Excessive Candour
Clang

Here is a novel about nothing but sound that is called quiet. Here is a novel whose protagonist is a famous clown called Kasper with a voice as omnipresent and hypnotic as a tin drum that is called girl. Here is the tale of a man who can hear the impact upon the world of a leaf falling, and who hearkens acutely to the literal sound of Western civilization falling like a million leaves closing in our long Book, but who is the victim of a card-sharp game of family romance played out by those to whom he listens most intently, including a not-really-very-silent female child.

Peter Hoeg's third book—Smilla's Sense of Snow (1992), also published as Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, a wording whose unfeeling literalism may prefigure what may have been done to his new novel—is of course justly famous for its uncanny rendering of Smilla herself and for the hauntedness of its arctic plot; his sixth book, The Quiet Girl—which I think is a direct translation of Den stille pige—did not enjoy a similar success on its publication last year in Denmark.

It is not easy to extract much sense from the commentariat brouhaha normally generated in any small intense polis by the success of one of its citizens on the world stage; like other European countries whose rich incest-ridden cloistral dramas are islanded from the main—Finland and the Czech Republic and Portugal also come to mind—Denmark is a place that arouses hatred and love in those who have emigrated, as though they'd left their twin behind. Whatever happened to The Quiet Girl and its author in 2006 was violent enough to generate, in October 2007, an entire book by Paul Behrendt in defense of Hoeg and his novel, but that, pretty well, is all we know over here.

We are thwarted by the fact that Denmark is too small and too easy to speak English in for much of its day-to-day cultural life to pass over the wide wide waters. We are also hampered by the scratched callus of Nadia Christensen's mundane (but apparently serviceable) translation, of which one sadly negative thing must be said right off: that Kasper's hypnotic powers of conviction—the constant dance of voice and supernaturally athletic gesture upon which much of the action of the tale almost literally hinges—may have been conveyed in Hoeg's original Danish, but that this incessant songlike whispery voice-in-your-earlobe holler of persuasion has not been conveyed in English. For 400 pages we have to take Kasper on faith.

It is a long haul, though there are some roller-coasters that are fun to ride. And we have been fooled from the get-go, whose first sentence—"SheAlmighty [a Kasperism for god which may have read better in Danish] had tuned each person in a musical key, and Kasper could hear it."—begins to give us to believe that Kasper, unlike normal mortals, can hear the happening of reality, the sensorium of the very instant of Now as it takes us, and that he is therefore in command of the story as it begins to unfold. But it soon becomes clear that the beginning of the novel is nearly the end of the story it has to tell, and that Kasper is not Loki with a magic marker but a staked-out Christ (or some such figure).

We meet him. He is sitting in his denlike office. Two adults and a child arrive. He knows their musical key, and from that knows who they are. Kasper is a world-famous clown, but because of his ability to gain rapprochement with others in distress he has often been engaged to commune with otherwise unreachable children. The adults ask for their child to be examined. He agrees for a fee. But as he has already recognized, the child, KlaraMaria, generates an intolerable quiet in the world, which may be the heart of the matter. So if there is to be an interview, it will be on her terms. But they leave, taking her, and Kaspar falls through, listening, into what is going to ensue; we follow him blindly.

Something is lost in translation

We are in Copenhagen, slightly into the near future. A mysterious earthquake has flooded a large tract of the city near the waterfront. (The narrative of The Quiet Girl is intimately and intricately tied to the topography of Copenhagen, but the maps Farrar has supplied are weirdly unhelpful, omitting some regions the book focuses on, failing actually to label most of the landmarks or streets instanced in the text while naming many others not referred to at all, and not providing an outline or other device to mark the flooded area, which Hoeg clearly expects his readers to locate exactly.)

Kasper is in deep trouble with the tax authorities, both in Denmark and in Spain. He is obsessed by a lover who left him 11 years previously, and by the coming death of his father, and by an organization of nuns whose leader, whom he calls the Blue Lady (again, one wonders if this sounds as garish in Danish), seems to know a great deal about his past, and by a consort of kidnappers who seem to have abducted the 12 children who share some (or all) of KlaraMaria's preternatural control over the music of the world, a control so profound that they are able to enchord the future.

It is certain that they created the earthquake and subsquent inundation—its footprint is perfectly rectangular, and neither quake nor flood cause any casualties in the heart of town—and we begin to sense that Kasper's sacrificial dance with the authorities and the spies and the saboteurs and the entrepreneurs all hounding him is not a dance of the Christ (or whoever) at all. His actions may be salvational, but he is not the salvation. As far the children are concerned, he is John the Baptist.

There is not much about the circus in the novel (though Hoeg clearly knows that world intimately), or about Kasper's actual performances throughout Europe in his famous morbidezza clown face weeping, but the haunted pell-mell contumeliousness of Kaspar's progress through the stations of his cross toward the ultimate Inner Ring remind one strongly of Peter Carey's rendering of a not-dissimilar hegira in The Unusual Life of Tristram Smith (1994). In both novels, the collisions between performance and life explain both; both Kasper and Tristram (and I think Oskar before them) exploit their grasp of what needs to be done by deafening their fellow actors into compliance, by shaking the plot into harmony.

Which has to bring us back to the translation, I guess. The Quiet Girl is a book which is aloud on every page with performance clamor, the sound of Kasper taking the world in; it is a loudness only intensified (and sensitized) by the gradual revelation that Kasper has essentially been staked out, on his own recognizance, to do John the Baptist work for the children who turn out to be his charges as they display their powers, so that the world will listen to them when they tell us we may all survive. Those pages which are not polyphonic, a compositional enterprise which requires sophisticated voice control to convey in prose, are cacophonous, an effect which should contrast on the page to Kasper's interweaving transfigurations of the sounds of things.

There is a lot of action in The Quiet Girl, and an intricate unwhorling of plot. There are dozens of differentiated characters. There is a plethora of Bach, who is Kasper's psychopomp (but Handel is only fit for cows—a stupidity which Hoeg may or may not understand insidiously undercuts our respect for Kasper's Big Thing with Bach). There is Copenhagen next year or so, deeply chilled. There is the unfolding family romance, in which Kasper finds his child at the heart of the conch. It is not a novel which should be wearying. It should be aloud but not noise. It should ring like crystal, break like a little girl, tango. Maybe, in some other land across the language gulf, The Quiet Girl continues to sound like that.