'An Unreliable Man' by Jostein Gaarder

From the creative genius of Jostein Gaarder comes a beautiful novel about loneliness and the power of words.
Jakop is a lonely man.
Divorced from his wife, with no friends apart from his constant companion Pelle, he spends his life attending the funerals of people he doesn't know, obscuring his identity in a web of improbable lies.
As his addiction to storytelling spirals out of control, he is forced to reconcile his love of language and stories with the ever more urgent need for human connection.

MY THOUGHTS:
This is a most thoughtful unreliable narrator case, because we're warned at the outset in the title. Jakop is a lonely, middle-aged teacher with a weird pastime. He attends the funerals of total strangers, making up cockamamie stories about his brief but meaningful encounters with the dear departed in case anybody at the memorial services should inquire. People can't contradict him from their coffins. Although individuals often leave Jakop cold, he's addicted to hanging out in the middle of tight, extended family groups because there's something compelling about belonging. 'I doubt if I'm any fonder of people than the next man, but life has made me incredibly fond of families.'

As Jakob narrates his story, his own solitary past comes to light, including a history of being picked on at school. The younger Jakop bought into the shame which seems inevitable with victims of bullying. I've been there many years ago, and the memory is still strong. Forget all about any platitudes along the lines of, 'It shows more of a problem with them than it does with you.' We're closed to that sort of reasoning when we're in the thick of it. It's incredibly easy for young people to assume that since we're targets, our personalities must be seriously flawed. So apart from a brief unhappy marriage, this poor guy has been a fringe dweller at other people's events for years. He knows he's treading a delicate path with the potential to blow up on him at any moment, but so far so good.

Since he was a young boy, Jakop has one good friend named Pelle, and we have to read the book to understand the complexity of their relationship. Eventually a lady named Agnes meets the pair of them and begins to figure out what makes them tick.

Whoa, there are any number of themes for different reviewers to pick up on, depending how deeply we want to wade into linguistics, mythology, Christology and all the other deep and meaningful topics which ring Jakop's bells. Several of them went way over my head. For a simple reader like me, the best takeaway by far is that we are often far greater people than the social faces we present. As left of field as Jakop's creative coping mechanisms may seem, they help him plumb depths of his own personality that would never otherwise see the light of day. In fact, he often regards his different facets of storytelling as part of an entity which isn't himself at all.

I do get where Jakop is coming from. If you've grappled for years with the sense that you present an awkward, inhibited public face, you may think that any rebuffs are well deserved. Yet this book offers us encouragement to shrug in the face of rejection or indifference, and think, 'Perhaps this is the best face I can present right at this specific minute, but I know full well that what these people think they're seeing is not a fraction of all I am.' And then it doesn't seem to sting so hard. I've been giving quiet, shrinking souls the benefit of the doubt for years, and Jakop's story confirms that I'm on the right track. Our kindest response must always be, 'Just because I'm not getting the best of this guy (I hope), I'm sure there's bound to be more facets of him than I'll ever see.'

It's not my favourite Gaarder tale. (That is still The Solitaire Mystery, at least right now.) But Jakop is one heck of an unreliable narrator, who doesn't build himself up as a person many people want to spend time with. And I know enough now to think that Gaarder's one of those authors who'll be bound to deliver if we persevere, and sure enough, the magic worked on me the further in I was drawn. 

🌟🌟🌟½