Mean Girls

Danish author Christian Jungersen's new novel educates about genocide

by Amy Baily

Some books you can read for a few minutes before you go to sleep. You can leave them at home when you go out. Then there's The Exception.

In the award-winning Danish author Christian Jungersen's English-language debut, the four staffers at the Danish Center for Information on Genocide are sincerely trying to educate the world and put an end to genocide. This could be nutritious, but dull. Fortunately, The Exception, already an international best-seller, is as wonderfully creepy and suspenseful as it is nutritious.

We meet Iben first. A semi-celebrity in her native Denmark since she was a hostage in Nairobi, she's still haunted by flashbacks to her captivity while dressing for a night out in Copenhagen. She meets a possible love interest, then, as quickly as we've become accustomed to the world through Iben's eyes, the point of view changes to that of Malene, Iben's best friend and co-worker.

Malene is vivacious but needy. She's been flirting with Iben's romantic prospect for years, and a potential connection between him and Iben now has different implications. Anne-Lisa, the DCIG librarian, can't see the resulting tension; she's too desperate to belong to the office clique, which is rounded out by the secretive secretary, Camilla.

Into this fraught world come two anonymous death threats for Iben and Malene, and the women begin to cast about for suspects. First they suppose it's a war criminal they've covered. Then they start looking closer to home, at one another. A good old-fashioned witch hunt ensues.

You'd expect genocide researchers to be experts on physical and psychological torture. What you might not expect is that they'd prove such natural and adept torturers themselves. This is where Jungersen shines: In a deceptively low-key style, he methodically ratchets these earnest, educated people into monsters. Homes and offices are broken into and vandalized, someone is hospitalized, and a mate dies in a suspicious fall. The passive-aggressive death match distracts nearly everyone from the mass-murderer stalking them.

Shameless anti-genocide propaganda, The Exception is also, in its anatomization of everyday cruelty, artful, true, necessary and welcome.

(a_baily@citypaper.net)

The Exception

By Christian JungersenTranslated by Anna PatersonNan A. Talese, Doubleday, 512 pp., $26