Word: bjarnhof
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...unseen eyes of the attendants, and only the best of them rattle their keys to let the boys know they are coming. The keepers' special concern: sex, natural and unnatural. In a brilliant set piece that has the spectral, hallucinatory quality of a Poe short story, Author Bjarnhof tells of a boy who made contact with the well-guarded girls' wing of the institute. Like ghosts, he and his Juliet would glide along the sleep-drugged passageways to make their bed of love on a sweaty mat in the institute gym - until the night the light...
...creaky thongs and trusses, who has a gentle faith that all the sightless are under God's special bless ing. There is Adolf, who endlessly rubs his eyes so that he can "see" the spray of flames that constitutes his last childhood memory of the sighted world. Author Bjarnhof sensitively captures the circular, repetitive agony of a blind man's brooding. As he makes poignantly clear, the blind feel like nature's odd men out. As a former inmate says of the sighted: "They've kept us alive, but they don't want to bother...
...this novel, the nameless hero stands at the entrance of his room, compulsively clicking the light switch on and off. To his dread, he knows the light is working; yet no glimmer cuts the dense black fog before his eyes; he has gone completely blind. Danish Author Karl Bjarnhof, 61, has an un nerving intimacy with this scene and subject, for, at the age of 19, he lost his sight. The Good Light continues the fictionalized autobiography Bjarnhof began with his remarkable The Stars Grow Pale (TIME, April 28, 1958), taking his hero from boyhood into adolescence. The new book...
Nine Strokes. Music is the hero's passport to the country of the sighted. An instructor catches him playing the organ by ear, enrolls him in music classes, and the budding musician makes new friendships with Copenhagen's musicians and painters (Bjarnhof himself has toured as a cellist). When sight finally fails him completely at the telltale light switch, he has the spunk and serenity to bear it. He likens the morning's church chimes to "nine prayer strokes. Three for the night that's past. Three for the day that's coming. Three...
...Author Bjarnhof writes a sparely sculptured prose of singular beauty and keeps just the right emotional distance from his theme so that what the reader suffers is never sentimental pathos but the moving burden of bearing the unbearable. The wonder and purgative power of The Good Light is that men like Karl Bjarnhof's hero, pushed to the extremity of the human spirit, do not curse God and die, but like Little Jens, bless life and live...