The Circus
A Novel
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A real-life vanishing act leaves one man looking for his missing friend in this Kafkaesque new novel from the author of The Room and The Invoice.
NAMED ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2020 BY The New York Times • BookRiot • The A.V. Club • Gizmodo
The gentle, off-beat narrator of The Circus is perfectly content with his quiet life. By day he works in a bakery, and by night he obsessively organizes and reorganizes his record collection: it’s all just the way he likes it. But when his childhood friend Magnus comes calling out of the blue, the contours of our narrator’s familiar world begin to shift. On a visit to the circus together, Magnus volunteers to participate in the magician’s disappearing act, and midway through the routine he vanishes. Is this part of the act? What’s happened to Magnus? And who is it calling on the phone in the dead of night, breathing into the receiver, but never saying a word?
Smart, sharply unsettling, and with its sleight of hand exquisitely kept, The Circus is a funhouse mirror of a read—one that ingeniously reveals the way we see ourselves and the stories we tell.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Karlsson (The Invoice) delivers a pithy and sagacious jaunt into an uncanny reality in his riveting third novel. In modern-day Sweden, the unnamed narrator, a placid, middle-aged loner, has moved on from the bullying and isolation of his adolescence to enjoy a reasonably tolerable existence. He meticulously organizes his record collection, works at a bakery, and occasionally hangs out with a few friends. But his life is disrupted while visiting a circus: his childhood friend, Magnus, volunteers to participate in a disappearing act and then actually vanishes. Unnerved and annoyed, the narrator attempts to solve the mystery of Magnus's disappearance, only to discover that the parameters of his own existence are starting to blur after he starts receiving phone calls in which a mysterious person plays him music, asks him questions, and dredges up long-forgotten memories. He waits outside Magnus's apartment, seems to see the magician from the circus around every corner, and entertains the irrational advice of his psuedotherapist friend Jallo. As the narrator's confusion increases, he gradually begins to examine his friendship with Magnus and confronts the nagging suspicion that he is somehow responsible for Magnus's fate. Karlsson's knack for Kafkaesque surrealism and suspense is wonderfully paired with sardonic humor and a deeply sympathetic protagonist. This excellent, clever yarn is Karlsson's best yet.
