When we meet Niko, as he’s known to friends and family, he is struggling with a never-ending and always growing pit and ache in his stomach. Although Niko’s mother became a Danish national treasure as a pop singer, she and Niko’s father die in a car accident when Niko is 13. He was cared for by his older sister, who also manages and invests the earnings from their mother’s songs. But Niko’s fear of losing her increases as she begins living her own life, gets married and has a family. Niko increases his carousing and fighting, gaining the reputation of “an up-and-coming young psychopath.” His path of self-destruction includes suicide attempts, trying to erase that knotting pain in his stomach.

Niko believes things may finally be changing for the better when he meets Silje, who turns out to be the singer in a tribute band to Niko’s mother. Niko falls deeply in love with her but can’t control the demons inside. During a minor argument he ends up savagely beating Silje and then attempts suicide in his sister’s home. His actions eventually drive his sister to suicide herself, an event that crushes him.

The knot is tearing down everything to make room for itself. Walls, rooftops, floors, everything is being smashed to pieces in the loudest possible way. Suddenly the noise and pain stop, because what’s the point of giving me a stomach ache when I no longer function? All is silent, the demolition is over, the knot is everywhere and I am no longer me. I am the knot.

It’s at this point that Jesus Christ steps in. Actually, he breaks in. Niko wakes up early one morning to the sounds of a prowler in his apartment. Niko sees a man who’s “tough, long-haired, bearded and big and strong, and [who] oozes confidence” entering his bathroom. When the man comes out, Niko clocks him in the head with an ashtray. Niko meet Jesus, or at least someone who claims to be Jesus and there to make Niko “a better man.”

This encounter reflects part of the tone of My Friend Jesus Christ. Husum takes a light, at times humorous, touch to the issues Niko faces. At the same time, the sparse language of the work, translated from the Danish by Mette Petersen, retains a balance of seriousness and sincerity. That quality may reflect Husum’s time as a screenwriter prior to the book, first published in Denmark in 2008 as “My Friendship with Jesus Christ” and now in its first English translation.

Although Niko is relatively convinced that Jesus is a “nutter,” when Jesus touches him the knot disappears. Jesus advises Niko to move from Copenhagen to Tarm, the village in Jutland where his parents grew up. Niko’s mother never returned to the town and refused offers to perform there after running away with Niko’s father to escape her own abusive father. Figuring he has little or nothing left to lose, Niko moves there.

Once in Tarm, Niko quickly comes to treasure the area and makes a handful of friends and acquaintances, including a friend from his childhood who shows up in town, a promiscuous hairdresser, and an attractive Jehovah’s Witness who comes to Niko’s door. Acting again on the advice of Jesus (or the “nutter”), Niko convinces his friends, a group he calls “NATO,” to return with him to Copenhagen to help him try and right the wrongs he’s done. With a variety of twists, turns and complications, the group devotes itself to that mission with Niko getting occasional advice — and even some assistance in a fight — from Jesus.

My Friend Jesus Christ is about a search for individual redemption, not Christian fiction or even markedly religious. In fact, some Christians might even object to the book’s portrayal of Jesus. Like Niko, the reader gets hints that the evidence supports the man’s claims that he is Jesus but we are never actually sure.

Husum seems at his best in describing Niko before he meets Jesus, doing a first-rate job of portraying a soul in agony. That effort, though, makes some of the balance of the book seem a bit of a misfire. Niko’s easy acceptance of the idea of moving to Tarm and his mollification there and later don’t quite fit the self-destructive and tormented Niko of the first third of the book. Likewise, at times events in Copenhagen seem a bit too much like a blithe excursion than the struggle of an anguished soul. Additionally, although the ending is certainly appropriate for a story about a search for redemption, it is a bit confusing.

Despite those flaws, My Friend Jesus Christ entertains in its own idiosyncratic way.

Lars Husum, My Friend Jesus Christ

Set in the period when Laura Ingalls Wilder was living in Dakota Territory. some might presume that its setting in the Red River Valley near Fargo, N.D., is what distinguishes it from Wilder’s Little House series. Granted, both portray the difficulties of trying to carve out a life on the prairie and recognize the role of women in that enterprise. Dakota has a grander vision, however, a much broader horizon than the family home and nearby town, which she brings through in a couple ways.

One is the breadth of characters. The main focus is the family of John Bingham, who, at the outset, is a wealthy investor in the Northern Pacific Railroad living in St. Paul, Minn. When the Northern Pacific goes bankrupt and sparks the Panic of 1873, Bingham is among the investors who seek to recoup losses in the stock by trading it for land the railroad held as part of its massive land grant and taking his family to what was known as a “bonanza” farm. Much of the story is told from the perspective of his daughter-in-law, Frances Boughton Bingham. At At the other end of the spectrum is the family of Torger Knudson, Norwegian immigrant homesteaders trying to eke out an existence in a sod house on the prairie. His daughter, Kirsten, will eventually become part of the housekeeping staff in the sumptuous Bingham home in the midst of the prairie. Parts of the story are also told from her perspective, although hers is in the first person in a dialect reflective of her heritage and, as the story proceeds, the growth in her development.

Just as the will of these two women come on display over the course of the book, there is another persistent indomitable force — the weather. Whether in the form of blizzards, the humidity of summer, the omnipresent wind, the flooding of the Red River or the profoundly beautiful changes it brings to the land over the seasons, the weather is a constant presence in the lives of these people. This is particularly so given the isolation and distance among the many families and individuals living outside established communities and the fact that not only their livelihood but their lives depended on the weather.

Finally, Marshall, who now teaches English at the University of Michigan, weaves the territorial politics of the time into the story. Various characters, including Frances’ husband, take the reader to the territorial capital in Yankton, in what is now southeastern South Dakota, nearly 300 miles from the Red River Valley. This gives us a glimpse of not only the debate over the capital’s location and dividing the territory into two states, but also the chicanery and graft underlying and influencing much of the political debate. By occasionally taking the story inside the powers and efforts trying to bring people to the prairie and the disadvantages to which individual families were subjected by those same promoters, Dakota is historical fiction that entertains and educates.

Although at an important storyline involving Frances is particularly modern, Dakota is presented in a style that echoes the motifs of late 19th Century American literature, even with its chapter headings. The story unfolds at a relatively leisurely pace. While some readers might find it too leisurely, the pace has the feel of the gradual change of seasons. Occasionally, the book’s breadth can be a weakness as, for example, some characters or episodes almost seem like vehicles intended to take the reader to particular places or to place the story in a context with historical events those unfamiliar with the Dakotas will know. Ultimately, though, the book is a meticulous tapestry intended to show how life was lived and how some prospered, some failed and “most just hung on.” It is an homage not only to the people but the land and the profound relationship between the two.

Brenda K. Marshall, Dakota, Or What’s a Heaven For.

The title character is a third grader in a Catholic school when Kennedy is killed. Johnny is flush with not only the hopes and dreams of a third grader — becoming physically fit in response to Kennedy’s promotion of fitness — but the hopes and dreams that reflect the Kennedy Administration more broadly — going to the Moon and fighting Communism. In fact, Johnny is fond of quoting the phrase from Kennedy’s speech announcing the lunar program, that Americans pursue such goals “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” This is a unique time in American history, post-50s but before the tumult and disarray of the late 1960s. It is a time that seemed so much simpler and clear.

Johnny’s story reflects the disruption of the times. The sister of a nun at his school witnesses the assassination. Glimpses of her story reveal various facts with which anyone who has read about the conspiracy theories is familiar. Johnny, occasionally picked on for his seemingly odd ways, becomes the leader of an odd assortment of people who come to believes the school boiler possesses special powers, powers that among other things may reveal what really happened in Dallas. Johnny leads classmates, nuns and a couple maintenance workers on a type of vision quest to assuage the rupture in their previously ordered world and the suggestion that the assassination may not be as it seems.

At times, this search may strike readers as a tad confusing. Moreover, it doesn’t quite ring true the Catholic school environment in which it occurs. This is surprising because perhaps the strongest part of the book is Palecek’s ability to capture the culture and and atmosphere of Catholic schools at the time. As he notes in a prologue, in the 1960s “every berg, town and ville in the Midwest boasted a Catholic block of school, rectory and convent.” That was certainly the case in my hometown, where I was a second grader in a Catholic school at the time of the Kennedy assassination. The school took up half block. The rectory and sat on a quarter of a block across the street. And even though my hometown had a population of less than 15,000 at the time, it had two Catholic schools.

There is no doubt the Catholics took pride in JFK being the first Catholic president. That pride bolstered the sense of exhilaration many others in the country felt. But it also bolstered the Catholic education system being one in which patriotism and religion went hand-in-hand, particularly when it came to “the Red Menace.” It was virtually doctrine among students in Catholic schools that unless the government continued to battle Communism, the Catholic Church would be a primary target when the Russians invaded. Regardless of the size of the town, children in Catholic schools “realized they would be soon rounded up by Russian soldiers and made to line up in the playground and say there is no God.”

Thus, although Johnny Moon‘s main theme purports to be the Kennedy assassination, those of a certain era, particularly those who attended a Catholic elementary schools, will see it differently. To us, Johnny’s life and beliefs are a surprisingly insightful and accurate commentary on an aspect of life never forgotten but rarely finding its way into print.

Mike Palecek, Johnny Moon

Cain is an assiduous indictment of the God of the Old Testament by re-imagining the brief tale the Bible tells of the title character. Saramago, who died last year, made his position clear on the book’s release in Europe in 2009. He said the Bible depicts a “cruel, spiteful, vengeful, jealous and unbearable God” and recommending people not trust that God. The book is Saramago’s extended literary argument on that point, frequently from Cain’s mouth.

Saramago’s story of Cain killing his brother Abel is just the starting point. God’s judgment after Abel’s death is for Cain to be “a restless wanderer.” In Saramago’s hands, he wanders the Book of Genesis, aided by the fact he can go back and forth in time. Cain visits the Tower of Babel, is present as Abraham prepares to sacrifice Isaac and joins Noah on the ark, but not in the chronological order in which these events appear in the Bible.

Throughout, it is clear that Cain is increasingly angered by what he perceives as God’s capriciousness and antipathy toward his creation, that he is an entity “who devours his own children.” In Saramago’s version of events, the devil and other fallen angels rebelled because God is evil. God “is not a person to be trusted” and the ease with which he orders Abraham to sacrifice Isaac indicates such acts are “a deep-seated habit.” If anything, if God has a conscience, it is “so flexible” that it agrees with whatever God does, regardless of effect or ramifications. Cain even lays Abel’s murder at God’s feet, saying, “[Y]ou were the one who pronounced sentence, whereas I merely carried out the execution.” He believes “god should not go wasting his energies on creating an atmosphere of constant terror and fear,” particularly when he turns his back on the poor, unfortunate and wretched.

Cain is unquestionably tendentious. It is also a more blunt approach to a subject Saramago addressed in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, an irreverent re-imagination of Christ’s life in which Saramago also displayed some anger. Yet Saramago’s style keeps the book from straying completely into the category of screed. Although it sounds the same notes several times, Cain‘s indictment often reflects a touch of humor. For example, when Abraham suggests Isaac forget that he was willing to kill his son, Isaac responds, “I’m not sure that I can.” Likewise, as Cain ponders Abraham was about to do, he wonders if God would order his own son to be killed if he had one.

The book, being released in the U.S. in a translation by Margaret Jull Costa, who has been translating Saramago’s works for more than a decade, continues some of Saramago’s prior style idiosyncrasies. None of the proper names in the book are capitalized unless they begin a sentence or line of dialogue. This is not so much a tool of disrespect toward “god” as a necessity of style. Like many of his works, the novel contains long passages built not of sentences but long clauses separated only by commas. Especially since conversations are not delineated by quotation marks, it is only the capitalization of a word amidst one of these clauses that indicates the speaker has changed. What might appear as run-on sentences comes off almost as stream-of-consciousness conversation, although in Saramago’s and Costa’s hands the conversations have an almost colloquial feel. It does, though, take a bit of getting use to, especially for those who haven’t previously read much Saramago.

Cain isn’t plowing any new ground. Critics have long pointed out the God of the Old Testament and Torah seems cruel and unjust. And some Christians classify some of the harshest positions in the Old Testament as metaphorical, not literal, although 3 in 10 Americans view the Bible as the literal word of God. Saramago fans may enjoy the book but it does not rank with works like Blindness, All The Names or Death with Interruptions. Whether relative newcomers to the Saramago oeuvre appreciate it may hinge as much on their religious viewpoints as anything.

José Saramago, Cain