The story seller

The story seller (Norwegian original title: Sirkusdirektørens datter ) is a novel by Jostein Gaarder , which was published in German in 2002.

content

The story is about Petter, a somewhat strange child. His parents live separately and he lives with his mother. Petter has a very keen imagination . He prefers to sit at home alone and make up stories rather than play outside with other children. He also tells these stories to his mother, who does not understand him and is worried because Petter is always alone.

In the 3rd grade, Petter finds the use of his imagination: For a small fee, he does the other children's homework. He even enjoys doing this, because he has to keep thinking up new mistakes because it would be noticed if all children had perfect homework. Petter is getting older, his mother dies and he has the house to himself, so that he often invites women to visit. These women are nothing special to him, however, and he does not enter into a firm bond with them.

Petter still has idea after idea and he writes them down in notebooks: drafts for novels, plays and much more. Of course, he would never elaborate on it himself, as his new ideas would immediately distract him from the original plot. Shortly after graduating from high school, he met a young author and showed him a draft novel. He is enthusiastic and so Petter sells him the idea. Later, on a walk, he met Maria, who is about ten years older than him and who is immediately something special to him. You start a relationship. Petter tells Maria many of the stories he has made up himself, but gradually Maria gets scared of his imagination, because he also tells her about a little man whom he calls "meter". “Meter” originally comes from his dream, but is now also around Petter every day when he is awake. However, he stays in the apartment and does not follow him on his walks. So Maria ends the relationship, but first lets him impregnate her because she “wants to take something from him”. Petter gets to see the child, a girl, a few more times and also tells her a few stories. After that, Maria breaks off all contact with Petter and moves to Stockholm. You will never see each other again.

Petter gets on with his life by putting all of his story drafts up for sale, helping writers' block writers. He is slowly building a small empire, first only in Norway and later also internationally. Slowly but surely, he has to fear being exposed because his clientele is so large and dissatisfied authors could blame him for a failure. There are also two German books that are based on his ideas, but which he never sold. Petter immediately thinks of Maria, as only she had the privilege of hearing stories that he later sold. When he was a publisher's representative at a book fair in Bologna, there were rumors about "the spider" who is said to be responsible for most of the new books - Petter. An acquaintance tells him that the angry authors may have hired a killer and Petter takes the next plane to escape. He rents a room in Amalfi.

There he meets Beate, with whom he falls in love and with whom he also sleeps. However, after he tells her a story that he told his little daughter back then, she is shocked and doesn't want to see him anymore. When Petter is back in his room, he rhymes that Beate is his daughter, whom he hasn't seen for years, and that it was she who wrote the novels that are based on his ideas. “Meter” is still with him, forcing him to write down a traumatic experience of his childhood that sparked the fantasy of “Meter”. After that, "meter" disappears forever. Finally, the next day, Petter meets Beate for the last time. The end remains open.

language

The entire story is written from a first-person perspective, which allows an in-depth look into Petter's clear, albeit unusual, thoughts and feelings.

The narrator looks back over large parts of the story, but does not stick strictly to the chronology of the events (for example, it is mentioned before the story with Beate that things are not going well), which can easily confuse an inexperienced reader.