Asked what book changed him as a teenager, Knausgaard responded: “The History of Bestiality trilogy by the Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe. It is about the evil inherent in human beings, and goes through history’s wars, massacres, oppressions and torture methods. I was 16 when I read it, and it felt like the truth about humanity had been revealed to me.”
That appeared in October 2024. I first heard of these books in 2013 via Goodreads reviews by friends on there. The title attracted me, of course. I acquired the editions pictured below, translated by Esther Greenleaf Mürer, published in the late ’90s by Durfour Editions, which no longer lists these books on its site but still sells them used on Amazon for about $17 each. You can also get them on Amazon for the same price from Norvik Press but with crappier covers.
I don’t know too much about Jens Bjørneboe other than that he suffered from alcoholism and depression and offed himself in 1976 at age 56. He was apparently widely celebrated in Norway on the centennial of his birth. His daughter also married Dag Solstad. And I haven’t yet watched these interviews but the cover photo above is a screenshot of a still from one of these videos produced for Norwegian TV.
Moment of Freedom: The Heiligenberg Manuscript (1966)
It’s important, when people mention the narrator’s multi-volume series “The History of Bestiality,” to consider secondary definitions of the word “bestiality.” The expectation is that the narrator is compiling “protocols” regarding human beings doing it with animals: dogs, sheep, donkeys, cats, perhaps rats and monkeys, too. Alas, it’s more about human beings behaving like beasts — something more common than inter-species intercourse. Dashed bestiality-related expectations didn’t disappoint me, however, because this first volume of a trilogy screws the pooch in the best possible way.
Reminded me of Kozinski, an unreliable Sebald, maybe a dash of Bernhard (but more of “The Voice Imitator” — the product of obsessive chronic newspaper clippings), and particularly Huysmans, if not decadent but a beatific drunk, a converted painter, a perceptive eye on a world marked by innocent civilians who transform into murderous cider-beserks after too long indulging a 10-quart habit, who rampage around town with grenades thanks to a peculiarly warm wind.
It’s hard to write about without cataloging its every movement, from the judge with the porno pics of the town’s most respectable folks engaged in all sorts of sodomy, to Nazi genocide, Soviet genocide, American atomic genocide, to the catacombs of Rome, to brothels all over Europe. But it’s not hateful — it’s not Bernhardian ranting — there’s love for beauty, for painting, for landscapes, for trees, sun, grass as Knausgaard says — this is discussed in My Struggle Book 4 and you can see the influence — the attempt to get out of the way for once and write the truth.
Love the unpredictable movement, how it improved as the narrator’s history and terminology cohered. Loved that the few pages about the soft pastel light of Brooklyn and corn on the cob for sale — about how great cities are nature in themselves — I read near the front window as afternoon light was fading at a quiet bar on 5th Street off Avenue A. Odd that the few pages I read in NYC were about NYC of yore.
An inspiring book — the sort that makes you want to compile your own protocols.
Powderhouse: Scientific Postscript and Last Protocol (1969)
At a lunatic asylum situated upon a thin crust of earth between wild raging magma below and the infinite clockwork idiocy of outerspace above, during the late-sixties/early-seventies, in the territory of Gaul, the narrator and a few criminal madmen lecture about humanity’s history of atrocities, brutalities, and most interestingly, its executioners. Excellent essayism on cruelty and horror offset by tenderness for and appreciation of beautiful moments we spend alive eating, drinking, talking, tripping, communing with nature, cumming all over one another, sitting in an ice-cold brook in which we refrigerate our butter and wine.
There’s something black humorish about this second installment in “The History of Bestiality” trilogy, like an independent Woody Allen movie shot on Super 8 — unlike the first installment, it sometimes seems to want to veer toward straight-up comedy, what with every character essentially repeating the motif about the thin layer of crust (upon which we destroy each other) between raging fire and infinite idiot outerspace.
Bjorneboe’s pedantic side usually faces front, and he excels at pedantry, yet it also nevertheless can get a little slow, a little bit hit-over-the-headish (yeah, yeah, the Christian church killed several hundred million human beings, got it!), but when he describes his delight in the simple fact of existence upon the earth, he’s at his best.
Pretty good sex scenes, with a horny young lad at first and later with a hot young lady. Lots of semen spurted across a page or two — surprised me!
Really interesting exposition about executioners, particularly inept ones — they’re googleable, too.
The lectures add a dimension that makes up for (kicks under the rug) a not even half-assedly explored murder mystery regarding a hanged Hungarian.
Of note, there’s a touchingly tender relation between the narrator and a hedgehog (symbol of the potential meaninglessness of existence).
Here’s a representative passage:
“About this moon we know everything. About the whole machinery, the whole insane, mechanical appartus, the solar system, Andromeda’s nebula, ellipses and periods, motions, metals. We sit here on our feeble-minded, explosive planet and sail around in an utterly meaningless, monomaniacal bedlam of a watchmaker’s shop. About other solar systems we know everything, but to go up ot the ambassador’s wife who howls her wolf-howls and clings to the barred window, go up to the little black-slayer of an American general — and you’ll see that we don’t know anything about them.
We know everything about the cosmos, about outer space, but we don’t know anything at all about Fontaine, our little Belgian sex murderer.
After this conquest, this assault on the dead, frozen space — after this there must follow a conquest of something else.
We’ve conquered outer space, but not our neighbor.
And we must conquer him now.
For either it is totally insane and meaningless — and ought to go under — or it has a meaning and ought to survive.”
Here’s the sort of passage that excels:
“This time I was sufficiently refreshed: now I felt night only as warm and soft and living around me, confortably lukewarm, full of life, full of mating and lewdness, full of odors and of the faint night sounds which tell of the life which exists on this accursed, leprous, spiritually gonorrheal globe which is our little green home and which I love so indescribably, so full of lust, so full of thought, so full of cruelty, and so full of beauty. The sky was black as tar and the stars shone insanely, thick as thick, everywhere, all over the whole sky. In the enormous leafy treetops in the park there was a rustle of a faint, faint breeze, all too subtle to be called wind.”
The Silence: An Anti-Novel and Absolutely the Very Last Protocol (1973)
The clearest of the three volumes, the language and structure of this one seem more aerodynamic. As in Powderhouse, things take off when, instead of an essay on the history of executions and executioners, the narrator Jean relays the history of the eradication of the Aztecs and Incas by Cortez and Pizarro. Not the best book to read leading up to Christmas, as I did (2014), since it rips the church at every turn for its genocidal predilections. Often jibed with current events (the report on CIA torture, random killings just north of Philadelphia, and of course the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases).
Makes great points about how the Holocaust was simply good old-fashioned white colonial oppression turned on itself, on Europe, instead of Africa and South America, and efficiently executed in a handful of years instead of decades/centuries. Also interesting about how China and Japan and, to a degree, India resisted European colonial oppression.
A brilliant, cracked essay, featuring Colombus and Robespierre as characters, not to mention a quick dialogue with a shabbily dressed God, who turns out to actually be Satan.
Some great pages about a drunk, Vietnam deserter, American oilman trying to undermine capitalism by helping developing countries advance their oil-related activities. This one’s set in an imaginary North African country instead of an alpine region of Norway (Moment of Freedom) or in France.
Toward the end it morphs into something more like straight-up autobiography before transforming into a suicide note set to a biblical cadence, suggesting that the narrator is a savior sort, which reminded me somewhat of the end of Knausgaard’s A Time for Everything, although the narrator of that one was more of a cutter/self-mutilator than alcoholic.
Overall, the trilogy is such an individuated work, really sort of unlike anything I can think of — an unhinged essay on the history of human violence (I hope Vollmann got the idea for Rising Up and Rising Down from Jean’s protocols), expressed at times through mouthpiece characters who all speak alike, mixed with occasional autobiographical elements. Unlike Bernhard or most other great haters, there’s a generous helping throughout these books of love for life on earth, a real sense of an extreme experience of the duality of existence (light and darkness in perpetual round). Not about the middle ground — and therefore either the sort of book you’ll love or hate. I can’t imagine a wishy-washy opinion of these books. Definitely recommended. Also, I noted in 2014 that the translator lived in Philadelphia and I considered trying to contact her but never got around to it (I had an infant at home at the time).
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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (from New Directions). Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox (from Barrelhouse). Or The Shimmering Go-Between from me (Atticus, the publisher, is kaput).
