Sheldon Horowitz - 82 years old, impatient, and unreasonable - is staying with his granddaughter's family in Norway when he disappears with a stranger's child. Sheldon is an ex-Marine, and he feels responsible for his son's death in Vietnam. Recently widowed and bereft, he talks to the ghosts of his past constantly. To Norway's cops, Sheldon is just an old man who is coming undone at the end of a long and hard life. But Sheldon is clear in his own mind. He'd heard the boy's eastern European mother being murdered, and he's ...
Read More
Sheldon Horowitz - 82 years old, impatient, and unreasonable - is staying with his granddaughter's family in Norway when he disappears with a stranger's child. Sheldon is an ex-Marine, and he feels responsible for his son's death in Vietnam. Recently widowed and bereft, he talks to the ghosts of his past constantly. To Norway's cops, Sheldon is just an old man who is coming undone at the end of a long and hard life. But Sheldon is clear in his own mind. He'd heard the boy's eastern European mother being murdered, and he's determined to protect the child from the killer and his Balkan gang. With an endearing combination of dexterity and daring, Sheldon manages to elude the police in what is hostile, foreign territory for him. But what he doesn't know is that the police and the gang both know where he's heading. Norwegian by Night is the last adventure of a man coming to terms with the tragedy of his own life as he tries to save another's. It combines laconic, deadpan humour, moral seriousness, visceral grief, and narrative tensions in a remarkable way - and Sheldon, in particular, is about to become a famous fictional hero.
Read Less
Norwegian by Night is one of the more interesting Scandinoir novels I've read. Well written, simply plotted, the characters are memorable. However, (spoiler alert), I would have preferred an ending that wasn't quite so noir because by the end of the novel, I cared too much about its elderly Jewish, Korean War veteran protagonist.
Highly recommended.
Jangus
Jan 15, 2017
Don't miss out on this one
I just finished N by N. It was totally captivating. I took me a complete day to finish the last chapter, because I was afraid they would kill Sheldon. (My mother said I was an unabashed escapist, and she was correct.) The writing was superb. I had only two qualms about a tense he was using--I knew he was trying to keep the story in the active voice, but I questioned the wisdom of this. The NY Times was right on by saying, Has the brains of a literary novel and the body of a thriller. The characterizations were superb--there was not one character I did not get--even the speechless Paul. I could go on and on, but I don't want to give the plot away.
