An enchanting novel that has become an international sensation, Troll recalls the unforgettable charm and otherworldly zoology of Rafi Zabor’s The Bear Comes Home and Steven Sherill’s The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. Everyone has their rough nights, but things have clearly taken a turn for the surreal when Angel, a young photographer, ends a night of drinking and heartbreak by finding a group of drunken teenagers in the courtyard of his apartment building, taunting a young troll. Trolls are known in Scandinavian mythology as wild beasts like the werewolf, but this troll is just a small, wounded creature. Angel decides to offer it a safe haven for the night.
In the morning Angel thinks he dreamed it all. But he finds the troll alive, well, and drinking from his toilet. What does one do with a troll in the city? Angel begins researching frantically. Officially classified by scientists in …
An enchanting novel that has become an international sensation, Troll recalls the unforgettable charm and otherworldly zoology of Rafi Zabor’s The Bear Comes Home and Steven Sherill’s The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. Everyone has their rough nights, but things have clearly taken a turn for the surreal when Angel, a young photographer, ends a night of drinking and heartbreak by finding a group of drunken teenagers in the courtyard of his apartment building, taunting a young troll. Trolls are known in Scandinavian mythology as wild beasts like the werewolf, but this troll is just a small, wounded creature. Angel decides to offer it a safe haven for the night.
In the morning Angel thinks he dreamed it all. But he finds the troll alive, well, and drinking from his toilet. What does one do with a troll in the city? Angel begins researching frantically. Officially classified by scientists in 1907, trolls have long been thought practically extinct. Angel searches the Internet, folklore, nature journals, and newspaper clippings—even calling a veterinarian ex-boyfriend to find out what it will eat—but his research doesn’t tell him that trolls exude pheromones that smell like a Calvin Klein aftershave and that this has a profound aphrodisiac effect on all those around him. Shooting an assignment for the ultrahip “stalker” brand jeans, Angel finds that Martes, the advertising art director who previously jilted him, suddenly finds him irresistible, and in general he has gone from being the brokenhearted to the heartbreaker. As Angel’s life changes beyond recognition, it becomes clear that the troll is familiar with the man’s most forbidden feelings, and that it may take him across lines he never thought he’d cross.
A novel of sparkling originality, Troll is a wry, peculiar, and beguiling story of nature and man’s relationship to wild things, and of the dark power of the wildness in ourselves.
Such a weird tale. A gay man finds a baby troll being beaten by ruffians, rescues him and grows obsessed with caring for his wild charge. And then things became uncomfortable to me as paternal love morphs into something else. I like the dawning wtf horror this book gave me, and it stuck in my head as a unique piece of unmagical realism. I think it might be a criticism of pedophilia, which makes me uncomfortable because the characters are mostly gay men, though the juxtaposition of the mail order bride in the story seems to suggest a more general critique of any exploitation. Lets just hope that trolls stay hidden.
I'm not giving this book a start rating. It wasn't a book for me. That doesn't make it bad, but it does mean I can't fairly review it.
I also don't want to give it a rating because I suspect the translation is part of what makes it weird. It read like Finnish-in-English and felt clunky.
If you want to read something really different, do give it a try. I'm glad I finished it, but it was tough going for a while.
While the constant shift in pov is incredibly annoying and the characters border on the stereotypic, the story does have its merits; particularly if you stay with to the end.
