Novel
The Liar
Løgneren
Martin A. Hansen · 1950
Synopsis
Johannes Vig, nearly forty, schoolteacher and sexton of the small island of Sandø, keeps his diary over a few spring days, when the ice that cut the island off from the world begins to break. He addresses it to an imaginary confidant whom he calls Nathanael. He is secretly in love with Annemari, his former pupil, who is engaged to Olaf, due to return in the spring, and who is being courted by a young engineer from the mainland; she comes to ask his advice, and his diary does not say everything he knows.
Context
At the beginning of 1949 the state radio asked for a serial to be read on air; the author hesitated for a long time, then wrote quickly, working from drafts going back to 1942. The actor Pouel Kern read twelve episodes of it, on Sundays, in the spring of 1950, and it is said that the streets emptied. The text then appeared as a serial in the Berlingske Aftenavis, illustrated by Ib Spang Olsen, and then in book form the same year. It is his last novel: he then turned to the religious history of the North. Knud Leif Thomsen made a film from it in 1970.
Who it is for
Under two hundred pages, in the form of a diary, full of allusions to the Bible and to Kierkegaard. Know before opening it that the one who holds the pen is also the one the title refers to.
Prizes and reception
One of the best-selling Danish books of the twentieth century: nearly four hundred thousand copies in the author's lifetime.
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