Jens
Bjørneboe : Prophet
Without HonorBjørneboe (1920-76), controversial Norwegian poet, dramatist, essayist, (anti-)novelist, and lifelong rebel, saw authority as always and everywhere repressive. His rebellion shocked his contemporaries, and it increased with his obsession over mankind's inhumanity, whose cruelty he saw as expressing an innate, divinely initiated evil.
Garton, lecturer at East Anglia, prefaces a chronology covering Bjørneboe's life to chapters on his career, essays, and polemics; she illustrates his poetry and Brechtian lyrics with translations, then analyzes the novels thematically (emphasizing "protocols" like Moment of Freedom. An annotated selective bibliography includes English reviews and translations of his works.
Garton's restrained study is strangely at odds with her subject's pain and passion. And she does not deal with the more controversial hypotheses about Bjørneboe's obsessions or with the contrast between his final vision of Ragnarok, followed by an anarchistic utopia of good men, and his final depression, followed by suicide. Nevertheless, her study is reasonably and carefully composed. Appropriate for upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and general readers.
This page last updated August 1999