From the publisher
Some Norwegian comments
U.S. reviews (1999)
U.S. reviews (1975)
From the translator's introduction
More about Moment of Freedom on this site
Excerpts

Moment of Freedom is the first volume in a Trilogy which also includes Powderhouse and The Silence.

From the publisher:

Upon its publication in 1966, Moment of Freedom was widely acclaimed in Europe as a masterpiece. It was published by W.W. Norton nearly twenty-five years ago, but has long been out of print. We are pleased to make it available once again in an updated translation.

In its apocalyptic view of mankind and in its haunting, devastating portrayal of justice, Moment of Freedom reminds one of the Book of Revelation and Kafka's The Trial. Living high in the Alps in a German principality called Heiligenberg, our narrator tells us that he's dutifully fulfilling his obligations as a Servant of Justice and acting as a daily witness to injustice masquerading as a court of law. One day in the courtroom he notices that the judge is much too engrossed in looking at something concealed in his folder to pay attention to the proceedings. The something turns out to be some pornographic photographs showing various other pillars of the town engaged in a variety of sexual activities with minors.

The incident propels him on a mental journey back through his life: dreams and hallucinations, black-humor fantasies and suicidal drinking binges; the Roman catacombs, warm summer nights in Brooklyn; brothels in Stockholm; his childhood in Norway, and wanderings in Germany and Italy. But aside from the court records he has been keeping his own long and detailed account of man's cruelty to man in a massive twelve-volume study he calls his History of Bestiality. Acknowledging his Germanic past, the narrator realizes that all his attempts to perceive order in life lead only to his acceptance of the chaos of life. With echoes of Nietzsche and Sartre, we see him striving to live uncoerced by power, unpersuaded by friends, to take for himself the liberty of stating his critique in order to live in his own moment of truth, to stand "far out at the edge of the abyss."

Some Norwegian comments:

"Moment of Freedom brought me to the utterly decisive discovery that a novel could have meaning for one's life. For a long time I considered it an important mental health precaution to read Moment of Freedom at least once a year."    —Kaj Skagen

"... a cross between the great 16th-century carnivalist Rabelais and Franz Kafka's novel The Trial."    —Jahn Thon

"Jens Bjørneboe has here been equal to the technical problem: how to express a new reality for which the old words, the old forms, no longer suffice? ... The process of liberation the book describes is confirmed by what it is: it tells of a will to give a personal vision of the truth, here and now, existentially."     —Leif Longum

From the U.S. Reviews:

Readers of Ranier [sic] Maria Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge or Fernand Pessoa's Book of Disquietude will recognize and appreciate this somber addition to the roster of ambitiously poetic, diary-like European novels.... Its return to print is welcome.
             —Publisher's Weekly, 12 April 1999

A new translation of the 1966 novel that begins Norwegian master Bjørneboe's celebrated "History of Bestiality" trilogy. That highly charged phrase is also the title of the 12-volume anatomy of human depravity compiled by its protagonist, a morose court clerk whose saturnine psyche essentially resembles that of Dostoevsky's misanthropic "Underground Man." But this novel, like Dostoevsky's, is much more than simple rant, for Bjørneboe skillfully juxtaposes jeremiads leveled at global iniquities (Nazism, the bombing of Hiroshima) with his narrator's memories of encounters with vividly depicted and variously flawed other people, as well as his own failings and hypocrisies. The result is harshly comic and richly disturbing fiction—and one eargerly awaits the forthcoming later volumes of the trilogy.
             —Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 1999

One must be grateful that Bjørneboe knows how to balance on a very fine rope that carries him over the jarring choir of bitter cries and self-absorbed pain. Wryly staging the events in a world—a Lemuria—of lemurs, or small bears, scholastics, and eschatology believers, the narrator's story elegantly maneuvers away from such pitfalls. Moreover, aware that he's on the fringe of madness himself, the narrator insists on laughter as both detachment and protection from insanity. It is to Mürer's full credit that her translation resounds with Bjørneboe's "Florentine laughter," maintaining a very fine line between madness and clarity, blind rebellion and pointed critique.
             —Anne Sabo, Norwegian Teachers Newsletter, Fall 1999.

Reviews of Norton edition (1975)

[The narrator's] struggle for identity and for a sense of orientation in a chaotic world, his learning, his passion for truth and freedom, his melancholy, and his anger fascinate with ever-increasing intensity.... The novel keeps a balance between a violent criticism of our civilization and a passionate admiration for its intellectual and artistic accomplishments. The careful translation does justice to the work's complex style and poetic diction.
             —Inge Judd, Library Journal, 15 May 1975

Bjørneboe ... is a discovery, and what a great one! Not since the early Faulkner have I read such a powerful novel. I say Faulkner, but he does not have that writer's confusion. Surely he will find his place in the world's literature sooner or later....
       Bjørneboe is a writer's writer. The book, which explores the dark night of the soul, probably will offend a good many readers. But as Flannery O'Connor, the Georgia writer, once said when confronted with the fact of "violence" in her novels: "You sometimes have to shout to be heard"....
       Here is a story-teller who writes with artistic mastership and should be carefully read by everyone who cares where we are going and where we have been.
            — Elise Sanguinetti, Anniston (Ala) Star, 27 July 1975

Many books have been published which try to tackle the ugly aspects of humanity at war with itself. Moment of Freedom is such a novel, less than a novel and more than one, written superbly....
      The author recalls his life ... with the eye of a painter, the ear of a musician, the heart of a poet—a world of bestialities and beauties...
       With black cynicism he moves from brothels to art galleries, from philosophy to search for personal freedom. Roving over the world, this leading Norwegian writer is a refugee in time as well as place, as he examines the darkest side of human life, the mystic of evil in man.              —Boris Nelson, Toledo Blade, 6 July 1975

This American edition reminds its far-from-Norway readers of the regenerative efforts that remain to be made by all to heal the kind of scars still felt too acutely in a country whose own soil was violated by war....Bjørneboe graphically uses memory and hallucination to expand the narrator's menial role for a "court of injustice" into a probing of mankind under whatever flag.... The narrator's long work in progress, "The History of Bestiality", becomes an ironic metaphor for a history of humanity. Those internationally familiar haunted faces painted by the author's countryman, Edvard Munch, would be poignantly at home in this landscape.
             —Roderick Nordell, Christian Science Monitor, 1 August 1975

From the translator's introduction:

Moment of Freedom marked a new departure in Bjørneboe's literary production. Generally considered to be Bjørneboe's masterpiece, it draws heavily on his early years as a painter, and in form is more like a painting or a poem than a novel.... The mystical orientation of his early poetry, the social criticism of his early novels, his fascination with Germany and Italy—all are richly interwoven here. As before, the spectre of Nazism, which had haunted him since he first read Wolfgang Langhoff's book on the Oranienburg concentration camp at the age of fifteen, looms large; the themes of injustice, authoritarianism, and the violence of power are pervasive.

Bjørneboe increasingly felt a need not only to place the mystery of human evil in broader historical and philosophical context, but as to make a more personal statement of a vision which sees beyond evil to the fundamental goodness and beauty of creation. He wrote in 1967:

      Much of what I have previously written has been morally covered and grounded, so to speak morally defended, by the fact that I have continually treated other people's problems. I have been dependent on finding a moral defense for writing at all; I have thought of what others thought or would think, believe and say. . . I have felt the past fifteen years as a moral and social military service, which I as a writer did not have the right to shirk.
      But one day you get too old for military service.
      And I know that if I am to be of use in the future, this usefulness will consist in my writing the truth which is my own truth, which only I know—because only I am I, only I can see the world in my way.

Excerpts:

"I spent the years in Stockholm drawing & painting"

The Prison Rebellion

Jacques Callot

More about Moment of Freedom on this site:

Glossary of Historical Persons mentioned in the Trilogy and The Sharks

Literature about JB's Late Novels