“The Quiet Girl” unfolds in a surreal and often violent landscape, one as bleak as the damp Copenhagen spring that serves as its backdrop. Peter Høeg builds a convoluted intrigue around a circus clown with unique auditory abilities who is facing tax-evasion charges and possible deportation.
The premise is intriguing: “SheAlmighty had tuned each person in a musical key, and Kasper could hear it.” Kasper is Kasper Krone, whose acute ears can hear both character and intent.
Kasper had grown up in the circus. At 12, he broke his back in a performing accident. The initial prognosis was bleak, but in recovery he discovered his gift. “An interlude had begun,” he explains, “and in that interlude I heard for the first time. I heard the hospital, the trip home, the car, the winter quarters, as I’d never heard before. It wasn’t just the physical sounds; it was their context.”
Kasper is living hand to mouth, a victim of his gambling habit, when two strangers come to his door. They bring a child, KlaraMaria, and say that they are in need of his help. Kasper is known to provide a kind of therapy, though he finds their reference to the children’s psychiatric ward at Bispebjerg Hospital suspect. But his interest is piqued. KlaraMaria is a special child, one he has met before. Of all the people he hears, she is the only one in whom he has heard silence.
Soon other concerns take center stage. He awakes the next day to find a cardinal and an altar boy waiting to take him to the Ministry of Justice. He’s applied to regain Danish citizenship, but difficulties have arisen. There are some issues around tax evasion, in Denmark and in Spain. The Ministry seems surprisingly willing to put these concerns aside if Kasper can provide information on one of his old students — KlaraMaria.
The strange couple soon reappear with the girl, but only for a single session. KlaraMaria manages to tell Kasper that she has been kidnapped, and she passes him a note with a drawing that might offer some clue as to where she’s being kept.
Kasper’s search for the girl loops through a complex landscape, one involving a dying father, a long-lost lover and a group of nuns at the Rabia Institute. The nuns have taken responsibility for protecting a group of 12 children, each of whom shares the kind of silence carried by KlaraMaria. Out of the silence grows clairvoyance and perhaps even power. Because KlaraMaria has been kidnapped, and seems to be held by a man of great influence, the nuns ask for Kasper’s help, to rescue the girl and to protect the rest of the children.
Kasper is a fully realized character, a seeker, one looking for love and salvation. His perceptions of the world, shaped by his aural abilities, are unexpected. He describes the soul of Kain, his rival, as a place where, “He heard money, more than he had ever heard before. He heard real estate. Cars. He heard the future. Golden economic virtualities. He heard the man’s sexuality. It was more than interesting. Masculine, with a strong feminine overtone. He would have been able to get any woman. And most men.”
Other perceptions, though, are distressingly trite: “Hell: It’s not a place. Hell is transportable, all of us carry it around with us. It opens up and stays with us from the moment we lose contact with our natural sympathy.”
The prose in “The Quiet Girl” is clipped, sometimes to the point of being choppy. At times, it just misses: “The vehicle was as long as a railroad car. Kasper loved how rich people sniffed their way to each other. It was like Romeo and Juliet. Even in the heat of passion and love at first sight, in the upper right- hand corner there was always a space for keeping score.”
Høeg is best known for his 1993 novel, “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” and readers looking for a repeat of this performance are likely to be disappointed. “The Quiet Girl,” which features an equally singular central character, lacks the crystalline edge of its predecessor.
That fault may not lie with Høeg. It is difficult to know how much of this end result lies in the work of the translator, Nadia Christensen. The effect, ultimately, is a complex tale centered on a character who is original but who never gains the reader’s empathy.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post.
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FICTION
The Quiet Girl, by Peter Høeg, $26
