Engrossing 'Doghead' wraps up family's history

As a matriarch lies dying, her grandchildren examine the family myths, trying to sort fact from fiction.

By CHERIE PARKER

For the Minnesota Star Tribune
March 20, 2009 at 7:43PM
Doghead by Morten Ramsland
Doghead by Morten Ramsland (Star Tribune/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Ugly truths in family histories have a way of getting pasted over with flowery facades; a certain level of denial seems to be required for a clan of people to continue associating with each other through the generations.

But it's not only the bad acts that get mislabeled on the family bookshelf. Long-held grudges, feuds and imagined slights often conceal a sweeter picture than the collective memory has created. In Morten Ramsland's very popular Danish novel "Doghead," his first to be translated into English, a matriarch's impending death instigates an accounting of all these family myths -- the good and the bad. And, while the ultimate uncoding of the family's mysteries gets to be a bit of a gimmick, Ramsland's multigenerational family saga is a complex, engrossing tale of unique characters in situations that are sometimes funny, sometimes wrenching, often outrageous and fantastical, but always human and believable.

The family at the center of "Doghead" is not particularly remarkable, but like most real families, has survived -- and committed -- a variety of remarkable things. The story begins when narrator Asger returns from Amsterdam to the family's base in Denmark to see his dying grandmother, Bjork. Asger is a painter, like his late grandfather, Askild, whom both Asger and his sister, Stinna, still revile in memory.

In the weeks preceding her death, Bjork began revisiting long-stagnant family stories. Asger and Stinna take the opportunity to rehash the family's legends, filling in gaps and replacing misunderstandings, half-truths and outright lies along the way. How the siblings are suddenly able to see back in time to events that do not include Bjork or any other living witness is a bit of a narrative sleight-of-hand, but under Ramsland's richly textured story, this lapse in logic is completely forgivable.

Some of the legends that require clarification: whether Askild was an anti-Nazi war hero or a wartime crook; how Asger and Stinna's father, Niels Jr., believed himself to be visited in the forest by the spirits of two women he had not yet met who would later mark the course of his life, and the sad life and ambiguous death circumstances of Asger and Stinna's brain-damaged aunt.

Ramsland has garnered comparisons to John Irving, and "Doghead" does share Irving's style of dense plot, epic scope, quirky humor and intermittent pathos. And although there is a universally painful and amusing quality to this dysfunctional family, American readers would be well-advised to keep Google maps handy to follow the clan's moves back and forth through what can feel like a confusing jumble of Scandinavian city names.

In the end, Asger -- unlike us real folk in our own lives -- will have all his questions answered. But Ramsland can be forgiven this sin of literary license; Asger's trip to restorative history is a rich gallop of storytelling that makes up for its rather pat destination.

Cherie Parker blogs at thelitlife.com.

about the writer

about the writer

CHERIE PARKER