Reviews

Moment of Freedom by Jens Bjørneboe

shanenonymous's review

challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

ebokhyllami's review against another edition

4.0

Bok 1 i trilogien Bestialitetens Historie. Veldig god, om enn noe tungt språk fra Bjørneboe.

kristinen's review against another edition

adventurous reflective relaxing medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

paulataua's review

2.0

‘Moment of Freedom’ is certainly not an easy read. It’s a sprawling mess, but a mess that does explore the decay of humanity, its inherent evil, and its inclination to violence. Yeah, there were a lot of interesting things within, but it was a constant struggle for me to keep going. It is written in a style that belongs somewhere in the 1960s and 1970s, a time when being obscure was always seen as a positive. I won’t be going on to the second part of ‘The History of Bestiality’. One was enough.

aurorasgrande's review against another edition

challenging dark reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

evacbj's review against another edition

4.0

Mest ubehagelige lesningen jeg har kommet meg gjennom på en stund. Bestialske greier. Sikkert litt sannhet om de mørkere sidene av de små bjørners natur, men boi, vil jeg vite dette?

bruslie's review against another edition

5.0

«Frihet er å ikke ha noen målestokk utenfor sin egen bevissthet, men å bære alt ansvaret selv"

shumska's review against another edition

5.0

čitanje heiligenberškog rukopisa zapravo je suočavanje s ljudskim zlom. izvrstan jens bjørneboe kroz trilogiju "povijest bestijalnosti" (heiligenberški rukopis prvi je dio trilogije; u drugom će se baviti zločinima Crkve, a u posljednjem kolonijalizmom i genocidima) razmatrat će različite oblike zla koje je, očito, neraskidivo s pojmom čovjeka kao takvog.

i sam tragičnog života -alkoholičar od svoje 12. godine, prvi pokušaj samoubojstva u 14.; cijeli život borio se s depresijom i alkoholizmom i naposljetku si u 56. godini presudio vješanjem- njegovo pismo jasan je odraz ne samo vlastitog duševnog stanja, već i nemio i bolan podsjetnik na opakost svijeta u kojem živimo. izuzetno poetičan, često i sarkastičan (kao... što nam drugo preostaje, nego nalaziti humora u trpljenju?), mjestimice brutalan u opisima prizora zla koja je ljudska vrsta u stanju činiti jedni drugima, a cijelo vrijeme, svakom rečenicom, human i suosjećajan. izuzetan autor kojeg se premalo čita... a mogu i razumjeti zašto: sa svakom okrenutom stranicom, entuzijazam prema životu opada, a vjera u ljudski rod biva poljuljana. malo kome odgovara pristati na taj kompromis; idealističnu ideju života ustupiti kvalitetnom, ali tragičnom tekstu.

jimmylorunning's review against another edition

5.0

...it has to be like that so that injustice can take its course. 43

This book is a devastating evocation of violence, immorality, and injustice, made only slightly more palatable by the blackest of humor and a dash of literary tact to taste. For literature has always had a certain quality of a screen -- it both exposes and hides. Literature is a comfort. Think of Sebald, Bernhard and Handke, authors who come to mind when reading this one, but there is a holding back in those books, a fear that naming the thing too directly will ruin the art--that need to tell it slant.

One needs a dialectical superstructure in order to speak truly, and he knew it. One needs it in order to die as well, because these two things hang together: there's a smell of death associated with all truth, something of death's shamelessness. Falsehood likewise has its relationship to death. No one knows that better than I myself, who have lied so much. But it's a different relationship. It isn't so inexorable, because a lie can be made right again, it can be corrected with a new lie, it isn't final and absolute. But a truth--once it's out, then it's inexorable--a brother to death. 13

But for our narrator, it is the opposite. He is writing a book called The History of Bestiality in which he tries to find personal meaning in the sea of bleak inhumanity that is post-war Europe:

I thought about how I'd staked everything on achieving one single thing: to be at peace with the world! Through many years I'd sought out injustice in order to inure myself to it. That was the whole secret in my plan: to tolerate unfreedom and injustice. 55

Saying it that way is humorously backwards. But there is a truth in it too. For his hatred of unfreedom and injustice requires that he lives in it, that he become completely comfortable and resigned to it to the point of acceptance--not of the senseless acts themselves, but of the fact that it has gone on and will go on (and even a weird faith that it serves some kind of mysterious purpose):

In our own excellent times, many have noticed that the world to a certain degree bears the stamp of wars and acts of violence. There are people who take this hard. That's because they don't think enough about ... how every period has been about the same: the total picture is a bloody operating room of an executioner's workshop. Why it should--just by pure accident, all by itself--have become any different after the last century's technological progress, is simply a completely open and unanswered question. 160

In a voice of melancholy and bitterness, he takes us through a landscape of dreams, stories, thoughts and recollections. But the price of this encounter with truth is high. His memory is riddled with holes--he doesn't even remember his own name or who he is. One gets the sense that he has traded personal biography for humanity's. That in fact the stories he's collected over the years, and which he recounts for us, stories of normal people doing really shitty things, has somehow replaced his own stories one by one, so that he remembers nothing of it.

Of course I remember a lot from my life, but I have this steadily stronger feeling that I don't remember what it's all about. 177

And this form of amnesia also has a certain honesty to it. For the way it works is not unlike the way memory works when we jump from one thing to another. Thus the book in the end feels vague in the best of ways, i.e. one has that feeling of stumbling out of a dream-fugue, that vague amorphous blob that is human experience recollected, but without the writing itself being vague. The writing is always sharp, specific, cutting.

Naturally in the course of the battles great quantities of excrement also went down into the soil, in part evacuations from three million men who expelled their feces in the normal or customary manner--but also immense quantities of excrement which came out through the mouths or purely and simply through the backs or bellies of the combatants; in other words, intestinal content which had been more or less fully converted to excrement, and which naturally had great fertilizer value when mixed with blood and other body fluids. 168 (he goes on for pages comparing the fertilizing value of different types of solders, young vs. old, German vs. Anglo-Celts, etc.)

This is not simply a catalogue of wrongs. I hope I didn't give that impression. There's so much in here and it is not boring for a second. It is more like an extended essay with creative fictional elements to it. It is even a call to action, but to personal, meaningful action. There's a tenderness in his voice and a constant feeling of weirdness. The way he calls the subjects of his stories "little bears" for instance is both endearing and creepy at the same time. This is not a perfect book. He puts too much raw (sometimes even sentimental) emotion and political statements in it for that. But perhaps it is better than a perfect book.

The question was clear: Is it I who am mad, or is it the world? I knew the right answer, but I didn't dare to utter it: It is the world which is mad! Instead I bowed and said: The world is right: I am mad--thus making myself the World's accomplice in the Sin against the Holy Spirit. For many years I concealed my terrible deed behind the mask of modesty and humility. 146

OK, one more quote... simply because this description of a painting is so telling and so beautiful, to me, and encapsulates something of the futility/hope of the speaker:

One of the pictures which has pursued me ever since, and which has been a companion through life, is Ernst Josephsson's painting La joie de vivre; it shows an old man's deathbed.
The whole picture is a soft, mild flicker of light and color; the white, clear afternoon light filters in through the window, dissolving all fixed objects, the bed, the bedclothes, the head and beard on the old, smiling man. Beside the old man are standing in the same all-effacing and flickering light the old wife, a little child, and a young woman. They're all smiling the same soft, contented child's smile as the old man in the bed. Beside him is a glass of wine. In the background an old French peasant cupboard, which also lies under this veil of light. The picture is heavily and thickly painted, with the colors hanging in coarse clumps--and all this weight is in Josephsson's spirit transformed into lightness, to light, to a vibrant shimmer, to a world which is no longer of earth, but of light, all the pain of sickness and decay has turned into joy in life, to la grande joie de vivre; the world has once again become a flowering, matter is conquered, and the old man's face, his smile--like the smiles of the others--lies, like the whole painting, between laughter and tears, lies in a double light, in a fissure between smiles and seriousness which--as the great Servant of Justice Hans E. Kinck says: "whispers of a man's soul in dissolution." Of the look, I would say, which sees behind reality, straight through matter which is itself in a state of dissolution. La joie de vivre is the most beautiful example I know of matter transformed, transubstantiated through spiritual chemistry: this is my body....

Between smiles and seriousness--yes that exactly... though the smiles occasionally resemble grimaces.

lenehoynes's review

challenging dark slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5