Troll: A Love Story [B1232]

2004 PB. This internationally acclaimed winner of the Finlandia Award is 'a brilliant and dark parable about the fluid boundaries between human and animal' (The Boston Globe). Angel, a young photographer, comes home from a night of carousing to find a group of drunken teenagers in the courtyard of his apartment building taunting a wounded, helpless young troll. He takes it in, not suspecting the dramatic consequences of this decision. What does one do with a troll in the city? As the troll's presence influences Angel's life in ways he could never have predicted, it becomes clear that the creature is the familiar of man's most forbidden feelings. A novel of sparkling originality, Troll is a wry, beguiling story of nature and man's relationship to wild things, and of the dark power of the wildness in ourselves. "An imaginative and engaging novel of urban fantasy . . . The stuff of ancient legend shadows with rather unnerving precision the course of unloosed postmodern desire."-Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post Book World.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Wonderful and disturbing. It is a tale of innocence, cruelty, predation, exploitation, lust, manipulation, misconceptions, and misfits (in a very literal, fish-out-of-water way). It is told by various 1st person points of view and the narrative itself is interrupted by bits of folk tales, newspaper stories, and scientific articles. The depiction of being an outsider is layered over and over: the toll in the city, the gay man, the artist, the Fillipino child-bride, the straight man on the gay scene. All of them existing just outside the mainstream; no character in this book fits the world quite right, except ironically, in the end, perhaps, the troll. The whole thing is somewhat unsettling and uncomfortable, slightly erotic, and leaves the reader asking: Who is the real demon? Who is the uncivilized animal?"; "The book seemed to bring up a lot of themes without actually doing anything with them. I am not sure if this was the author's intention, but the most satisfying interpretation I could think of is that the book is depicting the exploitation of nature through the ways marginalized groups are usually exploited."; "I really liked it, strange and dark and dreamlike. Proooobably not for everyone though."