Christian Jungersen’s first novel, Undergrowth, won the Best First Novel Award in Denmark in 1999 and became a bestseller. His next novel, The Exception, won two of Denmark’s highest literary awards, remained on the bestseller list there for nearly two years, and has been published in twenty countries. He lives in Malta.
You Disappear
Paperback
(Reprint)
- ISBN-13: 9780345804624
- Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Publication date: 10/07/2014
- Edition description: Reprint
- Pages: 352
- Product dimensions: 7.90(w) x 5.20(h) x 0.80(d)
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Mia’s happy marriage is shattered when a brain tumor begins to change her husband’s personality beyond recognition. As Frederik becomes ever more a stranger before her eyes, the revelation that he has used his position as headmaster to mbezzle millions from his school's treasury turns Mia's private crisis into one that involves the community. But this disgraceful crime could become Mia’s salvation: working with a defense lawyer to build Frederik's case, they wrestle with the latest brain research, the question of free will—and their growing attraction to each other.
Consumed by her new obsessions, Mia must reexamine everything she thought she knew about her marriage, and herself, as she too starts to change. . . .
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—The Wall Street Journal
"You Disappear is not just a well-told story, but a dramatic recalibrating of what it means to have a mind—and a soul.” —Dara Horn, author of The World to Come
“Jungersen’s prose is alternately spare and lyrical, making this a page-turner where entire passages stay with you.”
—LitReactor
“With incredible insight, Jungersen expresses the inner thoughts most people won’t say out loud after a loved one’s brain injury. I tore through this story page by page, relating to each and every complex emotion driven by unforeseen circumstances, as lives are thrown out of control.”
—BrainLine.org
“Thought-provoking. . . . An intriguing read.”
—Booklist
“Brilliant. . . . Mia begins to suspect that many people around her suffer from brain damage, leaving the reader with an exciting sense of unease. ”
—Publishers Weekly
“This fast-paced, well-researched literary suspense novel keeps readers hooked until the final page. . . . Superb.”
—Library Journal
Praise for Christian Jungersen
“Jungersen’s sparse, Danish approach to language is effective . . . leaving us with a humming tension.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“An argument can probably be made that some of the best recent Nordic writing has been detective fiction. . . . Jungersen stakes out a path all his own.”
—The New Yorker
“Excellent on so many things. . . . There is a hugely empathetic imagination behind [The Exception], one that resists allowing us to fall into the simplifying judgments that are a necessary prelude to cruelty. Its characters seem deeply true to life.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Jungersen . . . writes evocatively and perceptively about sensitive topics, and offers provocative theories about what makes each of us who we are.”
—Mostly Fiction
Jungersen’s (The Exception) brilliant latest novel, set in the suburbs of Copenhagen, explores a troubled marriage that is further complicated by a personality-altering brain injury. A doctor informs Mia Halling that her husband Frederik, a private school headmaster, has a brain tumor that will make him treat her differently. “ou must be… prepared for… to lose all empathy for you,” he warns. When Frederik is arrested for embezzlement, Mia looks to his diagnosis as a possible legal defense. This leads her to question the entirety of their marriage—especially the time she regards as their “three good years,” when Frederik was faithful and caring. Jungersen peppers the novel with the phrase “the real Frederik,” a notion that torments Mia whenever she tries to define it. Her fear that their best years were “just a by-product of a tumor” creates more suspense than Frederik’s criminal trial. Jungersen loses interest in the trial, focusing on Mia’s entanglement with Bernard Berman, Frederik’s lawyer and a member of her support group for spouses of brain-damaged people. As the novel progresses, Mia begins to suspect that many people around her suffer from brain damage, leaving the reader with an exciting sense of unease. (Jan.)
An intelligent, at times even intellectual, novel about philosophical issues of identity and moral responsibility. Mia Halling is at her wits' end with her husband, Frederik, for he's recently been showing highly irrational and unpredictable behavior, such as being exceptionally quick to anger and calling her vile names. Frederik is the headmaster at Saxtorph, a prestigious school in Denmark, and seems to have much going for him, including a loving wife and a 16-year-old son. But during a holiday in Majorca, Frederik falls from a wall, and during a brain scan, it's discovered he has a meningioma exerting pressure on his brain. Perhaps this is to blame for his increasingly erratic behavior? Perhaps, though his behavior has by now started to verge on criminal activity; it turns out he's been embezzling money from the school and playing commodities markets with sanguine expectations of extraordinarily high rates of return. Jungersen has done impressive research on brain science and makes it clear that the symptoms Frederik experiences--including lack of empathy for others, childish behavior, emotional cruelty, sexual outspokenness and (supreme irony) unawareness that he's even ill--threaten to tear apart the delicate fabric of his family life. At a support group for families with loved ones who have experienced brain injuries, Mia meets Bernard, a lawyer whose wife was injured in a car accident. Mia needs Bernard both sexually and in his legal capacity, for she wants to hire him to represent Frederik in a lawsuit being brought against him by Laust Saxtorph, the now-bankrupted director of Frederik's school. When Mia and Bernard begin their affair, Mia starts to experience some of the secretiveness and indiscretion that used to characterize her life with Frederik, and even Bernard has some secrets of his own. Jungersen writes brilliantly and raises knotty questions of identity--who, after all, is the "real" Frederik?--and of moral accountability, no matter who we are and what we've experienced.