The Seducer by Jan Kjærstad

Author:Jan Kjærstad [Kjærstad, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Mystery, Contemporary, Thriller, Fiction
ISBN: 9781908129529
Publisher: Arcadia Books
Published: 1993-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Hell

What did Jonas Wergeland look for in a woman? Or, to put it another way, why did he get that tingling between his shoulder-blades on encountering a select few members of the opposite sex? Is there an explanation that goes beyond all the usual clichés concerning the randy male and basic instincts?

Thanks to my – how shall I put it? – unique position, I am able to cite an incident that offers one possible answer to this question. And again it concerns Jonas’s fateful cousin, Veronika Røed.

The year in which Jonas was born, Professor Ole Hallesby made a speech, broadcast on the radio, in which he sent the following, not exactly entertaining, thought into thousands of homes: ‘You know that if you dropped dead this instant you would go straight to Hell.’ This sparked off the much renowned ‘Hell debate’ as it was called – yet another one of those exchanges that exposes diverting sides of the Norwegian national character. I am not, however, going to succumb to the temptation to comment on this, merely to state that in due course Jonas Wergeland came to side with Hallesby; he knew there was a Hell.

Jonas always said that he was a cold-blooded creature. Even as a child he evinced an inveterate mistrust of winter and, more particularly, the Norwegian cultivation of this season; it was the cold, more than the snow, that got to him. No matter how many layers of clothes, or how thick the layers, his mother wrapped him in, even when tucked up nice and snug inside a sheepskin sleeping-bag with layer upon layer of blankets on top, he still seemed to shiver and shake. Later, Jonas would also belie the boast that all Norwegians are natural born skiers. He hated those strips of wood that the others had such a whale of a time sliding about on, not to mention all the sticky, messy business of waxing the things. All of the children at Solhaug, except Jonas, cheered when the first snowflakes began to fall; within seconds out came the skis and sledges, the skimmer-boards, the little toy ski-jumpers that you could bend at the waist and the plastic bobsleighs with lead weights in the runners. All winter long, Daniel and the other boys – and the girls for that matter – were hard at it building ingenious bottle slides; hanging onto the backs of cars (strictly illegal) rolling about in the snow and making whole hosts of snow-angels, while at the same time carrying on endless snowball fights with lethal clumps of ice as ammunition. And after all of this, they would come running in, looking like snowmen, gleefully rosy-cheeked, leaving puddles in the hallways and filling the flats with the stink of wet wool. Jonas viewed with aloof distaste all the pointless hassle of winding disgusting strips of insulating tape round ice-hockey sticks, not to mention dodging deadly pucks, all the time spent building staggeringly high ski-jump slopes, devising new waxing combinations to make jumping

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