100 Pages a Day:
Part One – Part Two – Part Three

Overall, the best part of The Hurricane Party, was the retelling of the Lokasenna, the banquet of the Norse gods featuring the trickster god, Loki, killing and insulting others. You know, causing trouble as trickster gods do.

This part was interesting and read smoothly, even when tangents were taken to explain the background story of Loki and some other character.

It was the foundation laying that was stilted and somewhat mundane.  It’s necessary to meet Hanck and learn his story, and for the scenery to be explained as classist, grey and toxic (literally) for the ordinary worker.

We learn many details about Hanck but it truly felt as though Ostergren had taken bullet points about Hanck’s life and then tried to flesh them out with some details.  Most of these details make little sense in the context of the story and add nothing to the plot of Hanck finding, losing, and learning about love.

That the innkeeper’s red-haired daughter was a virgin and her hair was perfect in the calibration of some obsolete gauge still has me wondering.

I often remind myself that I must meet the author where he is, not where I want him to be.  This could have been a more interesting story about a man living in 1984 like times who learns about love through the death of his son.  Ostergren’s way of telling this story wasn’t how I wanted it to read.  This is another case of author and reader being on different pages.

Part One – Part Two

Pages 199 – 214

Bora finishes telling Hanck the tale of Toby’s death.  There’s a lot of history and side stories to explain the inner workings of The Clan and their feuds, especially Loki’s part in all of it.

The next morning, Hanck departs for home, hoping to come to terms with how Toby died.

Hanck has been told that Loki frequents a bar called The Colonial Club, so Hanck goes there in the hopes of confronting Loki.  An older whore joins Hanck at his table and lures him into talking about his sorrows.

She writes a note for Hanck to use to skip the line of supplicants at the Old Man’s residence, and get direct and immediate access.  Hanck, understandably, is hesitant about using this letter.  Who is this woman to have connections with the highest level of The Clan?

Dubious though he is, Hanck decides to give it a try.  To his surprise, he is ushered into the Old Man’s, Odin’s, presence.  After reading the letter, he reveals to Hanck that the whore at The Colonial Club was Loki himself.  Furthermore, Odin reveals that he knows what happened to Toby, both the time he was delivered to the hospital and the time he died while serving at the banquet.

Hanck tells Odin he wants to see his son, so Odin makes a deal.  Having enjoyed Hanck’s reports from the time when he was an insurance adjuster, Odin wants Hanck to write the same type of report about love.  Not the drivel that poets and storytellers write, but a sharp report in which love can be codified.  Hanck is dubious about his ability to do this task, but agrees if only he is allowed to see his son one more time.

Can you turn love into something sensible, rational and even logical?  If you can, then you would also be capable of forgiving.” (p. 280)

Hanck is then taken to the City of the Dead where he has one last conversation with Toby, in which it is revealed that he has met his mother and knows his father lied to him about her.  Then, Hanck visits the display of Loki’s torment, tied up under a  snake whose  venom will kill him should any touch him.  Loki’s wife sits next to him, holding a bowl above his head, catching the venom as it drips down.  Eventually, the bowl gets full and she must step outside to empty it.  Then Loki’s torture can be seen by all.

When he arrives home, Hanck sits at his typewriter and thinks that Odin has handed him an impossible task.  How can love be codified?

Then an invitation to the meeting of the Affect Commission to participate in a forum about love and how to codify it.  Hanck sits uncomfortably warm in the turtleneck he bought Toby years ago and listens to experts speak about love and its fluidity.

At the interval he leaves because he’s realized that these experts have it all wrong.  “Love is unfathomable!” (p. 311)  He returns home and sits at his typewriter and finds he knows how to write about love, by writing about his love for Toby and their life together.

Part One – Part Three

Pages 98 – 198, this section really picks up steam and gets to the heart of the story.

Earlier in the book, when Hanck’s mother dies, her last words are “He will be a chef!”  She utters this before Hanck even met Toby’s mother.

Toby is described as sensitive and builds imaginary worlds, happily playing alone.  As he grows, he begins to show talent in the kitchen and takes over the cooking duties.  As he approaches adulthood, his skills become honed enough that he begins to work as a chef in higher end restaurants, from which he brings left over food and wine to share with his father.

Once a year, The Clan holds an enormous dinner party on one of the islands of the archipelago.  Toby leaves home and begins working at the inn which hosts this party and becomes a chef of great acclaim.

Hanck is again visited by two men dressed in lavender.  These communicators tell him that his son has died, at the age of 20.  As he progresses through the stages of grieving, Hanck wanders the pleasure district in search of something to dull his ache.

Finally, Hanck decides to confront the people who killed his son, and gets a ticket on the ferry which takes him to the inn on the farthest island in the archipelago.

One of the nine sisters who manage the inn arranges to meet Hanck in the library and tells him the story of Toby’s (known as Fimafeng to those he worked with) death.  Bora tells Hanck that Loki killed Toby because he sneezed.  That Toby didn’t have the sense to cover his face, or excuse himself after he sneezed.  He stood with a beatific grin on his face and Loki took offense and killed Toby.

Remember Toby’s mother was from the sect called The Sneezers, which explains the beatific look.  As Bora continues the tale, it becomes clear Loki was spoiling for a fight, his ego couldn’t handle all the other gods heaping praise on Fimafeng.

Now comes the retelling of the Norse story of Lokasenna.  The Clan is the clan of Norse gods who meet once a year for an all out bacchanalia (to mix mythic metaphors).  In the tale of Lokasenna, Loki is banned from the banquet by the gods after having killed Fimafeng.  But he returns and begins insulting everyone present.  Many respond in kind, and tensions escalate.  Odin strains to keep the peace as Loki tells tales of outlandish sexual situations, stories that should have remained unspoken.

Hanck has checked in for some unimaginable excitement as he learns of how Toby died, and the political wrangling going on between the members of The Clan.  Infuriated grief-stricken father, meet narcissistic trickster god who has angered all the other gods of The Clan.

Part Two – Part Three

After reading Margaret Atwood’s wonderful retelling of the myth of Penelope and Odysseus, The Penelopiad, I discovered there’s an entire series planned by Canongate, featuring global writers retelling myths.

The Hurricane Party, written by Klas Östergren is part of the Myths series.

In pages 1 through 98, 1984 has reared its ugly head in Sweden.  The cities are bleak, the administrative bureaucracy is being run by a fearsome organization called The Clan.

The book opens with a description of listening to organ music on the radio.  It took a while to understand it’s just the notes.  A note could be broadcast for days or weeks with no change.  An entire cottage industry has grown around gambling on when the note will change and to what.

Hanck Örn used to work for an insurance company run by The Clan.  His job was to investigate claims made to this company, a flimsy cover for The Clan’s protection racket.

In these first pages, the reader learns that Hanck was fired from his job and, returning to the scene of his last investigation, invests his money in typewriters.  Setting up a workshop in his apartment, Hanck teaches himself to repair and customize them, having found a market which sells obsolete technology to collectors.

On one of his visits, Hanck meets a young woman who tracks him down in his city apartment and spends the night.  Here we learn about the many splintered factions of Christian sects, especially The Sneezers who believe that God can be found in the space of the sneeze where the least amount of control and the largest void intersect.

Months after this encounter, men dressed in lavender arrive to take Hanck to an undisclosed location, which turns out to be a hospital.  His son, three-day old Toby, had been dumped with Hanck’s business card pinned to his swaddling clothes.  On the back of the card is the note, “Mother dead.”  Hanck was taken to the hospital to be informed of his son’s existence, and to decide Toby’s fate.

Perhaps needless to say, Hanck instantly falls in love with Toby and prepares his home for this new entry in his life.

This is a bleak book so far and the writing feels stilted.  I’m willing to admit this could be a cultural miscue on my part.  The translator for this book, Tiina Nunnally, has won awards for her work, so it probably isn’t.  Be that as it may, The Hurricane Party doesn’t read as well as George Orwell.

A little research reveals the myth being retold makes itself obvious later in the book and has to do with Loki as related in the Prose Edda of Norse mythology.