December 23, 2013
Jungersenâs (The Exception) brilliant latest novel, set in the suburbs of Copenhagen, explores a troubled marriage that is further complicated by a personality-altering brain injury. A doctor informs Mia Halling that her husband Frederik, a private school headmaster, has a brain tumor that will make him treat her differently. âou must be⦠prepared for⦠to lose all empathy for you,â he warns. When Frederik is arrested for embezzlement, Mia looks to his diagnosis as a possible legal defense. This leads her to question the entirety of their marriageâespecially the time she regards as their âthree good years,â when Frederik was faithful and caring. Jungersen peppers the novel with the phrase âthe real Frederik,â a notion that torments Mia whenever she tries to define it. Her fear that their best years were âjust a by-product of a tumorâ creates more suspense than Frederikâs criminal trial. Jungersen loses interest in the trial, focusing on Miaâs entanglement with Bernard Berman, Frederikâs lawyer and a member of her support group for spouses of brain-damaged people. As the novel progresses, Mia begins to suspect that many people around her suffer from brain damage, leaving the reader with an exciting sense of unease.
Starred review from December 15, 2013
An intelligent, at times even intellectual, novel about philosophical issues of identity and moral responsibility. Mia Halling is at her wits' end with her husband, Frederik, for he's recently been showing highly irrational and unpredictable behavior, such as being exceptionally quick to anger and calling her vile names. Frederik is the headmaster at Saxtorph, a prestigious school in Denmark, and seems to have much going for him, including a loving wife and a 16-year-old son. But during a holiday in Majorca, Frederik falls from a wall, and during a brain scan, it's discovered he has a meningioma exerting pressure on his brain. Perhaps this is to blame for his increasingly erratic behavior? Perhaps, though his behavior has by now started to verge on criminal activity; it turns out he's been embezzling money from the school and playing commodities markets with sanguine expectations of extraordinarily high rates of return. Jungersen has done impressive research on brain science and makes it clear that the symptoms Frederik experiences--including lack of empathy for others, childish behavior, emotional cruelty, sexual outspokenness and (supreme irony) unawareness that he's even ill--threaten to tear apart the delicate fabric of his family life. At a support group for families with loved ones who have experienced brain injuries, Mia meets Bernard, a lawyer whose wife was injured in a car accident. Mia needs Bernard both sexually and in his legal capacity, for she wants to hire him to represent Frederik in a lawsuit being brought against him by Laust Saxtorph, the now-bankrupted director of Frederik's school. When Mia and Bernard begin their affair, Mia starts to experience some of the secretiveness and indiscretion that used to characterize her life with Frederik, and even Bernard has some secrets of his own. Jungersen writes brilliantly and raises knotty questions of identity--who, after all, is the "real" Frederik?--and of moral accountability, no matter who we are and what we've experienced.
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December 15, 2013
In another thought-provoking novel (after The Exception, 2007), Danish author Jungersen takes on the mysteries of the human mind. Schoolteacher Mia is devastated when doctors discover that her husband, Frederik, a headmaster, has a brain tumor, which is changing his personality. Then she learns that he has embezzled millions from his school. The comfortable life they have built for themselves and their son is soon dismantled as Frederik is arrested and they are forced to sell their house and belongings to pay back the embezzled funds. As Mia looks back at her life, she realizes that she had been incredibly happy the last few years because Frederik had become so much more attentive to their relationship, but was his behavior authentic or the result of the tumor? Mia also finds herself attracted to a fellow member in her support group for the spouses of people with brain injuries. Incorporating articles on brain research and free will, the novel is, at times, erratically paced, but several plot twists and fascinating discussions about abnormal behavior make for an intriguing read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)
August 1, 2013
Danish author Jungersen has a way with edgy, ethically challenging premises; The Exception, an award winner and international best seller, features four women at a nonprofit reporting on genocide who turn on one another when they start receiving threatening letters. Here, Mia wonders whether husband Frederik is still the man she married--and indeed responsible for his actions--when a brain tumor begins altering his personality. The answer matters, because he's just defrauded the school where he serves as headmaster of a bunch of money. With cutting-edge science.
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