Twilight Country (UNESCO Collection of Representative Works) - Softcover

Faldbakkan, Knut

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0720608856 ISBN 13: 9780720608854

Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers, 1997

Synopsis

Although the author is Norwegian, his quietly alarming novel is set in a generalized projection of a society disintegrating from the effects of industrial pollution and economic inadequacy. Air is unbreathable, water is undrinkable, all goods are in short supply, and all services are erratic. Nothing flourishes except bureaucracy, as a baffled government grinds out cradle-to-grave regulations that complicate a citizen's life without improving it in the least. Mr. Faldbakken's hero escapes from the mess with his wife and small son by fleeing to the vast dump that borders the city. There they find a few other refugees with whom, through ingenuity and a little violence, they construct the beginnings of a community.

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Norwegian

From Publishers Weekly:

A dark, end-of-the-millennium vision permeates this novel by Norwegian author Faldbakken ( Insect Summer ). Fleeing from the collapsing economic, social and legal systems of Sweetwater, a dystopian city in an unnamed country, former architect Allan Ung takes his teenage wife, Lisa, and their four-year-old son, Boy, to live in the Dump, a garbage disposal site that now houses an assortment of refugees from this dying society. Among them are Doc, a back-to-the-land idealist; his arthritic wife, who despises him for the life they are forced to lead; the outlaw brothers Felix and Run-Run; Mary Diamond and her alcoholic pimp/boyfriend Smiley. The mute Run-Run and Boy develop a close friendship, Allan and Mary become lovers and Doc regards Lisa with a paternal eye, especially after her pregnancy is revealed. The author pessimistically suggests that these self-proclaimed outcasts can never create a better society, but his narrative, which shows the loose tribe enduring if not flourishing, implies at least a Darwinian survival of the fittest.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0720608856
• ISBN 13: 9780720608854
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240