AshehougAgency

The Peer Gynt Version

In The Peer Gynt Version, Terje Holtet Larsen takes hold of what there is to know about the visit to Kristiania in 1902 by the Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger. Weininger came solely to see the National Theatre’s production of Peer Gynt. With this as his starting point, the author examines what we can rely upon in the information we are handed down about the life and times of others. What is truth and what is lies and how do the myths about a person’s life come about?

Praise for The Peer Gynt Version:

“Between the minor discussion of the Peer Gynt of theatre history and the careful, revealing account of a son who was never found by his father, there opens a space in which the reader can remain without ever feeling a surfeit of amazement. The fact that the book also says something inalienably important about what it means to be Norwegian, makes it a high point in the autumn book season.”
(NRK P2 Kulturnytt) 

“Terje Holtet Larsen’s The Peer Gynt Version is a combination of documentary novel and guide to cultural history. It is impressive in its complexity, elegant and slightly ironic in form and tone.”
(Dagsavisen) 

“We could scarcely find a weirder, more original book than Terje Holtet Larsen’s The Peer Gynt Version among last year’s Norwegian literary publications, for this assorted mixture of a bastardised genre insists on being a ‘novel’, although the writing is presented as a crossover between cultural history essay and autobiographical sketch. To the extent that this is fiction, the poetical aspects are found above all in the way the two subject areas are woven together, and in the awareness that every version of the world contains a personally coloured understanding of the condition of things. Regarded in this fashion, all texts are fictitious, even those which take as their starting point factual material that can apparently be thoroughly checked out.”
(Stavanger Aftenblad) 

“Well written and enthralling, dealing with how so-called reality conceals its own alternatives and new stories.”
(Bergens Tidende)

“A book with its starting point in an Ibsen classic – well worth reading.”
(Dagbladet)

First published: 2003, Kolon forlag
Terje Holtet Larsen: Biography and bibliography