Tales of Protection

by Erik Fosnes Hansen

Book Overview

Four enthralling tales about chance, by the author ofPsalm at Journey's End Tales of Protectionis a novel about people in different places in different epochs -- contemporary Norway, nineteenth-century Sweden, and Renaissance Italy -- whose stories are bound together by the author's original and searching inquiry into why things happen the way they do. As the book opens, a dead man lies in his coffin reflecting on the past. Bolt was an eccentric scientist...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374272409
• ISBN13: 9780374272401
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 500 Pages
• Weight: 1.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

One of the best novels ever, but...

Tales of Protection, Les Anges protecteurs is a wonderful novel, written by a genius author. But, but, we've been waiting for volume 2 for ages and can't see anything coming. Has Erik Fosnes Hansen stopped writing ? It would be a shame.

Norwegian Lyricism

Interwoven stories of love, loss, art and reality, the limits of reason, the persistence of memory, the protection of secrets (and each other), patterns of existence, and man's place in Time and Nature, "Tales of Protection" is a rich, extravagant triple A-1 read, on a level with another fact-filled fate-immersed work of fiction -- "Moby Dick." I don't know this for a fact -- I hope Norwegian author Erik Fosnes Hansen will pardon me because I am trusting my intuition here -- but the novel seems to spring from a Scandinavian tradition of story-telling: trolls populate the fields and forests, history repeats itself, the world regenerates itself fitfully, the sea and the earth swallow us all, music reverberates from the spread legs of a grieving cellist playing Bach in a seaside church, and -- as the first and last chapters proclaim -- life is a bird. The stories are simple enough to summarize. An elderly mining engineer turned capitalist, who tends bees and husbands an ape on his Oslo estate, inexplicably falls in love with his grand niece. A century earlier, a Baltic mariner turned lighthouse keeper's assistant cares for the keeper's sick daughter but bears some hidden responsibility for the deaths of the crew of a shipwrecked vessel. In Renaissance Italy, a cabinetmaker's son apprenticed to a merchant exiled from Florence comes of age as he tries to assist his master to learn the secret of an altar painting with ostensibly magical qualities. Getting there, however, is much more than half of the fun. Fosnes writes with authority and ease about, for example, mineralogy, the preparation of panels and egg tempera, the habits of highwaymen, the socialization of bees, the treatment of diseases with herbs and ointments, the corruption of monasteries, the troubles of Ovid, and the awkwardness of first-time lovers. Forget the lecture about serialization as an alternative to rational causation; that's just an old mining engineer's effort to explain what he does not understand. All literature is about mystery, all stories are patterned, the pleasure is encountering in another place and time what we already sense, if do not know, about what connects us to the planet. Life is a bird. -- Robert E. Olsen

Ingenious but challenging

Tales of Protection is made up of four seemingly uncorrelated, independent stories that are later seamlessly stitched together through a coincidence of events. The beginning of the novel, the section titled Prologue in Heaven and on Earth, sheds light on the crucial element that will later help readers understand the correlation between the enthralling tales. The book itself ingeniously hinges on the nature of coincidence, chance, and luck and how these motifs have impartially played their roles in lives that span over a vast time interval. Opening of the novel brings readers to Ekelund, England, in the present, to Wilhelm Bolt's coffin where the old man experienced the final moments of life: he had breathed his last breath and his spirit had yet departed. Bolt saw ethereal visions; images he had not seen before, things the living could not see like swirls of moisture and pollens in the air. He began to hear music behind the music, the whisper of ghosts and vibration of air. Bolt reminisced his life in an old estate in which his butler Andersen, an ape Jacob, and colonies of bees in hives kept his company. The retired engineer had an eccentric passion of keeping systematic records and journals of incidents of coincidence through networking correspondences and limited available literature. Events deeply affecting an individual's life had seemed the most significant and precious to Bolt. Lea Bolt, the grandniece, intruded the old man's sequestered life as she arrived in Ekelund by a fortuity. A spark piercing through the gloomy Ekelund sky took the readers back a century to Sandon Lighthouse Station off the Norwegian coast in 1898. Once a junior lieutenant, Bernard Enberg arrived at the island where Kalle Jacobssen kept watch at the lighthouse by some circuitous fortuities (Enberg was the only option to fill the position after his predecessors had appendicitis and fell off a sea cliff respectively). A shipwreck had crushed his larynx and permanently rendered his voice hoarse. Had it not been Enberg, who had a penchant for music and reading, the organ in the chapel on the island should never have its voice restored. Josefa, Kalle's daughter, who suffered from occasional epileptic fits, shall never find a mentor in the ex-lieutenant who taught her to sing and to appreciate literature. Out of gratitude and friendship, Kalle took the brunt for Enberg after Enberg missed spotting a shipwreck in time. As the lighthouse faithfully and indefatigably performed its duty ashore, dawn settled into Lord Lorenzo del Vitro's veranda and crept into his bed beneath the magnificent luminous ceiling paintings. The year was 1497 in Rome, Italy. Renaissance was in full force. Fiorello attended Lorenzo and took punctilious care of his scab-infested master who was fastidious about his living, and would not tolerate the least additional pain and the least irritation in his surroundings. When the miraculous power of a painting of Mary the Virgin of unknown authorship heale

A TREASURE TO READ AND READ AGAIN...

This is an amazing book - meticulously constructed and lovingly built, word-by-word and scene-by-scene. The premise intrigued me when I first saw it - `...four tales about the nature of luck and circumstance (that) stand alone but are ingeniously stitched together'. I was not disappointed in the least - I found the novel satisfying on many levels, and I know that I'll want to re-read it more than once. There are elements that link the four parts together that are only evident in hindsight - now that I've seen at least some of them on the first pass, I'd love to re-experience the book with that knowledge in hand. I imagine that I'll find other, more subtle links when I do that.Fosnes Hansen's writing is crystalline and detailed, but it never ventures into `boring'. The copious elements involved in each tale are there because they need to be - and they give each tale a stunning degree of depth, illuminating the richness of the characters' passions for the reader to an extent that allows them to experience how these passions consume the characters themselves. What makes a mining engineer love his work, what breathes life into his existence - or a lighthouse keeper, or a painter, or, for that matter, anyone? The author goes deeply into the anatomy of various subjects - geology, beekeeping, the history and function of lighthouses, painting - each time in order to more vividly illuminate the lives and souls of his characters.He writes also of love, in each of the stories. They span time from approximately the present day in the first, to the 19th century in the second, to Renaissance Italy in the third, and back to the 20th century in the fourth - and through them all are spun precious threads, like silver and gold running through a rich tapestry, linking the lives and stories together through space and time.I'm afraid if I go into any more detail I'll give too much of the experience of this masterpiece away - if you enjoy writing of the highest caliber that challenges both your intellect and your memory, you owe it to yourself to devote the necessary time to this novel - it's 500 pages long, and it deserves your complete attention. I don't think you'll be disappointed...

Really fun! Challenging to both intellect and memory.

As the book opens, the rising sun illuminates membranes of dew, nebulae of fragrance, and clouds of pollen. A pair of swifts, with a nest outside a chapel, converse about the dead man inside, while the not-yet-departed spirit of the man listens to the "music within the music." Details like these, in lesser hands, might presage the beginning of a heavy-duty Gothic romance, but here they introduce a lively and thought-provoking novel which investigates the serious themes of time, love, art, and science-and the role chance, fate, or coincidence plays in our lives. The dead man is Wilhelm Bolt, a reclusive scientist who has been living at Ekelund, an old estate, with his aged servant Andersen, many hives of bees, a talking ape, a valuable art collection, piles of research documents, and a recently arrived grand-niece. Bolt has taken her in, hoping she will continue his research on the law of seriality, the strange conjunction of random events which we call coincidence, the opposite of causality. The book's structure itself illustrates seriality, four seemingly random and unconnected stories from different time periods, all of which have at least one character, object, and/or specific kind of music, art, or science in common. As the novel moves from the present at Ekelund, to an 1898 shipwreck off a small Norwegian island, to 15th century Rome and Padova (a section which could have used some pruning), to a World War II research camp, the narratives feel completely different in focus, yet the reader's discovery of coincidences in them is startling, encouraging further examination and a search for more seriality. Time itself feels random here, descriptions sometimes repeat, and narrators and point of view suddenly change. Ghosts, spirits, and voices appear and reappear. Despite the romantic stories, Hansen's style is remarkably business-like, however--factual and scientific in detail, rather than lyrical or flowery. Because the overlaps in the stories are not emphasized--and are sometimes actually hidden in the middle of a sentence or paragraph-readers will want to stay alert and read carefully. The novel is loaded with wonderful observations, the individual stories are exciting, the scientific detail is fascinating, and the novel's focus is unique, making this a stimulating read, one of my favorites for the year. Mary Whipple