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A review by oofym
The Liar by Martin A. Hansen
challenging
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
The Liar by Martin A. Hansen was certainly one of my weirder reads this year. You’ve got yourself an unreliable narrator in Johannes Lye; a schoolteacher who’s stuck in an existential rut between nihilism and spirituality. Then there’s the writing style; no quotation marks, poems interlaced throughout the narrative, and it’s an epistolary novel set on a tiny Danish island to top it all off.
I really enjoyed my time with this, I took it very slow, wrote A LOT of notes (4000 words), and I very much appreciate the rather innovative and subtle artistry which Hansen weaves throughout this dream-like domestic tale.
The amount of philosophy, morality, existentialism, mystery and emotional drama included in The Liar is the absolute perfect sweet spot for me, it’s the goldilocks zone. My major takeaway after my reading is that Hansen, through Johannes Lye, is trying to show the harm of a spiritual no-man’s-land and the restlessness that this can cause particular people.
“When you get to the very utmost point of that despair and pointlessness, you discover that life is one huge battleground in which two powers are locked in eternal combat. No-man’s-land doesn’t exist.”
Johannes states that this in-between zone of good and evil doesn’t exist, but the story says otherwise. Johannes is the exemplification of this grey area. He deceives others, pursues passions of the flesh, is borderline possessed by some evil spirit at one point, and yet he also, out of the kindness of his heart takes an abandoned pregnant woman into his home, loves his dog, cares for the people of the village and finds great joy in his job at the school. Because of this strange contradictory personality he has, he feels as if he’s a stranger on the Island, impermanent and unimportant.
All humans commit good and bad deeds, but when a human believes in nothing greater than themselves, they start to see the utter unreliability of their own character, they start to question the point of all their actions, and most never come to a conclusion. It feels obvious to me that throughout the story Johannes is seeking the presence and comfort of God. He directs his diary entries to a made-up character named “Nathaniel”, and Johannes explicitly mentions that he views him as the biblical disciple of Jesus who is incapable of deceit, and throughout the novel Johannes desires Nathaniel’s attention and seems to constantly beg him to listen to him. The way Johannes writes to this fictitious Nathaniel is the exact same way a person would try to speak to God or something higher than themselves. Johannes often asks Nathaniel not to judge him too harshly, he asks for Nathaniel’s opinion and he seeks his presence on all tricky matters of spirituality. You could replace the world Nathaniel with God, Jesus, Buddha or Allah and nothing about this novel would change in the slightest.
All humans commit good and bad deeds, but when a human believes in nothing greater than themselves, they start to see the utter unreliability of their own character, they start to question the point of all their actions, and most never come to a conclusion. It feels obvious to me that throughout the story Johannes is seeking the presence and comfort of God. He directs his diary entries to a made-up character named “Nathaniel”, and Johannes explicitly mentions that he views him as the biblical disciple of Jesus who is incapable of deceit, and throughout the novel Johannes desires Nathaniel’s attention and seems to constantly beg him to listen to him. The way Johannes writes to this fictitious Nathaniel is the exact same way a person would try to speak to God or something higher than themselves. Johannes often asks Nathaniel not to judge him too harshly, he asks for Nathaniel’s opinion and he seeks his presence on all tricky matters of spirituality. You could replace the world Nathaniel with God, Jesus, Buddha or Allah and nothing about this novel would change in the slightest.
We see throughout the story the turmoil Johannes’s existentialism and borderline nihilism cause him, the alienation he feels at having nothing to tie himself too. Without recounting the entire story, we see a change in Johannes in his last diary entry. He quite literally begins it with.
“Pigro is dead (his dog). Now I’ve only God in whom I can place my trust.”
Johannes now seeks something more permanent, he still sees the supposed meaningless in human behaviour and activities, but now he wishes to tie himself to the land in some way. He’s taken up a project to document the Island’s history, residents and geographical features. It’s given him a bit of purpose, and it appears that he worries a little less about the women and events that were pulling him in every which way. But still, he’s not entirely at ease, he says at one point that he often thinks about drinking himself into oblivion. Johannes, despite his attempt to create his own meaning, still isn’t content, he’s still in that spiritual no-man’s-land.
I suppose the argument of the story, is that to stake your entire life on things that are impermanent or purely material is a foolish endeavour, one must cling to something eternal or everlasting, something with grand meaning. If we give in to fickle human emotions at every opportunity we become like Johannes was in his notebooks; deceitful, manic and “The Liar.”
“Maybe that’s another reason why I’ve written the words “The Liar” in my other notebooks that deal with my own life. Because what I have depicted therein sails past you and me like the shifting clouds in the sky. Loose, everchanging and drifting. Never permanent.”