A Great Deserted Landscape (Electric Literature's Recommended Reading) by Kjell Askildsen

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Editor's Note
"A Great Deserted Landscape" by Kjell Askildsen
Author's Bio
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More Recommended Reading

    Editor's Note
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    A master of the short story, Kjell Askildsen’s unadorned style is not so much concerned with the manipulation of plotlines as with the manipulation of the reader’s feelings and allegiances, with the presentation of characters as people, real people, people so like us that it’s creepy, uncanny. The reader should arrive at the last sentence feeling shocked, yes, but not because of some “twist in the tale” à la Roald Dahl. The shock is rather generated by the feeling of uneasiness at having finished the story without any sense of closure; shocked by the humanity of the characters, something seems off somehow. The reader is left behind, alone in “A Great Deserted Landscape.”
    A not-so-traditional tale of sibling rivalry told from the brother’s perspective, “A Great Deserted Landscape” is a story about a brother, about a husband, a possible murderer, an incestuously minded creep, a self-centered jerk. It’s also about his sister, his dead wife, his mother, his adulterous father, but mostly just about him. At least that’s how he’d see it.
    I hate this guy: he’s ambivalent towards the fact that his wife has just died in a car crash, an event that seems to have worked too much in his favor to have been an accident. He now gets to creep on his sister, who is waiting on him hand and foot in his incapacitated state; his mother fawns over her poor little boy, confining his sister to an undeserved second place in a rivalry that we can all identify with, from one side or the other; he seems almost proud of his cheating father for having affirmed his masculinity. I really hate him. He’s selfish, sexist, and self-righteous. And yet, I saw myself in him. I mean, I don’t want to bump off my boyfriend, I don’t have a crush on my brother, and if my mom or dad cheated I’d probably be pretty pissed, but we’re all guilty of something or other, we’re all selfish in our own way. So, now I’m alone in “A Great Deserted Landscape”: the story finished before the part where I got to feel better about myself. Askildsen really knows how to get under your skin. After all, how often have we all shared the protagonist’s final thought?: “If she [or he] only knew.”
     
    Becky McMullan
    Editor of Selected Stories by Kjell Askildsen

    A Great Deserted Landscape
     
    I’d been helped out onto the veranda. My sister Sonja had placed cushions under my feet, and I was in hardly any pain. It was a warm day in August, my wife’s funeral was about to take place, and I was lying in the shade looking up at the pale blue sky. I was unaccustomed to such bright light, and on one of the occasions Sonja came to check on me, I had tears in my eyes. I asked her to fetch my sunglasses, I didn’t want her to misunderstand. She went to find them. It was only the two of us; the others were at the funeral service. She came back and put the sunglasses on me. I formed a kiss with my lips. She smiled. I thought: if she only knew. The sunglasses were so dark that I could look at her body without her noticing. When she was gone I looked up at the sky again. From somewhere quite far off I could hear the sound of hammering, it was reassuring, I never like when it’s completely silent. I once said that to Helen, my wife, and she replied that it was due to feelings of guilt. You couldn’t talk to her about that kind of thing, she’d immediately start prying.
    When I’d been lying there for quite some time, and the blows of the hammer had long since ceased, it suddenly grew a lot darker around me, and before I realized that it was due to the combined effect of a cloud and the dark sunglasses, I was seized by an inexplicable feeling of anxiety. It passed almost immediately, but something remained, a feeling of emptiness or desolation, and when Sonja came out to check on me a little