Norwegian By Night is the story of a man, a man with a secret. At 82, Sheldon Horowitz has just buried his wife Mabel. His granddaughter, Rhea, has asked him to move to Norway to live with her and her husband, Lars. She doesn’t want him to be alone. Her grandmother has told her that he has the beginnings of dementia and she is concerned. He has no one left in New York, so finally, she convinces him to move with her to Oslo. Moving someone with dementia can be devastating. If a person’s surroundings are even more unfamiliar they can be seriously challenged, but Sheldon seems to be adjusting. He doesn’t go anyplace alone; he doesn’t speak the language so it would be difficult to go out, anyway.
Sheldon’s only son, Saul, was killed in Viet Nam. Afterwards, he dreams of him and starts to talk about the days when he, himself, was a marine, a sniper, even calling out a man’s name in his sleep. His wife is put out. After all, he has always told her that when he was in service, he had a job as a clerk, a desk job. This is what leads her to believe he is losing it. Sheldon meanders between reality and fantasy, at times, but never madness or confusion. He has logical explanations for everything he does, although sometimes his explanations rattle those around him.
In Norway, he lives in an apartment adjacent to Rhea and Lars. Upstairs, the neighbors are always quarreling loudly, in a language he does not understand. One day, a woman appears outside his door and is in need of help. When he opens up the door, he sees it is the woman from upstairs and she also has a little boy with her. He allows her to come in and escape the wrath of the man she is living with, and the story sprouts wings.
Senka, the boy’s mother, is a Serb. In her country, her family was brutally killed by Kosovars who were extracting revenge for the deeds of the Serbs who murdered their families and friends. They do not care that the war is over. Brutally raped, Senka becomes pregnant, and the little boy with her is the product of that encounter. The man who raped her, Enver, is from Kosovo. He traced her to Oslo when he found out that he was a father, and he traveled there to capture his son and return with him to Kosovo.
Now, getting back to Sheldon’s story; he has long believed that the Koreans may be looking for him to exact revenge for those he killed when he was a sniper during that war. Though this may defy reality a bit, in fact, after he rescues the child and his mother, he does wind up being pursued by some pretty unsavory characters, although they were definitely not Koreans! As he flees with the child, whom he names Paul, as a tribute to his son, his thoughts travel between his past and the present time, recalling tactics he was taught in military training that will help them both survive. He remembers WWII, a war he was too young to fight in and thinks about Korea, the war he personally witnessed. Then he thinks about Vietnam where his son lost his life.
Sheldon is filled with guilt. He thinks of his war time experiences and remembers his personal responsibility for some of the pain; he blames himself for causing things that were beyond his control, random accidents of fate, sometimes. He thinks about his son and his son’s service to the country and blames himself for his enlistment. He accepts his own weaknesses as the cause of most of the failures in his life. Sheldon’s thoughts are so basic and so simple, that, at times, the reader will have to laugh out loud, even though the prior thought might have provoked a deeper emotion and thought, in contradiction to that “funny” feeling.
The story really opens up a dialogue on aging as well as bigotry. It suggests many questions to the reader. Why would Norway allow wanted men into the country because they seek sanctuary? Have they become too liberal in their behavior, saving the victimizer to attack the victim again? Which of Sheldon’s and/or Donny’s memories are real and which are made up to salve his conscience? Does Sheldon have dementia or are his explanations for his behavior plausible?
The book is hard to put down. It draws the reader in, as Sheldon, an octogenarian, draws on his military background and memory to become somewhat of a hero. The mystery is told in three parts in which Sheldon reminisces about the past and the major events that have colored his attitudes about life. The reader will discover that evil begets evil, hate begets more violence, revenge invites vengeance and war invites serious retaliation into the future. There is no easy answer for the prejudices and the anger someone harbors in their heart and mind.
I liked the book, but I thought some of the coincidences required the suspension of disbelief. Also, there are some unanswered questions. How did Senka get the information she hid away? How did Enver find out about it? Why didn’t the police put a surveillance detail on Rhea and Lars?
Regardless of the inconclusive moments, still, the book was exciting, and I stayed up half the night to finish it! The author juxtaposed tongue in cheek humor opposite gruesome scenes and it worked so well that it was really easy to read. Sheldon’s philosophical ideas about aging and behavior are really thought provoking and worthy of discussion.