{"id":270146,"date":"2009-04-13T13:10:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-13T13:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/04\/13\/doghead\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:24:08","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:24:08","slug":"doghead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/04\/13\/doghead\/","title":{"rendered":"Doghead"},"content":{"rendered":"

When first published in Denmark in 2005, Morten Ramsland\u2019s Doghead<\/em> was a staggering success. Although Ramsland\u2019s prior poetry collection and first novel had been largely overlooked, Doghead<\/em> received widespread popular and critical acclaim, winning numerous national prizes, including the prestigious Danish Booksellers\u2019 Golden Laurels Prize. Four years later, Doghead<\/em> has now made it to the United States, and has already garnered its author the perhaps well-meaning, but dubious title, of \u201cDenmark\u2019s John Irving.\u201d<\/p>\n

A sprawling, dark-humored, frank, and stringently cynical novel, Doghead<\/em> traces four generations of the Eriksson family, whose vividly offbeat members include wayward sailors, epic drunks, would-be painters, over-attentive mothers, adulterers, accomplished liars, orphans, and escapists. It\u2019s a generally unhappy clan, a collection of almost-strangers who find themselves bound together not so much by blood ties or loyalty, as by common history. <\/p>\n

For this is a family that is irrevocably steeped in its own lore. Each person is defined by several stories that are repeatedly told to nephews, nieces, and grandchildren\u2014by the three or four nicknames that each of them have been christened with. (The narrator, Asger Eriksson, is known at various points of the novel by no less than five titles: The Liar, The Latchkey Kid, The Bastard Boy, The Danish Shrimp, and The Bandit. Each name is the product of its own story.) It\u2019s a hermetic mythology, as illuminating as it is often reductive. But it is only by retelling (and painting) these family legends that Asger can connect with his family and finally reconcile with the years of misunderstanding, neglect, cruelty, and obliviousness that have characterized most of the Erikssons\u2019 interactions. \u201cIt\u2019s as if the stories have started taking control of me,\u201d he admits. \u201cThey\u2019re driving me back towards my own birth and motives that I\u2019m not sure I\u2019m quite ready to confront.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her recent New York Times<\/em> book review, Clare Clark declares Doghead<\/em> to be a \u201cbleak book\u201d which \u201c. . . while enthusiastically engaging with the coarser aspects of life, displays a grimly pessimistic view of human nature.\u201d And though she\u2019s certainly not wrong in her estimation of the novel\u2019s resignation to the realities of familial callousness and vindictiveness, Clark does perhaps disregard the book\u2019s real motives. This is not a novel that seeks to redeem its characters, so much as it is a story about the possibility of catharsis through art. Asger\u2019s grandfather struggles all his life to have his cubist-inspired paintings accepted, only to find peacefulness in mundane pastel landscapes in his old age. His grandmother Bj\u00f8rk is for decades the family storyteller, weaving tales not only about the family\u2019s history, but also the beauty and magic of her Norwegian homeland. Asger himself runs away to art school in Amsterdam following a grim adolescent episode. <\/p>\n

Where the book does ultimately misstep, however, is in its failure to flesh out this catharsis for its readers. Rather, the novel seems to collapse under its own weight by the last third of the book, when Asger begins to relate his own role in the family history. Rattling off one tragedy after another, Asger\u2019s personal revelations feel mechanical and disconnected, and at times, unnecessarily dramatized. Where Asger, The Narrator, was a perceptive and empathetic figure in the novel, Asger, The Character, reads far less truthfully, even in the midst of his most intimate disclosure\u2014a story in which the eponymous \u201cDoghead\u201d\u2014the monster that he believed lived under the basement stairs of his childhood home\u2014is finally revealed. <\/p>\n

Despite its shortcomings, Doghead<\/em> remains an impressive tribute to the complexity of familial relationships, the profundity of art, and the importance of a shared history. \u201cThe stories were the glue holding our family together,\u201d Asger explains at the end of the book, \u201cit was only after they vanished that everything began to disintegrate, and slowly we were scattered to the winds.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When first published in Denmark in 2005, Morten Ramsland\u2019s Doghead was a staggering success. Although Ramsland\u2019s prior poetry collection and first novel had been largely overlooked, Doghead received widespread popular and critical acclaim, winning numerous national prizes, including the prestigious Danish Booksellers\u2019 Golden Laurels Prize. Four years later, Doghead has now made it to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[16686,20556,14766,20566,1646,22096,16676],"class_list":["post-270146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-danish-literature","tag-doghead","tag-larissa-kyzer","tag-morten-ramsland","tag-review","tag-thomas-dunne-books","tag-tiina-nunnally"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270146"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":324116,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270146\/revisions\/324116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}