silence, disappearances, and deaths pervading the action. Vera and Fred both go silent for months as a result of trauma. The great-grandfather and Vera's father never appear, and Arnold Nilsen, Barnum's father, disappears periodically after his marriage to Vera, as does Fred, the half-brother. Permanent disappearance, i.e., death, occurs to the Old One and a host of other characters, and accidents involving still other characters cast a pall over much of the novel, highlighting the "aloneness" of each person, and the quixotic nature of fate. Still, there is much humor here as the characters keep soldiering on. This is a huge book, but the pages fly by, despite the fact that the author does not insert much paragraphing. Whole pages continue without any breaks at all, and dialogue is simply imbedded within paragraphs. With hundreds of well-drawn, memorable scenes, dozens of carefully presented characters whose entire lives and history you know completely, surprises buried within seemingly ordinary tales, and the creation of a complete and unique universe, this is a novel which will richly reward the reader who is not intimidated by its size. Mary Whipple