Where the Narrator Is Just. The. Worst. But Interesting

The Dwarf by Pär Lagerkvist
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found this book intriguing and kinda fascinating, and I don't know why. Gimme a minute.

[It's from the 40s, translated into English in the 70s--so the title is very uncomfortable. Forgive me if I just leave that aside for now.]

The story is told from the perspective of Piccoline, a little person in the court of a prince during the Renaissance. It's clearly meant to be a fictional version of Florence, with a fictional version of Leonardo da Vinci as a minor character, but most of the plot is invented. Piccoline is a horrible, misanthropic character, clearly a narcissist and probably a sociopath, although the novel obviously doesn't say anything like that. He delights in war and ugly things, is cruel to people, and doesn't have any concept of empathy, so he's hard to follow, in a way. You'd never want to know him. Nevertheless, the story, as it's told in his voice, is compelling.

[As a personal note, I am one of those "won't read books with unlikable characters" people, but I've read three things lately with very unlikable sociopathic or narcissistic characters, yet the books worked for me. I'm still working out why as I type.]

He believes he is not human, but a race apart, so he watches humans with interest but no compassion. He accompanies the prince to war, and never stops loving the violence. When they have to make a peace treaty, he is horrified, but the prince uses him to poison his enemies, which makes him very happy. Really, he just wants to lash out, like the prince's bad angel tempting him to foolish acts. Then they are besieged, and he's annoyed at the peasants taking refuge in the city:

The refugees are more and more disliked, being regarded, and rightly so, as the cause of the food shortage. They are a burden to the citizens. Most unpopular of all are their whining dirty children who go begging all over the place... They are stupid like all peasants, and spend most of their time sitting and staring.

His reflections are always this way, showing no comprehension, no compassion, no humanity. When plague starts to kill the people, he's glad just to see there be fewer peasants left in the city. When the prince's young daughter falls in love with his enemy's son, like Romeo and Juliet, [serious spoilers here] Piccoline discovers the boy in her room, tells the prince, and is super happy to be there when they kill him. He doesn't care that the girl loved him and later kills herself.

He's the same way with the princess, who he probably loves in a toxic way. She hasn't always been nice to him, but she has always trusted him with her secrets, including her lovers, which causes him so much jealousy. He is happy to include her most recent lover in the poisoning, which brings her to a crisis of conscience, where she feels that she has caused all the suffering in the city and can never be saved. She begs him to help her, but he says that she cannot be helped and will go to hell. He never relents on this and never shows her the slightest kindness.

So... he's horrible. But the whole time, it feels like he's serving some purpose, that the author has created him to be the incarnation of cruelty or spite or something, or the representation of all hurt, and trying to puzzle that out is a big part of the reading experience.

That's not my usual thing, either. But the story is stuffed with the narrator's observations on life, and they're all so toxic and ugly that it's almost unbearable, but they're not unique to him. He is speaking like the voice of human intolerance and cruelty, and it's interesting to hear, like a truth unearthed.

[Nothing but spoilers ahead.] The story ends with the siege ended by plague, the princess dead by starvation and negligence, and the narrator in the dungeon for his cruelty to her. The people who survived return to their lives.

I picked this up on a discard pile years ago. I only recommend it to other readers because I want them to get back to me after they're done to tell me WTF they think happened in this book. And why did I kinda like it?

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