Lillelord

by Johan Borgen

Book Overview

In Lillelord, Norway's contemporary master Johan Borgen (1902-79) demonstrates his belief that our lives tend toward schizophrenia. Wilfred Sagen at fourteen is still a perfectly turned out, impeccably behaved "Little Lord Fauntleroy" to his family, but to his teachers he is a disruptive enigma and, to a pack of Oslo street urchins, an instigator of crime. In his often desperate search for emotional integration, Wilfred is hampered by an acute...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811208273
• ISBN13: 9780811208277
• Release Date: April 1982
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 322 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Prophetic Portrayal

Schizophrenia is the easiest explanation for Wilfred Sagen's rapid degeneration from a pampered perfect boy - a Norwegian Little Lord Fauntleroy - to a naked fugitive swimming for his life. I think, however, that author Johan Bergen is casting his net wider than the individual 14-year-old boy toying with antisocial behavior. Written in 1955 but set in 1912, Lillelord (Little Lord, as his mother and aunts call him) is a study of anomie that harks back to Leopold and Loeb and looks toward the future, our future, of school shootings and date rape drugs among young people who seem to have the best things of life right in their hands. It's a grim, scary tale, narrated out of the sidelong peripheral vision of Lillelord himself. What begins as drawing room satire slides slowly into chaos, the narrative becoming more and more oblique as the boy loses control of his impulses. It's also a novel of class conflict; young Wilfred, who can do no wrong in his wealthy home, becomes the instigator of petty crime among the lower-class boys to whom he must prove himself. And it's a novel of adolescent sexual awakening gone horribly awry. Johan Borgen has been little translated into English, though his many books are available in German and French. In fact, Lillelord is the first of a trilogy about Wilfred Sagen, and it stands alone as a powerful novel, but sadly the other two books of the trilogy have never made it to America. Critics suggest that Wilfred's loss of personality integration was the counterpart of the culture shock experienced by all Norwegians between the two World Wars, through the Nazi occupation, and into times of explosive technological change. Politics and world events are scarcely present in the Sagen household in 1912, and of course Nazism is a horror that lies between the 'present' of the narrative and the 'present' of the author. Nevertheless, the reader of 2008 will be excused if she/he perceives Lillelord as a neo-Nazi in germination. A harsh, ugly story written with consumate psychological insight, Lillelord is a classic of European literature in the 20th Century, one which should be far more widely read.

MUST READ!!!

I highly recommend the entire trilogy. It is very well-written and very interesting psychologically.

Mind-racing psychological drama.

I found a little bit of myself in the neurotic, obsessive boy, Lillelord!Take a look; you will be surprised at what you discover...

this is my shrinkbook since1980,the year I first read it.

can't add anything to written above, but You have to read the whole trilogy(lillelord,Dark Streams((?),not sure,title translation might be wrong-I read it in Russian version,and same could apply to the third book-Now There's No Escape(?)),to get the whole picture.