Journey into Night
THE STARS GROW PALE (310 pp.)--Karl Bjarnhof--Knopf ($4).
One test of a writer is whether he can find words for the things that are too terrible for words. Denmark's Karl Bjarnhof, 60, passes the test brilliantly in The Stars Grow Pale, the sensitive story of a boy slowly going blind. In Author Bjarnhof's hands, a theme that might have been merely harrowing or touching takes on the larger complexities of a boy's awakening sensibilities in a small provincial town amid a home life both flintily pious and grindingly poor. What brands the young hero's soul is not the iron of personal bitterness but the irony of human existence.
Even as a preteenager, the nameless boy-narrator of Stars is the butt of his Danish schoolmates' gibes. They shrill "Cross-eyes" when he squints. At recess time, they rip off his cap and toss it into the chestnut tree. When he cannot quite make out the math problems on the blackboard and whispers questioningly to a deskmate, the teacher canes him. The boy takes this ugly-duckling treatment philosophically. He believes that his ugly-duckling family, as well as his weak eyes, is to blame.
Painkilling Drug. But his parents are not a bad sort, merely ignorant, stubborn, anxious, self-righteous and poor. Papa is a Swedish immigrant, a brooding, phlegmatic day laborer who can rarely get a day's work. In the evenings he takes to his Bible as to a painkilling drug. Mama works at home pasting paper bags together for a local factory. She keeps a kind of debit account with God, believing that she owes heaven a prayer of gratitude whenever life on earth is remotely bearable. The parents arrange things so that the boy sees his preacher once a week and his doctor perhaps twice a year.
As his vision fogs, the boy cultivates a world of offbeat characters where the ironies of life are less barbed and the humor less sardonic. There is a tramp who lives on baked potatoes and slugs of brandy. There is an alcoholic street singer, a kind of turn-of-the-century Bing Crosby ("Boo-boobooboo-boo"). And there is Grandma from Sweden who chews pipe dottle and comes to Denmark fully intending to die, but lives on to plague and embarrass the boy's mother with her unhousebroken back-country habits.
Gold Thread. When his mother finally takes the boy to a Copenhagen specialist it is too late to do more than prolong his eyesight for a few years, but back home in the town concert hall it is still early enough for the boy to find an exciting new sense of vocation. A violin note spins out over the hushed audience, "thin and glittering like a gold thread in sunlight . . . the echo felt like a kind of weeping in one's chest. A weeping that could not be wept." At novel's end, with a profound sense of release shared by boy and reader alike, the boy is ready to abandon his grey world of failing sight for the luminous realm of pure sound.
What is perhaps most remarkable about Stars is that it is a fictionalized memoir from an author who is himself blind. Between the ages of 17 and 19, Novelist Bjarnhof lost his sight, subsequently toured as a concert cellist and became one of Denmark's leading men of letters. Active as an essayist, newspaper editor and radio interviewer, Karl Bjarnhof has published seven novels. Stars, which appeared in Denmark in 1956 and has since been translated into six languages, is the sixth. It is a measure of Author Bjarnhof's rigorously won success that he makes his hero's tormented saga exalting without heroics or organ tones--or taking other than a dryly skeptical view of the traditional solace of religion. Taking adversity full face like a biting gust off his native fiords, the young hero of The Stars Grow Pale makes of his long day's journey into night a memorable voyage toward the inner light of selfdiscovery.
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