A Fairy Tale
A Novel
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In a Europe without borders, where social norms have become fragile, a son must confront the sins of his father and grandfather, and invent new strategies for survival
A young boy grows up with a loving father who has little respect for the law. They are always on the run, and as they move from place to place, the boy is often distraught to leave behind new friendships. Because it would be dicey for him to go to school, his anarchistic father gives him an unconventional education intended to contradict as much as possible the teachings of his own father, a preacher and a pervert. Ten years later, when the boy is entering adulthood, with a fake name and a monotonous job, he tries to conform to the demands of ordinary life, but the lessons of the past thwart his efforts, and questions about his father’s childhood cannot be left unanswered.
Spanning the mid-1980s to early-twenty-first-century in Copenhagen, this coming-of-age novel examines what it means to be a stranger in the modern world, and how, for better or for worse, a father’s legacy is never passed on in any predictable fashion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest from Danish author Bengtsson (Submarino) focuses on the relationships between fathers and sons. A young boy bounces around Copenhagen with his father, a loving but seemingly unstable man who moves restlessly from apartment to apartment and job to job. The boy, who shows a talent and love for drawing, is homeschooled and nourished on elaborate fairy tales involving a king and a prince searching for the "White Queen," a stand-in for the boy's mother. After his father's fixations turn violent, the boy is shuttled off to his mother and her new husband. Only as a young man does he begin asking questions about what led to his father's actions. His search for answers leads to his paternal grandparents, then back to Copenhagen, where he begins working at a post office and, for the first time, goes by an assumed name, Mehmet Faruk. In Copenhagen, he achieves a modicum of happiness, finding both love and artistic recognition, but then the mysteries of his past resurface. The early, child's-eye-view sections are filled with somewhat improbably precocious wisdom, but, on the whole, the book's short, lively chapters create a resonant catalogue of life.
