Name: Doppler
Rating: 3.670731707317073 (41 reviews)
ISBN: 9789150106664

Erlend Loe

roman

Doppler

A Guardian Book of the Year and Chapters/Indigo Best Book A bestseller in Scandinavia -- Doppler is the enchanting, subversive, and very unusual story about one man and his moose. This beguiling modern fable tells the story of a man who, after the death of his father, abandons his home, his family, his career, and the trappings of civilization for a makeshift tent in the woods where he adopts a moose-calf named Bongo. Or is it Bongo who adopts him? Together they devote themselves, with some surprising results, to the art of carefree living. Hilarious, touching, and poignant in equal measure -- you will read it with tear-stained cheeks and sore sides -- Doppler is also a deeply subversive novel and a strong criticism of modern consumer culture.

Edwin Lang

This is not a book meant to be read by 1)	a woman; 2)	especially a woman who believes a man ought not to own (and love) a large (i.e. real) dog; 3)	anyone who reads but agrees with and believes what is written in the National Post, but reads it himself; 4)	right-wing voters, and yet is friends who are; 5)	anyone who reads Once an Eagle and is inspired by it, and yet is non-militaristic; 6)	men who feel duty bound and yet are dutiful; 7)	men who have not gone through their mid-life crisis yet; 8)	any man (or any woman who supports her man who is) in good standing with the Knights of Columbus. Given that set of provisos Doppler is an absolutely delightful book, written in such a way that (perhaps both as a man and who’s also an extreme dog walker and so is comfortable with and respectful of the wild, with hybrid coyotes, with the magic of being out in any weather, at any time) it resonates. This is something deeply subversive about Doppler: Its reading engenders a joie de vivre, and although the ending is not as conclusive and satisfying as one might hope, the journey with Doppler is a delight. I took the book though as nothing more than a fable. There was too much that went Doppler’s way: just being able to remain in the forest for so long, his wife’s basic acquiescence, being able to do nothing for such a long time, to his not getting arrested, to his not getting a toothache. What was most realistic in the book was his affinity for the moose: it is my pet theory that if a woman opposes a man’s ownership (of a dog, for example) it is out of jealousy, and so it was completely believable that Doppler and the moose would become friends. What made the book unique was that Doppler remained basically alone, aside from his paradoxical attracting a following. If the story actually does a ‘to be continued’ I suspect that it may be in that vein: of his hitting a chord and having disciples. But in terms of going out into the desert, it is an ancient Christian motif and a tradition, and St Anthony of the Desert (250 AD) may have been one of the first Christians to venture out: “St. Anthony, the father of monks, retired to the desert at about the age of eighteen in order to live in perfect solitude. He laid the foundations of community life, and gave to his disciples that profound broad and sane instruction, the mature result of solitude and prayer, which forms the surest basis of Christian asceticism” (<a target="_blank" href="http://www.passionistnuns.org/Saints/StAnthonyDesert/index.htm" rel="nofollow noopener">http://www.passionistnuns.org/Saints/...</a>). There was a quote that resonated: “One problem with people is that as soon as they fill a space it’s them you see and not the space. Large, desolate landscapes stop being large, desolate landscapes once they have people in them. They define what the eye sees. The human eye is almost always directed at other humans and in this way an illusion is created that humans are more important than those things on earth which are not human”. I remember one time, in mid-Winter, extreme walking with my ‘Molly’, silent, alone, and then quite casually noticing from a small hill I was on a large really majestic looking coyote standing absolutely still on a small frozen lake below us: staring in another direction and there was an element of the we-three in that moment, amid the wildness of it all, the aloneness of that Winter’s morning. We are who we are, part of the society in which we live: that idea has to haunt any sane man or woman – the possibility that we don’t know what we are up, what assumptions we are making about the lives we live, unless something strikes us on the head, or someone dies, and we find ourselves rethinking everything from scratch, and for a while we become very, very grumpy, perhaps anti-social, and when we return we may be different. I don’t know what Erlend Loe had in mind in writing this, except that he wrote this book at 35, seemingly successful with, having completed by 2004, thirteen novels or children’s book or scripts, and I wouldn’t be surprised that amid the hullaballoo he didn’t step back from it all and wonder. Perhaps as we should, from time to time. Edwin

Erlend Loe is a master of the midlife crisis of middle class people. I rarely identify so much with characters. I’m just as neurotic. I also want to break free of society, move into a tent, kill a moose with a knife, and steal from my neighbors. You know, the middle class dream.

Aske Dørge

Hazal Özlem

Tam da günümüz problemlerine uygun bir okuma oldu! Enteresan, sürükleyici ve keyifli: “Bastığımız toprağın bağrında atalarımızın tozlarının da bulunduğunu, dünyanın başına gelen her şeyin bizim de başımıza geleceğini, dünyaya tükürürsek kendimize tükürmüş olacağımızı falan çocuklarımıza öğretmemiz gerek.”

Karianne Fremo Sveistrup

Doppler er en fin bok om reisen til en mann som flytter ut i skogen, og om det fine vennskapet mellom nevnte mann og en elg ved navn Bongo. Personlig likte jeg ikke hovedkarakteren noe særlig, og jeg irriterte meg jevnlig over valgene han tok, og hans barnslige syn på verden. Men heldigvis trenger man ikke å like en karakter for å like historien om han. At jeg hørte lydboken lest av Erlend Loe gjorde nok opplevelsen bare enda bedre.

Emilie Thea Bohrk

Read it for class, and enjoyed it a lot. There are many funny quotes and the story in itself is quite absurd, but in a good way. 
Don’t really know how to describe it other than that
It definitely is the kind of book that some people will love and others will find stupid, but for me it was a solid 4 star read!
I enjoyed the narrator’s worldview even though I find it very different from my own

En sørgmunter historie om en familiefar i eksistentiel krise. Doppler er en mand, der ikke bryder sig om nogen, og en dag mærker han, at han heller ikke bryder sig om sig selv. Han får nok af det hele og beslutter sig for at vende sin familie, job og venner ryggen og flytte ud i skoven. Væk fra trivielle spekulationer om nyt badeværelse og den evindelige kværnen fra sønnens videofilm. Nu vil han leve af det, han finder i skoven og kede sig så længe, at han bliver glad. Det var i hvert fald planen...

Doppler roman

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