Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

That Kamala Varma survived that first wave of hysteria, the huge spate of publicity which can inundate and all but drown anyone who achieves international success, was due not so much to her own level-headedness as to the book itself. Because The Tree of Love was — in the words of one reviewer — the sort of story which no one could explain. ‘It is a book that strikes straight at the heart of everyone who opens it,’ he wrote, ‘a story which sinks in and lodges inside the reader like a vital organ.’ Not long ago an American literary critic declared that The Tree of Love had done as much for our view of love as Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species did for our view of mankind. And that may be true. Because readers of Kamala Varma’s novel would like to believe that love can evolve, that love is not necessarily the same today as it was four thousand years ago. That it encompasses hitherto unknown possibilities. So too with the heart, Kamala Varma said: the human heart also undergoes change.

Overnight Kamala Varma became a world-famous woman. And a rich woman. Even in Norway, that fortress of a country which had tried for so long to kick her out, she gained recognition. People would turn and stare blatantly at her in the smallest, most out-of-the-way places, and not merely because of her colour now. Around the time when Jonas was released from prison, Kamala started writing a new novel — one that went beyond Victoria , she told Jonas — while still travelling all over the world, promoting new translations of The Tree of Love .

What did all this have to do with Jonas Wergeland? It had a great deal to do with Jonas Wergeland, even though Kamala Varma’s love story was not about him in any way. You see, The Tree of Love , a work praised to the skies by people all over the world, was dedicated to Jonas Wergeland. At the bottom of one of the very first, perfectly white pages of the original, English edition were the words: ‘For Jonas W.’ That was all: ‘For Jonas W.’

It took him a while to get round to asking her about it, it was almost as if he did not dare. One evening they were sitting by the fire in Kamala’s flat in Russell Square in London, not far from where Virginia Woolf had lived. Neither of them had spoken for some minutes. Then he asked: ‘Why did you do it?’

She had stroked the cross-shaped scar on his forehead with her finger and stared at him, as if surprised that he could not guess. ‘Because it was meeting you, your otherness, that put the idea into my head,’ she said.

Jonas thought about this again and again. What an honour. To have one’s name appear as the first words, as a prelude to, a story which had been printed in millions of copies, a book which would be read by young people sitting on park benches who would turn their faces to the sky every now and again and make sacred vows to themselves. A book which men would buy and quote from at difficult moments, as they knelt before their wives. A book which old folk would read and weep over, because they realised that the insight which this novel had given them and which they had rejoiced over in their youth had been no more than a seed, one which had since sprouted and grown into a mighty tree inside them.

When Jonas got out of prison he became Kamala’s secretary. He took care of the mass of paperwork associated with her books. She would have preferred to give him another title. ‘You’re not my secretary,’ she said, ‘you’re my reader.’ But Jonas insisted on being allowed to call himself a ‘secretary’ — a word which, in its original sense, meant a person entrusted with a secret, a private seal, and that was exactly what he wanted to be.

Jonas often took out The Tree of Love and ran a finger over his name printed on that page, as if he could not believe it was true. When everything was over, all that would be left of him would be this little dedication in a romantic novel. People would always wonder who ‘Jonas W.’ was — some people would even take the trouble to find out. He, Jonas Wergeland, who had held a whole nation in the palm of his hand, who had once ranked second only to the king, would wind up as a footnote, so to speak, in a love story. What a paradox. All his travails with television — only to be remembered because of a book.

The first time Jonas opened The Tree of Love , in prison, and saw those letters on the expanse of white at the very front of the novel, he found it hard to read what they said. The letters seemed to him to be shining, his name seemed to be shining. He sat with the book in his hands and knew that he had made the greatest discovery of his life, a discovery which redefined everything, truly expanded him, made him a new person.

So far I have not understood a thing, he thought. I need to go back to the very beginning.

JAN KJÆRSTADis one of Norway’s most acclaimed writers. His trilogy The Seducer, The Conqueror and The Discoverer (Arcadia) has achieved huge international success and won him the prestigious Nordic Council Prize, Scandinavia’s highest literary honour.

BARBARA J. HAVELANDhas translated works by several leading Danish and Norwegian authors incuding Peter Høeg, Linn Ullmann and Leif Davidsen.