An Altered Light

by Jens Christian Grøndahl

Book Overview

Irene Beckman appears to have a perfect life: two grown children, a house in a prosperous suburb of Copenhagen, and a successful career as a family lawyer. She is cool, sophisticated, and still... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151010439
• ISBN13: 9780151010431
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 271 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Living as an outsider

Irene Beckman is 56, has a husband, 2 children, 2 grandchildren, a job as a lawyer and her mother is still alive. In short, she has all a woman can wish. Until her whole world collapses within 24 hours: her husband Martin announces during a family dinner that he wants a divorce because he has a girlfriend and from her mother she gets a notebook in which she reads that her father is not her biological father. Her children and friends try to cheer her up with a lot of well-meant advice, but all Irene feels is an enormous emptiness, which forces her to reconsider her life: the affair she had 10 years ago with the 15 year younger Thomas, her relationship with her mother, her marriage with Martin and the (also sexually) liberated behaviour of her friends in the seventies, in which Martin and Irene never participated. In the end she decides to trace her father, a Jewish cello player who had to flee from Denmark to Norway in the Second World War. After a series of friends and family members, she traces him in Vienna and ultimately meets him in Ljubljana. He tells the story of his life and history repeats itself, like Irene he is a human being who has lived as a relative outsider. On the way back to Copenhagen she starts to resist for the first time in her life... A good book, but the middle part with the recollections of Irene is ever now and then a bit boring.

"If you can't say yes you have already said no."

An Altered Light is the thoughtful novel of a successful Copenhagen attorney of 56, Irine Beckman, who suddenly finds her marriage ending, confronted as well with questions about her past, a way of life that changes overnight. Irine has come to terms with her life, or so she thinks, an uneventful but pleasant marriage and the unavoidable ageing process: "She no longer believes the world will be better or worse than it is." Martin Beckman doggedly pursues the young Irine when first they meet in Paris, years before. She is escaping the restrictions of small town life with a trip to the cosmopolitan city, never expecting to meet a man like Martin, who is unrelenting, determined that they shall be together. Eventually Irine succumbs to the weight of Martin's affection, drawn along by his surety. Still, years later, she is not surprised at his infidelity, only vaguely curious that she has not noticed. After championing wronged spouses as a divorce attorney, Irine finds herself in the unenviable position of the soon-to-be-divorced,albeit prepared to move on without recrimination. Not especially grief-stricken, Irine reminisces over the marriage, raising children, enduring the tumultuous 60's ("the tyranny of emancipated lust") without the need to participate in the sexual revolution. Irine is brutally honest with herself, her aspirations and shortcomings, setting the emotional tone for the novel. Visiting her ailing mother, Irine learns that some of her assumptions about the past are in error and the world she knows shifts beneath her, suddenly less predictable. Mother and daughter have never been close, but these new concerns open Irine's heart, allowing compassion for the mother she has judged and found wanting. Irine is forced into a rebirth, an awakening in late middle age, a vital search for the self she has so long ignored, if not entirely neglected. While this journey is painful, it is not without rewards, as this protagonist releases and embraces her authentic self, free of resentments. The author subtly reveals Irine's complexities, her clear-eyed approach to the world and her willingness to experience whatever comes her way, undiminished by a broken marriage or the failure of expectations. Tender and painfully honest, An Altered Light is a pathway to acceptance, the joy of unexpected rewards: "The sun is warm on her face and she fancies it is the future shining on her." Luan Gaines/2005.