Encircling

Description

David Hugsar has lost his memory so his psychiatrist places an advertisement in a newspaper inviting friends and relatives to share their memories of him. The resulting letters, reminiscences and scenes offer an encircling narrative that reveals more about the intersecting young lives - the secret ambitions and bid for popularity among young Norwegians in a backwater town - than about David himself, the enigma at the heart of the novel. Adolescent sexuality, boredom, filial guilt, violence and love; the frustrations of life in a small-town rock band; drugs and cigarettes, all find their place in these chronicles of Norwegian provincial life. Carl Frode Tiller's Encircling explores masculinity in crisis with the adroitness of a new Raymond Carver.

Carl Frode Tiller (b.1970) has won the European Prize for Literature, the Brage Prize and the Norwegian Critics' Prize for his novels.He has also written three plays and a number of short stories. He has a master's degree in history, and plays in the rock band Kong Ler. He lives in Trondheim.