Before entering further into this novel, there is a question to be asked. Should male novelists always make their protagonists male, and female writers choose females as their main character, while the gender of all of the other incidental characters in their books are of little consequence? Of course not. Voice appropriation is part of a politically correct philosophy to which I cannot ascribe. Yet, after reading Grøndahl's novel, 'an altered light', I wonder if a woman would have viewed his protagonist in a different light. I found it difficult to relate to Beckman, an apparently successful Copenhagen family lawyer, whose world suddenly falls apart. Are successful women really as self-deceptive as Beckman appears to be at the novel's beginning? Is this view of her an image only a man would have of a woman, or is this a typically European view of women? I cannot answer this. One thing is certain, however. This is a very northern European book. It is obviously not written by someone influenced by the Anglo-Saxon literary thought process, whether it is a North America or a British one.

Worlds do fall apart, but most of us manage to cope with adversity, illness or betrayal, and so hold the pieces together. If, however, we avoid looking at the truth, if we build an artificial life around us, then we will end up uncertain of whom or what we are. This is the case with Beckman, whose all too orderly world shifts from underneath her when her husband suddenly announces at a family dinner that he is leaving her for a younger woman.

For a family lawyer, who deals daily with failed marriages, she seems remarkably unaware of the symptoms of failure in her own marriage. Yet, she is not that surprised. She just never expected that her loveless marriage could ever break, that her husband might want something more than she offered him, or he could offer her.

As she looks back on her life, we learn that she has been running from life for a long time. At first she ran off to Paris as a young girl to avoid small-town conventional living. Yet, she is not a true rebel. Although she does not truly love Martin, who comes to woo her ardently, she finally succumbs because she is tired of "floating around," and because she has begun to admire Martin's determined manner of reaching his goals. So, they get married and then fall into the very rhythm of life from which she ran in the first place.

Until the day Martin tells her he is leaving, it appears she has lived only on the surface, without giving thought to what motivates her life. Even being unfaithful to Martin seems to have little real resonance in her life. There is one exception. It appears she has always missed a twin brother, whom she never knew because he died at birth. To me, that seems a rather strange thing to do. But then, she also was a young girl who thought her parents were really actors and her home just a stage set. Insecurity and unreality always were part of her. It is grounded in growing up in an unrecognized dysfunctional family.

For someone, who has never really grounded herself in anything, Beckman is strangely introspective. In fact, the entire novel is one long introspective, internal monologue; one might even say that it is a huge navel gazing, except that even in her introspection Irene never really reaches any depths, not even overt self-pity. She is still floating, right to the very end, when she smuggles an unknown refugee from the Balkans across the Austrian border, and presumably also across that of Germany.

As she approaches the German border, she thinks about her meeting with a father she hadn't known existed until recently, and with whom she couldn't connect emotionally, except that she feels that music unites them. Grøndahl creates in him an individual just as disconnected from the world as the daughter he hadn't known existed. Beckman, as she drives along with her illegal passenger, visualizes this 'father' in Vienna and his daily routine of reading his newspaper after he arrives back from Ljubljana, Slovenia' s capital city. She had followed him there after he flew there in an attempt to avoid her. "It is still the same beginning," she muses. "Life is ceaselessly altering, and there isn't a place in the world where we belong. Beginnings have no arrival, no final destination. Hope is homeless, but indomitable, flowing beneath an awning between glinting spots of light in the calm surface of the water."

Grøndahl's language, at least in translation, is lyrical and detailed in its description of Beckman's surroundings. But, the endless introspection of his main character, and her inability to connect with anyone does after a while lead to a kind of ennui for the reader. Perhaps it is the Scandinavian in him that leads him to offer no solution or any optimism for a brighter future for Beckman. Driving toward the German border with the young man now hiding in the trunk of her car, she thinks "For you, everything is still undecided; for me, it's already late." There is something so pessimistic, so abject about the future in this thought. It is also so very European. It is just not the way I think North American women would think, especially successful ones unless they suffered from deep depression. As for the final situation in which she has placed herself, once again without really thinking, we are left to decide on how this potentially dangerous action will play itself out. All that introspection has, in the final analysis, lead her to naught.