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I think Høeg was trying to write a postmodern thriller with a protagonist who plays against the expectations of the genre—a mystic who quotes Meister Eckhart and Kierkegaard and Catherine of Siena, a man who is searching for truth in highly unorthodox places. Høeg has done this, but not without making Kasper appear somewhat superficial. In fact, even his ex–girlfriend complains when Kasper gets too lofty: "That's borrowed. Stolen. Patchwork! … Your feelings have no depth … . You live and talk as if you're performing in the ring all the time." This suggests that the author is well aware of his protagonist's flaws—but that doesn't make Kasper any less irritating.
Another quibble: the narrative form Høeg chose, a form that he successfully executed in Smilla's Sense of Snow, merely confuses the reader of The Quiet Girl (this reader, anyway). He took a fairly plain story and jumbled it up, so that he could divulge plot twists at exactly the right moment. Many other storytellers (not just Høeg in that earlier success) have brought this off—the movie 21 Grams comes to mind—with spectacular results. Here's the difference. At the end, the reader (or the viewer) should be able to go back and linearly reconstruct the story without a hitch. I had difficulty doing this with The Quiet Girl. But that may say more about me than the book, and perhaps it will be rectified with a second read.
Now I come to the girl's in–person plea for help. Why doesn't Kasper help her then and there? True, she is with her kidnappers, but neither is armed. She claims they will hurt her mother, so instead, she slips him a cryptic note that he's supposed to decipher, piece by piece. It is what I would call a movie–moment, and it cannot carry the novel through to its surprise ending.
Still, for all his vexing mannerisms, I like Kasper. One of the nuns he encounters paraphrases Leibniz's Theodicy: "God is like a kitchen maid. When she has baked a loaf of bread, she has done her best. And that includes everything. The burned part of the crust too. Evil must also be from God somehow. Otherwise we couldn't be here." Kasper is shocked. "Impertinence is indispensable," he thinks, "[But] It doesn't belong in the Church. The Church should maintain the concert pitch."
It's all about making sense of a broken world. Always.
Elissa Elliott is a writer living in Rochester, Minnesota. She's at work on a novel about Eve.
Copyright © 2007 Books & Culture.Click for reprint information.
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