Trying and Failing

With his novel Trying and Failing, Jan Grue completes an exceptional trilogy about disability and vulnerability. [...] Masterfully, Grue exposes the illusion that we all, even in Norway, have something within our reach that even comes close to resembling an equal life. [...] With Trying and Failing, Grue affectingly demonstrates how complicated challenges for the disabled can really be – and how deeply problematic it is to pigeonhole people.

... the final pages convey a universal wisdom that is so profound and appears to be so hard-earned that it’s worth the entire book.

Formidable literary art. [...] Trying and Failing is a glittering crown on professor and author Jan Grue’s three works about disability, feelings of alienation and related challenges. [...] The book is alternately solemn and humorous, and thoroughly well written – and particularly well composed. Grue neither tries nor fails. He reigns.

… highly engrossing reading. Jan Grue has written a wise and perceptive book, interspersed with fitting doses of dark and cutting humour, in which his eye for structures and systems doesn’t come at the expense of the people it is about.

One of the key features of the book, which points back towards Grue’s earlier works of fiction inspired by American postmodernism, is that it switches between a number of different text types (film script, interview transcript, pseudoplatonic dialogue, realistic novel prose, and more). Here the narrative voice is more than sufficiently smart and playful for this switching to become a living textual whole in which the author also has the opportunity to present mutually contradictory perspectives on the wheelchair experience in a way that would appear too chaotic in non-fiction. Along the way all possible weaknesses and pitfalls are met with jabs of self-deprecation (such as when empathy-creating possibilities of the realistic novel are dissected in the middle of a novel with an abundance of realistic, empathy-creating passages).This makes Trying and Failing a book that is fun and intellectually stimulating to read [...] The Jan Grue we meet in essay form comes across as a polite and rather cautious type. At the same time he shows us that such politeness is not unproblematic in the face of a majority culture that often overlooks or actively averts its gaze from the wheelchair user and his political demands. In Trying and Failing, Grue allows more room for wrath – a fact that acquires particular force in the many (and wonderfully inconclusive) discussions about foetal diagnostics, eugenics and ‘selective abortion as a slow form of genocide’. [...] As in the essays, the novel’s finest moments are when Grue relates most tangibly and vulnerably the wheelchair’s encroachments on the little things. It is particularly effective when passages about practical chores become long and wordy and verbose and as such urge the kind of slowness that life imposes on Magne himself.