
Book Review: Before I Burn by Gaute Heivoll
Before I Burn
A Novel by Gaute Heivoll, Translated by Don Bartlett
Graywolf Press, 2013
$26.00; 307 pp.
Reviewed by Daniel Pecchenino
Given the number of Scandinavian crime novels to wash up on our shores in the last decade, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this particular kind of book has replaced cheap minimalist furniture or high-functioning socialism as these cold northern states’ most distinctive cultural production. The beauty of this storm-surge of fiction has been that, unlike Ikea dressers, there’s nothing uniform about the best of these “thrillers.” Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy is the most popular of the bunch, but his violent techno-sexual novels aren’t simple recastings of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander mysteries any more than Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer books mimic the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Great crime fiction, wherever it’s from, uses traditional generic conventions to reinvent and critique them.
One of the most unique of these new crime novels, Gaute Heivoll’s Before I Burn, comes to us from Norway. Heivoll writes himself into the story from the outset, never even acknowledging the line between fact and fiction. Ostensibly, Before I Burn tells us about a series of arson fires that set a small corner of Norway on edge for a few days around the time of Heivoll’s birth. He’s not speaking from direct memory, but rather retelling what he later saw in photos and heard whispered growing up in a town where tragedy had intimate aftereffects. Heivoll doesn’t hide the identity of the arsonist from the reader any longer than he has to because this isn’t a “who done it.” Dag is (or perhaps “was”—time gets screwy in this book) a young man who, like Heivoll, seems destined for great things, but upon his return from military service at an Arctic base on the Soviet border (the novel takes place in the late 1970s), he begins setting first abandoned buildings, then occupied houses in his hometown ablaze. Heivoll writes of Dag’s handiwork: “There is only the fire… The flames and the smoke are being sucked up into the sky, of so it seems; there are creaks and groans, like distant responses. It is frightening, it is terrible and it is beyond comprehension.” This could just as easily describe the arsonist himself, “beyond comprehension” because he once seemed so knowable.
Like many of its modernist forebears, Before I Burn is a künstlerroman, a story of an artist as a young man. This doesn’t quite capture it though, as it’s really the story of three young artists: a writer, an arsonist, and, Kåre, a mysterious ski-jumper and contemporary of Heivoll’s father who died before he could disappoint his parents by failing his law exams or burning down the houses of old family friends. Kåre’s brief life is a symbolic goodness that also represents the town’s dead-end future. The boys are all only children, and their parents love them with a quiet ferocity that makes failure seem like something worth lying or scorching the earth to cover up. Indeed, it’s fitting that in a novel peopled with characters we are asked to think of as “true” that Heivoll, reflecting on the death of his father, writes: “The last thing I did was to lie to him, and I didn’t even have time to tell him that I had become a writer.”
If there’s a conspiracy at the heart of Before I Burn, then, it’s at once distinctly local yet profoundly global, the kind that drove the fiction of William Faulkner, Graham Greene, and, most directly, Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “Soldier’s Home.” It’s a conspiracy of silence that exists within families where something has gone amiss, where crises go unacknowledged because doing so would mean having to admit that happy homes don’t always prepare us to face the darkness of being human. Some, like Dag, respond to the darkness by trying to hit home right where it hurts. Others, like Heivoll, chew shards of glass so they might never have to say anything. And then there are those like Kåre, who leave us only a legacy impossible to live up to. This is the cruel joke Dag’s fires play on the town and on Heivoll—constantly on edge and waiting for something to burst into flames, they are acutely aware that what separates the best from the worst of humanity is a line as invisible as that which ropes off fact from fiction.
Daniel Pecchenino teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California. His poetry and criticism have appeared in American Literature, The Los Angeles Review, Flaunt, and Turnstile, and he blogs about higher education, literature, and pop culture at The General Reader. He lives in Hollywood where he’s allegedly working on a book about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walter Benjamin, and the Hays Motion Picture code.
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