cover image Under the Evening Sky

Under the Evening Sky

Finn Carling. Peter Owen Publishers, $34.95 (208pp) ISBN 978-0-7206-0783-3

Two ill-matched strangers dine together for five successive evenings on a Greek island, swapping improbable tales. Their table talk--swinging wildly between bombast and profundity, the mundane and the metaphysical, surreal fantasy and hyper-reality--is the substance of this short experimental novel by a Norwegian writer. One of the men, Robert Turner, who appears to be a worldly aesthete, tells the absurd story of how he once was hanged to death, falsely accused of setting fire to his manor in order to kill his wife. He also rattles on about his ``life-giving Eurydice,'' a young girl who for him embodies love's redemptive powers. His emaciated dinner guest, who calls himself Joseph Frost, poses as a writer suffering from a terminal illness. In an unexpected finale, their verbal house of cards comes tumbling down as we learn the true identity of each. This intriguing, constantly unpredictable meditation on illusion vs. reality takes wing when the conversationalists discuss art as a repository of meaning, the fragility of the social construct called reality, and people's relationships with animals as a touchstone of their humanity. (Mar.)