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The Exception
An internationally bestselling thriller, The Exception dissects the nature of evil and the paranoia that drives ordinary people to commit unthinkable acts. Four women work together for a small nonprofit in Copenhagen that disseminates information on genocide. When two of them receive death threats, they immediately believe that they are being stalked by Mirko Zigic, the Serbian torturer and war criminal they recently profiled in their articles. Yet as tensions mount among the women, their suspicions turn away from Zigic and toward each other. The threats increase, and soon the office becomes a battlefield in which each of the women's move is suspect.
514 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2004
68 people are currently reading
2670 people want to read
About the author
Christian Jungersen
16 books91 followersChristian Jungersen is a Danish author now resident in Dublin, Ireland, and New York City. He is the author of three prize-winning and bestselling novels.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 286 reviews
May 23, 2021
i'm frequently torn, when rating books, between rating based on merit, or rating based on my enjoyment. this is probably a three-star book, merit-wise. and yet i got totally sucked into it and really enjoyed it, despite its flaws. it's a very well-paced thriller that requires a certain suspension of disbelief but it was intriguing enough that my desire to finish reading it has made my thanskgiving feast delayed by three hours, so...
come to my blog!
come to my blog!
February 11, 2021
Kötülük doğar mı yoksa yaratılır mı ve ortalama bir insan doğru koşullar altında bu çizgiyi geçmeye ne kadar yakın?
Yazar, kötülüğün mikro ve makro ölçekli yapısını hem soykırım gibi gerçekten dehşet verici bir konu üzerinden hem de kişilerarası ilişkiler gibi çok daha küçük olaylar üzerinden bizlere sunmuş.
Aynı ofiste çalışan dört kadının birbirine uyguladığı taciz ve manipülasyonları ve diğer yandan soykırım tarihinin korkunç ayrıntılarını okumak sağlam sinir istiyor.
Son olarak o kadar çok beğendim ki tüm çeviri ve yazım hatalarını göz ardı edip yazarın bir başka kitabını daha hemen sipariş verdim:) keyifli okumalar.
Yazar, kötülüğün mikro ve makro ölçekli yapısını hem soykırım gibi gerçekten dehşet verici bir konu üzerinden hem de kişilerarası ilişkiler gibi çok daha küçük olaylar üzerinden bizlere sunmuş.
Aynı ofiste çalışan dört kadının birbirine uyguladığı taciz ve manipülasyonları ve diğer yandan soykırım tarihinin korkunç ayrıntılarını okumak sağlam sinir istiyor.
Son olarak o kadar çok beğendim ki tüm çeviri ve yazım hatalarını göz ardı edip yazarın bir başka kitabını daha hemen sipariş verdim:) keyifli okumalar.
November 11, 2021
A book about evil and bullying at the working place. But at the same time a book about so much more. Definitely worth a read!
January 6, 2016
What a book. The sort of book you walk away from disoriented. It isn't just physically heavy at 512 pages (though weightless on Kindle), it's also heavy in every other sense of the word. Such a deceptively simple story about inner strife of a small office spun into such a powerhouse of psychological suspense. Four women working in a center for information on genocide turn their lives into a Sartre style nightmare, subtly, slowly turning their office and personal lives into a psychological battlefield spiraling toward an inevitable tragedy. That's a basic summary and it oversimplifies the plot. The real genius of this book is in the juxtaposition of the evil on grand scale and one of a small contained environment. The macro and micro of evil in principle. Can a person overcome their pathologies as presupposed (predetermined) by various psychological standards and become an exception to the rules? Is evil born or created and how close is an average person to crossing that line under the right circumstances? Subject that has long fascinated me, one I studied, social psychology and all its implications, whether explaining something genuinely horrifying like genocide or a much smaller event such as interpersonal relationships. Jungersen took all the concepts, terms and research of social psychology and applied them so astutely, so cleverly to the book's protagonists and their actions...it's practically a textbook on the topic, although one with a suspense thriller motive thrown in. The book is told from four different perspectives of its heroines and at no point are you exactly sure of what's going on, because, of course, we can only know so much of another person and as the truth is slowly revealed, it stands a good chance of blowing your mind. This is why we read, isn't it? To be engaged, moved, surprised, entertained, educated, stunned even, to try to understand others. Well, this books offers all of it, although it isn't easy to get through, isn't always fun, far from light and might cause severe distrust of others or at least reconfigure your estimation of humankind. Fascinating book, a bestseller in Europe, well deserved of any praise. Absolutely worth the time and effort. Highly recommended.
March 31, 2022
Danimarkalı yazar Jungersen’le tanışma kitabım oldu ‘İstisna’. Tek kelimeyle ba-yıl-dım. Kopenhag’da soykırım araştırmaları merkezinde çalışan 4 kadın arasındaki nefes kesen yüksek gerilimi, arka planda soykırım tarihi eşliğinde okuyoruz. (Meseleye Türkiye’nin de dahil edilmesi dikkat çeken bir detaydı) İş hayatında karşılaşılan negatif durumları, mobbing’i, kötücüllüğü, bencillik ve bireyselliği, inanılmaz incelikli ve derin işlemesine hayran kaldım, okurken psikolojik açıdan yer yer zorlansam da bir o kadar keyif aldım. Karakterleri, gerilimi, kurgusu ve bilhassa sonu muazzamdı. 700 sayfa olmasına rağmen akıp gitti kitap. Kötülük üzerine okuduğum en etkileyici romanlardan biriydi. Çeviride tercih edilen ‘yaptıydım’ gibi kullanımlar ve yazım yanlışlarını saymazsak kusursuz bir metindi. “Bu kitap galiba bende bir defteri kapatacak” demiştim bir arkadaşıma, öyle de oldu; defter kapandı, müthiş bir final oldu... Herkese tavsiye ederim.
August 30, 2007
(The much longer full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)
"Ignoring the small flash of doubt in yourself -- that is what evil is. Nobody thinks of himself as evil, but that deception is part of evil's nature. And you can't lie to yourself all the time. Once in awhile, there's that moment when you question if you are doing the right thing. And that's your only chance to choose what is good, to do the right thing. And the moment lasts maybe fifteen minutes every other month, maybe less."
The little lesson about life quoted above is something a lot of us (especially Americans) are starting to realize more and more; that the root of what we traditionally call "evil" lies not in the cartoonish villainy we've assigned over the decades to such groups as the Nazis and the Klan, but rather in the small everyday lapses in ethics all of us commit regularly, which when multiplied by millions is what leads to things like Hitler, Franco, Stalin, Bush, etc. "Evil" is when we see something happening that we know is ethically wrong, but turn a blind eye towards because it's easier to do so; evil is when we overreact, when we rush to judgment, when we affect a self-righteous tone, when we abuse whatever tiny little amount of power any of us might have in our particular lives. It is something we're all guilty of, that none of us ever think we're guilty of ourselves, but when multiplied by an entire society is what leads us into the grand messes of both the world and of history.
And perhaps the guiltiest parties of all, or so argues Danish novelist Christian Jungersen in his brilliant new book The Exception, are those who believe they could never be guilty in the first place -- radical liberals, for example, humanitarians, those from pacifist countries -- because it is these people precisely who are blundering through such small evil acts without ever acknowledging them, without recognizing them for what they are. it's a fascinating and controversial thing for someone in Jungersen's position to posit, which is what has made Jungersen a fascinating and controversial author in his native Denmark; for Denmark, you see, has a long and proud tradition of pacifism and humanitarianism, including being one of the only countries on the planet during the Nazi era to officially and publicly harbor Jews. As a result, or at least according to Jungersen, there is now a certain amount of "liberal haughtiness" inherent in the Danish national character...
"Ignoring the small flash of doubt in yourself -- that is what evil is. Nobody thinks of himself as evil, but that deception is part of evil's nature. And you can't lie to yourself all the time. Once in awhile, there's that moment when you question if you are doing the right thing. And that's your only chance to choose what is good, to do the right thing. And the moment lasts maybe fifteen minutes every other month, maybe less."
The little lesson about life quoted above is something a lot of us (especially Americans) are starting to realize more and more; that the root of what we traditionally call "evil" lies not in the cartoonish villainy we've assigned over the decades to such groups as the Nazis and the Klan, but rather in the small everyday lapses in ethics all of us commit regularly, which when multiplied by millions is what leads to things like Hitler, Franco, Stalin, Bush, etc. "Evil" is when we see something happening that we know is ethically wrong, but turn a blind eye towards because it's easier to do so; evil is when we overreact, when we rush to judgment, when we affect a self-righteous tone, when we abuse whatever tiny little amount of power any of us might have in our particular lives. It is something we're all guilty of, that none of us ever think we're guilty of ourselves, but when multiplied by an entire society is what leads us into the grand messes of both the world and of history.
And perhaps the guiltiest parties of all, or so argues Danish novelist Christian Jungersen in his brilliant new book The Exception, are those who believe they could never be guilty in the first place -- radical liberals, for example, humanitarians, those from pacifist countries -- because it is these people precisely who are blundering through such small evil acts without ever acknowledging them, without recognizing them for what they are. it's a fascinating and controversial thing for someone in Jungersen's position to posit, which is what has made Jungersen a fascinating and controversial author in his native Denmark; for Denmark, you see, has a long and proud tradition of pacifism and humanitarianism, including being one of the only countries on the planet during the Nazi era to officially and publicly harbor Jews. As a result, or at least according to Jungersen, there is now a certain amount of "liberal haughtiness" inherent in the Danish national character...
June 26, 2008
Note to author: Most women do not act like those really awful 13-year-olds you encountered in middle school. Get over it.
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I was assigned this book by my adviser for an independent study. All I had to do was read it - not write anything, and I was happy about that. However, now that I'm not required to do any more academic writing, and no one is really "listening," I feel compelled to put in my two cents. I know - ironic.
In short, I am NOT a fan of this book. The basic premise is interesting: looking at how the small, daily acts of evil people commit against each other relate to the huge atrocities of genocide. If the author had focused on that idea more directly, it might have been a fairly good book. Instead, he created four female characters who had nothing better to do than act extremely paranoid, catty, self-righteous, and/or victimized in order to illustrate his point. Based on his characterization, I have to assume he has some fairly misogynistic attitudes. Sure, he gives each woman reasons for doing what she's doing to the others, but that doesn't make any of them good people. The only significant (but still peripheral) male characters are fairly reasonable people, who do nothing other than stand in contrast to these four awful women. Well, there is one evil guy, but he's the Bad Guy, so what do you expect? All-in-all, not a good jumping-off point for me.
I think, somewhat like in The Crying of Lot 49, the author is trying to use the plot to provide the emotional experience of an intellectual argument. This argument is that quotidian evil acts sometimes incidentally converge to create the horrors of genocide. In parallel, the plot is the result of a few bad choices fitting together in just the wrong way, causing all hell to break loose. I get the argument about genocide, but it made the plot completely unlikely.
I guess, all told, it's an interesting intellectual exercise, but it all comes down to a fundamental difference in perspective between my adviser and me. He is interested in what motivates people to be evil, so as to prevent it. I am interested in what motivates people to be good, so as to promote it. Figure out what camp you're in, then take my review with a grain of salt.
-------
I was assigned this book by my adviser for an independent study. All I had to do was read it - not write anything, and I was happy about that. However, now that I'm not required to do any more academic writing, and no one is really "listening," I feel compelled to put in my two cents. I know - ironic.
In short, I am NOT a fan of this book. The basic premise is interesting: looking at how the small, daily acts of evil people commit against each other relate to the huge atrocities of genocide. If the author had focused on that idea more directly, it might have been a fairly good book. Instead, he created four female characters who had nothing better to do than act extremely paranoid, catty, self-righteous, and/or victimized in order to illustrate his point. Based on his characterization, I have to assume he has some fairly misogynistic attitudes. Sure, he gives each woman reasons for doing what she's doing to the others, but that doesn't make any of them good people. The only significant (but still peripheral) male characters are fairly reasonable people, who do nothing other than stand in contrast to these four awful women. Well, there is one evil guy, but he's the Bad Guy, so what do you expect? All-in-all, not a good jumping-off point for me.
I think, somewhat like in The Crying of Lot 49, the author is trying to use the plot to provide the emotional experience of an intellectual argument. This argument is that quotidian evil acts sometimes incidentally converge to create the horrors of genocide. In parallel, the plot is the result of a few bad choices fitting together in just the wrong way, causing all hell to break loose. I get the argument about genocide, but it made the plot completely unlikely.
I guess, all told, it's an interesting intellectual exercise, but it all comes down to a fundamental difference in perspective between my adviser and me. He is interested in what motivates people to be evil, so as to prevent it. I am interested in what motivates people to be good, so as to promote it. Figure out what camp you're in, then take my review with a grain of salt.
April 19, 2024
Kopenhag’da Soykırım Araştırmaları Merkezinde çalışan dört kadın: Iben, Malene, Anne-Lise ve Camilla. Bir gün, Iben, Malene ve Camilla isimsiz tehdit emailleri alırlar. Bununla ilgili polis soruşturması başlar. Merkezin yayınlarını incelediklerinde uluslararası savaş suçlusu bir Sırptan şüphelenirler. Sonrasında kendi aralarında yaşadıkları gerilim yüzünden birbirlerinden şüphelenmeye başlarlar. Bu arada birbirlerine yaptıkları, özellikle Anne-Lise’ye uyguladıkları mobbing merkezdeki tansiyonu yükseltir.
Bu dört kadının iç dünyaları ve sorunlarıyla, aldıkları tehditler birleşince ortaya psikolojik bir gerilim romanı çıkmış. Roman dördünün bilinç düzeyinden anlatılıyor ve her bölümde farklı olasılıklara yöneliyor okuyucu. Sonuna kadar gerilim ve gizemin devam ettiği güzel bir psikolojik roman. Danimarka’da bir sivil toplum örgütünde mobbing varsa Türkiye’de kar amaçlı organizasyonlarda nasıl olmasın diyor insan. Bireysellik ve bencilliğin insanı getirdiği nokta çok çarpıcı.
Sürpriz bir sonla ve sorularla bırakıyor okuyucuyu, insan beyni ve psikolojisinin karmaşıklığı konusunda.
Bu dört kadının iç dünyaları ve sorunlarıyla, aldıkları tehditler birleşince ortaya psikolojik bir gerilim romanı çıkmış. Roman dördünün bilinç düzeyinden anlatılıyor ve her bölümde farklı olasılıklara yöneliyor okuyucu. Sonuna kadar gerilim ve gizemin devam ettiği güzel bir psikolojik roman. Danimarka’da bir sivil toplum örgütünde mobbing varsa Türkiye’de kar amaçlı organizasyonlarda nasıl olmasın diyor insan. Bireysellik ve bencilliğin insanı getirdiği nokta çok çarpıcı.
Sürpriz bir sonla ve sorularla bırakıyor okuyucuyu, insan beyni ve psikolojisinin karmaşıklığı konusunda.
August 15, 2008
Normally, if a book hasn't engaged me in the first 50 pages, I'll set it aside. Life's too short for bad books. I don't know why, exactly, I made an exception for The Exception. The first 400 of its 500 pages embeds you in the inner life of four pathetic, slightly deranged women who all work in the same office – all of whom are obsessed with the tedious minutiae of their work life. Toward the end the story shifts into an awful parody of a late-night TV police serial, complete with hideous cartoon villains and improbable escapes.
The only thing I can say in its favor is its absurdly bleak set-up. The women work in a center dedicated to research on genocide. One even edits a journal called Genocide News (no kidding) and we're treated to pages of ponderous extracts. It's only fitting that after torturing the reader with their empty lives for 500 pages, none of them ends up with much of a life at all. I can only guess that the author has a very droll sense of humor indeed.
Recommended only if you have lots of aquavit on hand.
The only thing I can say in its favor is its absurdly bleak set-up. The women work in a center dedicated to research on genocide. One even edits a journal called Genocide News (no kidding) and we're treated to pages of ponderous extracts. It's only fitting that after torturing the reader with their empty lives for 500 pages, none of them ends up with much of a life at all. I can only guess that the author has a very droll sense of humor indeed.
Recommended only if you have lots of aquavit on hand.
September 14, 2020
Bu sene okumakta bitirmekte en zorlandığım kitap.
Hem hacmi hem de içeriği o kadar derin ki! Hakkını vermediğimden çok eminim, bir defa daha okunmayı hakediyor.
Özellikle suçlu psikolojisi, insanlık suçları, soykırımlar üzerine bir merakınız varsa hşç kaçırmayın.
Aslında kitap 4 yıldız da hakederdi fakat Ayrıntı yayınlarının beni dehşete düşüren baskı ve dizgi, redaksiyon hataları sebebiyle 2,5 tan 3 veriyorum.
Her bir paragraf üzerine durur düşünürüm, araştırırım belki kendime sorar cevabı bulurum derseniz ısrarla okuyun derim. Ama kesin söyleyebilirim ki herkese göre değil.
Keyifli okumalar!
Hem hacmi hem de içeriği o kadar derin ki! Hakkını vermediğimden çok eminim, bir defa daha okunmayı hakediyor.
Özellikle suçlu psikolojisi, insanlık suçları, soykırımlar üzerine bir merakınız varsa hşç kaçırmayın.
Aslında kitap 4 yıldız da hakederdi fakat Ayrıntı yayınlarının beni dehşete düşüren baskı ve dizgi, redaksiyon hataları sebebiyle 2,5 tan 3 veriyorum.
Her bir paragraf üzerine durur düşünürüm, araştırırım belki kendime sorar cevabı bulurum derseniz ısrarla okuyun derim. Ama kesin söyleyebilirim ki herkese göre değil.
Keyifli okumalar!
July 24, 2025
Danca’dan İç ve Doğu Anadolu’nun kırsal bölgelerinin ağzıyla çeviri yapmayı oldukça iddialı ve komik buldum. Bir anda hortlayan ikilemeli geçmiş zaman kipleri, ısının kubbelendiği şu kavurucu yaz günlerinde bünyemde sinir bozukluğuna sebep oldu ve her -diydi eki gördüğümde kitap elimde civalaşırken bastım kahkahayı. Kıps kıps. Sözüm sayın çevirmenimize, havası yılın büyük bir bölümünde serin ve rüzgârlı diye (n-alaka?), bisiklet kullanmanın norm gibi bir şey olduğu Kopenhag’ın göbeğinde “çekmediydi, okudun muydu, dediydi” şeklinde konuşan bir "yerli" olduğuna ikna olamayız. O kişi olsa olsa leblebinin başkenti, müstesna bir şehirlimizdir, deriz.
Gayet akıcı olacak bir roman, çeviri ve editoryal sorunlarla uzuuuun ve sancılı bir eziyete dönüştü. Puanım ve isyanımın azizliğine uğrayan bu edisyonu morseverlerlerler evinde bir dekor ürünü olarak kullanabilirlerlerler.
“tısını çıkarmak” means 🥴
Gayet akıcı olacak bir roman, çeviri ve editoryal sorunlarla uzuuuun ve sancılı bir eziyete dönüştü. Puanım ve isyanımın azizliğine uğrayan bu edisyonu morseverlerlerler evinde bir dekor ürünü olarak kullanabilirlerlerler.
“tısını çıkarmak” means 🥴
December 27, 2023
Soykırım araştıma merkezinde çalışan dört kadın merkezinde şekillenen bir roman.
İnsanın seçimleriyle, öğrenmişlikleriyle ya da zorlu bir durum karşısında nasıl sınırlarını değiştirdiğine şahit oluyoruz. En basit anlamdan en kötü anlama kadar.
Genel hatlarıyla yavaş yavaş konunun gelişmesi, yayılması, olay örgüsünün tam yerinde dağıtılıp bilgiye dönmesi, emin olamadığımız o son derken ve bu kısımlarda sürekli bir seçim yapmaya sürüklemesinin kaçınılmaz olarak hissedilmesiyle gerçekten çok çok güzeldi.
Benim bu yıl okuduğum en iyi kitaplardan ve sanıyorum okuyan birileriyle konuşması gerçekten çok keyifli olabilecek kitaplardan.
İnsanın seçimleriyle, öğrenmişlikleriyle ya da zorlu bir durum karşısında nasıl sınırlarını değiştirdiğine şahit oluyoruz. En basit anlamdan en kötü anlama kadar.
Genel hatlarıyla yavaş yavaş konunun gelişmesi, yayılması, olay örgüsünün tam yerinde dağıtılıp bilgiye dönmesi, emin olamadığımız o son derken ve bu kısımlarda sürekli bir seçim yapmaya sürüklemesinin kaçınılmaz olarak hissedilmesiyle gerçekten çok çok güzeldi.
Benim bu yıl okuduğum en iyi kitaplardan ve sanıyorum okuyan birileriyle konuşması gerçekten çok keyifli olabilecek kitaplardan.
July 28, 2023
Ovo je jedan nikakav triler što se tiče klasičnih trilerskih osobina. Razvučen, neuverljiv, neuzbudljiv, s jednodimenzionalnim, antipatičnim junakinjama... Ipak ima interesantan osnovni zaplet - u nevladinoj organizaciji koja se bavi izučavanjem i arhiviranjem materijala o genocidima, zaposlene surovo maltretiraju koleginicu. Dočarana kancelarijska atmosfera nam razotkriva “toplu vodu” - kako je zlo, avaj, rasprostanjeno i među malim ljudima, a poremećeni umovi često se kriju upravo ispod demokratske/mirotvoračke/uljudne maske politike dobrih namera.
Pisac se temeljno pripremio tako da je roman solidno informativan na temu prirode genocida kao zločina i to mu je najveći plus. Čitalac se upućuje kako na razmišljanje o različitim aspektima ratnih zločina, tako i na korisnu sekundarnu literaturu o ovoj materija.
Narativno, mnogo se htelo. Knjiga je predugačka, autorov ambiciozni pristup je ugušio radnju, te je epilog roman koji je što se rapleta tiče - konfuzan, a ukupno i dosadan za čitanje.
Pisac se temeljno pripremio tako da je roman solidno informativan na temu prirode genocida kao zločina i to mu je najveći plus. Čitalac se upućuje kako na razmišljanje o različitim aspektima ratnih zločina, tako i na korisnu sekundarnu literaturu o ovoj materija.
Narativno, mnogo se htelo. Knjiga je predugačka, autorov ambiciozni pristup je ugušio radnju, te je epilog roman koji je što se rapleta tiče - konfuzan, a ukupno i dosadan za čitanje.
March 2, 2009
i wish i could give this book only a half a star, but that doesn't seem to be possible...it's unspeakably bad. and the only reason i would give it half a star is that it provoked me and i do believe that books should provoke us in some way.
there are two messages to this book:
1. all women are psychotic.
2. bullying in the workplace will get you everything you want.
this seems like it was written by a man who had a string of bad girlfriends who he wanted revenge upon, so he wrote them up as the four nastiest types he could conceive, all with a completely psychotic inner life (which he subjects us to in turn) going on under a surface that is otherwise quite normal. the most self-righteous, self-absorbed, most evil one of the lot is the one who gets everything her way in the end. there is no redemption and no good comes of reading this book.
run from it like the wind.
and on top of it, the english translation of it is absolute rubbish. but the book is no better in the original danish (i switched between the two the whole way and compared them in many places). life is too short for bad books...
there are two messages to this book:
1. all women are psychotic.
2. bullying in the workplace will get you everything you want.
this seems like it was written by a man who had a string of bad girlfriends who he wanted revenge upon, so he wrote them up as the four nastiest types he could conceive, all with a completely psychotic inner life (which he subjects us to in turn) going on under a surface that is otherwise quite normal. the most self-righteous, self-absorbed, most evil one of the lot is the one who gets everything her way in the end. there is no redemption and no good comes of reading this book.
run from it like the wind.
and on top of it, the english translation of it is absolute rubbish. but the book is no better in the original danish (i switched between the two the whole way and compared them in many places). life is too short for bad books...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 8, 2023
3.5 stars. Engaging but I was still distracted by some of the leaps in logic these characters kept making. I know this was written in 2008, but getting a death threat via email and them immediately assuming someone is actually making a credible plan to kill you is wild to me.
December 20, 2007
This is a top-notch, meaty psychological thriller that takes you inside a small office dedicated to research into genocide. There, the five office workers simultaneously dig into the very nature of evil as they study the most inhumane acts ever perpetrated, while they quietly destroy each other's lives with office politics and interpersonal bullying. Buried not-so-deep beneath the surface of even the seemingly closest friendships and politest collegiality apparently lurks seething resentments that rival those of genocidal maniacs.
At the Copenhagen office of the genocide research center, Iben and Malene, best friends, each receives an anonymous email death threat that they initially assume was sent by a Serbian war criminal they have published about. When the director's secretary also gets one, but not the much despised secretary, Anne-Lise, Iben and Malene begin to suspect that Anne-Lise is out to seek revenge for their teasing and ostracism.
Told alternately from the perspectives of the four women in the office, the story is both weighty and taut, with the reader becoming drawn into the increasingly paranoid and claustrophobic intimacy among them. Anyone who has ever worked in an office will recognize the way tiny gestures take on intense meaning in those confines. Even at the story's climax, when things become a little more standard-thriller, the truth can still go in a number of directions.
At the Copenhagen office of the genocide research center, Iben and Malene, best friends, each receives an anonymous email death threat that they initially assume was sent by a Serbian war criminal they have published about. When the director's secretary also gets one, but not the much despised secretary, Anne-Lise, Iben and Malene begin to suspect that Anne-Lise is out to seek revenge for their teasing and ostracism.
Told alternately from the perspectives of the four women in the office, the story is both weighty and taut, with the reader becoming drawn into the increasingly paranoid and claustrophobic intimacy among them. Anyone who has ever worked in an office will recognize the way tiny gestures take on intense meaning in those confines. Even at the story's climax, when things become a little more standard-thriller, the truth can still go in a number of directions.
October 24, 2010
Sometimes, characters in fully formed television worlds watch their own television, which is a device to comment on the events in the television show, and on the television show itself; you know, meta-TV. This book uses articles about genocide as the TV show inside the TV show, to comment on and help explain the actions in the novel, which is set in the fictional Danish Center for Information on Genocide.
The narrative is almost exclusively third-person limited, but it alternates between the employees of the DCIG, so you never feel like you have "all the facts," and the way Jungersen drops the reader in media res, you never feel like you know enough about "what happened before." As though there are "facts," it's ridiculous. It laughs at the idea of fact. Reading just the story as closely and analytically as you can, drawing sure conclusions is impossible. When you read one woman's section, her experiences make sense, even while you remember what the other women were thinking and feeling about the same events, and you don't know who is in the right.
Because I feel like The Exception wants you to choose. The genocide articles are worked smoothly into the narrative, and of course they're shocking and horrifying, but they also force you to consider the narrative in light of their various theses. What did this genocide demonstrate about human behavior? And then back you go into the story, and everyone is either acting weirder or perceiving everyone else as acting weirder; this concept could have been really instructive and precious, but it's quite sophisticated and intelligently done, I think.
I can't say much more without mentioning any plot points, and that'd be a terrible shame, not to get to read this cold. It's just so good, so strange and creepy, unlike anything I've read in a while. I can't recommend it highly enough. I want to wait a few months and read it again.
The narrative is almost exclusively third-person limited, but it alternates between the employees of the DCIG, so you never feel like you have "all the facts," and the way Jungersen drops the reader in media res, you never feel like you know enough about "what happened before." As though there are "facts," it's ridiculous. It laughs at the idea of fact. Reading just the story as closely and analytically as you can, drawing sure conclusions is impossible. When you read one woman's section, her experiences make sense, even while you remember what the other women were thinking and feeling about the same events, and you don't know who is in the right.
Because I feel like The Exception wants you to choose. The genocide articles are worked smoothly into the narrative, and of course they're shocking and horrifying, but they also force you to consider the narrative in light of their various theses. What did this genocide demonstrate about human behavior? And then back you go into the story, and everyone is either acting weirder or perceiving everyone else as acting weirder; this concept could have been really instructive and precious, but it's quite sophisticated and intelligently done, I think.
I can't say much more without mentioning any plot points, and that'd be a terrible shame, not to get to read this cold. It's just so good, so strange and creepy, unlike anything I've read in a while. I can't recommend it highly enough. I want to wait a few months and read it again.
January 18, 2025
İnsanın karanlık tarafları ile toplumların yıkıcı davranışlarının iç içe geçtiği sürükleyici bir kitap okumuş oldum.
Edebi yönden zayıftı, hatta çoğu yerdeki "geldiydim, gittiydim" yüklemleri sanıyorum çevirmenin doğal Türkçesinden. Ama, konunun hatırına yazarın diğer iki kitabındaki kadar rahatsız olmadım. Soykırım merkezinde çalışan dört kadının savaş suçlarına sebep olan şiddetin kaynağını araştırırken kendi aralarında birbirlerine uyguladıkları mobbing şunu gösteriyor ki: Küçük ölçekli bireysel çatışmalar ile büyük ölçekli toplumsal felaketler arasında temelde bir fark yok; her ikisi de aynı karanlık motivasyonların ürünü.
Edebi yönden zayıftı, hatta çoğu yerdeki "geldiydim, gittiydim" yüklemleri sanıyorum çevirmenin doğal Türkçesinden. Ama, konunun hatırına yazarın diğer iki kitabındaki kadar rahatsız olmadım. Soykırım merkezinde çalışan dört kadının savaş suçlarına sebep olan şiddetin kaynağını araştırırken kendi aralarında birbirlerine uyguladıkları mobbing şunu gösteriyor ki: Küçük ölçekli bireysel çatışmalar ile büyük ölçekli toplumsal felaketler arasında temelde bir fark yok; her ikisi de aynı karanlık motivasyonların ürünü.
February 6, 2012
I really struggled through this book. I wanted to like it, to get into the subject matter and what the author was trying to say.but there were a lot of problems with it. First, it was translated from Danish and that just didn't work. It was very choppy, without flow. I hope it was better in its original language. Second, there was a lot of repetition. A lot. Really. Third, and probably the worst defect is that the characters were, well, hideous. Women who are competent professionals, with incredibly responsible jobs, in a serious non-profit center focused on genocide research - who act like seventh-graders to each other and in their personal life. Written by a male, it really smacked of sexism in the way the characters were drawn. Fourth, there was a lot in the book that just didn't need to be there. And, finally, fifth - the plot just didn't come together for me and didn't make up for the other flaws. I give myself a A for perseverance for finishing it; a D for my time management skills while reading it.
Read
February 7, 2018Mixing fiction and nonfiction
This is an interesting, memorable book. It's about women who work in a genocide research center. They write reports on evil, genocide, and other subjects, and then we read what they've written, embedded in the novel. What matters in this book is the extremely unusual mixture of fiction and nonfiction. The facts in those reports are all real; I learned, for example, about theories of evil in the Third Reich beginning with Arendt and continuing to the present.
But then between the reports, the fictional researchers continue to do evil to one another. It's a very effective device.
I met Jungersen in Copenhagen; he said he wrote intuitively, and he had little to add. I don't believe artists who claim they are intuitive: it's an easy out when it comes to public relations. I hope he changes his attitude to his own work.
(The book ends weakly, with a chapter ripped from (or written for) a Hollywood screenplay.)
This is an interesting, memorable book. It's about women who work in a genocide research center. They write reports on evil, genocide, and other subjects, and then we read what they've written, embedded in the novel. What matters in this book is the extremely unusual mixture of fiction and nonfiction. The facts in those reports are all real; I learned, for example, about theories of evil in the Third Reich beginning with Arendt and continuing to the present.
But then between the reports, the fictional researchers continue to do evil to one another. It's a very effective device.
I met Jungersen in Copenhagen; he said he wrote intuitively, and he had little to add. I don't believe artists who claim they are intuitive: it's an easy out when it comes to public relations. I hope he changes his attitude to his own work.
(The book ends weakly, with a chapter ripped from (or written for) a Hollywood screenplay.)
September 26, 2007
Being as it's very educational for a novel, this book depressed the fuck out of me, and my view of humanity still has not fully recovered from reading it. The best parts were the sections on actual genocide, and the actual story and characters took awhile to engage me, but they eventually did. It's interesting to learn about the calm, stoic Danish people and their way of life, which evidently involves Scandinavian furniture, a terrible job market, being stalked by Serbian war criminals, and quietly torturing their havarti-munching coworkers.
August 12, 2009
First I could not put it down....now a day later I finished all 500 pages and can't stop thinking about it. A great read....not a comfortable read, but well worth it. Not an easy subject...but a very satisfying read. How many times do we think we are so "right" when our actions indicate otherwise?
December 14, 2008
Christian Jungersen’s The Exception is a gripping psychological thriller that dissects the perversions of human nature with a scalpel. Stitched into the narrative are studies on the nature of evil and accounts of real historical genocide, documenting patterns of savagery and entitlement that Jungersen then deftly reproduces in his characters. A recipient of the Danish Radio and Golden Laurels Prizes, nominee of literary awards throughout Europe, and New York Times Editor’s Pick, The Exception is a thought-provoking, tightly wound whodunit that lingers with the reader long after the book’s conclusion. Pity, then, that it’s also a clunky, sexist hackjob that, while getting the psychology of evil chillingly right, gets the psychiatry of its characters dangerously wrong.
The Exception centers on four women, coworkers at the nonprofit Danish Center for Information on Genocide, who begin to receive anonymous death threats. Their camaraderie soon devolves into a frenzy of accusations and scapegoating. Everyone is a suspect. Iben and Malene are best friends and romantic rivals. Anne-Lise is the office misfit who feels bullied by Iben and Malene. Camille shies away from the combustible office politics but has a torrid secret past that may implicate her in the threats.
Jungersen is at his best when jabbing at the hypocrisies of Western liberalism. He depicts the nonprofit world as one part hipster bacchanalia, two parts moral smugness—a keen and skewering observation that is conveyed with just the right amount of understatement. Early in the book, Iben finds herself speaking to a man who has abandoned his dream job, and its attendant financial insecurity, for a position in advertising. “Human rights and art,” he says, “great stuff but there’s no money in it.” Iben is incensed. She “jump[s] in and defends traditional values, such as ‘Money isn’t everything’ and ‘You can’t buy happiness,’” forcing him to justify not his profession but the very concept of remunerative employment. “In no time she realizes that this discussion is just a rerun of their old debates, as if they are all battle-worn politicians in the last days of an election campaign, able to predict their opponents’ arguments.”
Iben isn’t the only one intoxicated by moral superiority. The novel is determined to dismantle all delusions of moral grandeur. The four main characters each lay claim to innocence, even as they rationalize committing acts of increasing cruelty against each other—from petty lunchroom slights to outright assault. Meanwhile, their boss is engaged in a more systematic kind of duplicity, aligning himself with the country’s anti-immigration party in order to deny power to a rival board member, ultimately allowing the organization to become an instrument of the reactionary politics he claims to personally revile. There are also meaningful parallels between these characters and the Western world at large. When Iben “tries to concentrate on what a group of Dutch experts has written about Muslims in the southern Russian states,” her arrogance overlaps neatly with Western political arrogance—a Venn diagram of sanctimonies. The irony is delicious.
Interspersed throughout the novel are Iben’s fictional academic articles on the psychology of evil and the genocides in Bosnia and World War II Germany. Here we find Jungersen’s thesis: We—all of us—undermine our neighbors and our colleagues to acquire trivial advantages for ourselves, employing increasingly elaborate rationalizations to assure us of our rectitude. These acts are evil writ small, genocide in miniature. They are murder of the conscience, and with enough license, they become actual murder.
There is power in this argument, which explains The Exception’s enthusiastic reception. It raises important questions about the relationship between privilege and moral authority, and about the motives underlying liberal self-satisfaction. But this is also where the story begins to fall apart. A whodunit simply can’t end with every character equally culpable for the crime. So Jungersen undercuts his thesis with a twist ending that leaves one character as a literal martyr and another as a literal psychopath—embodiments of good and evil if ever there were. The Exception aspires to a moral calculus, but it achieves only arithmetic.
Even worse, Jungersen arrives at this unsavory conclusion by grossly misrepresenting the nature of mental illness. In order to designate a villain, he conflates a wide range of psychiatric disorders, implicating his evildoer first with an anxiety disorder, then with a split personality, and finally with antisocial behavior—as though common psychiatric illnesses can just flower effortlessly into psychopathy. It is a lazy trick to tidy up an unwieldy story, one that promotes a dangerous and outdated equivalency between mental illness and evil.
Worse still, Jungersen’s women all become obnoxious female stereotypes. Iben and Malene’s romantic rivalry is a Betty-and-Veronica frenemy cliché that borders on offensive. Camilla throws herself headlong into bad relationships, propelled by both her reckless libido and her reckless desire to please. And Anne-Lise is simply a hysteric who, at one point, must be restrained by her husband: “Anne-Lise runs around as a rush of thoughts overwhelms her. Why should I have believed they could bear to live with me? I’m bursting with evil thoughts…I must hit my face as hard as I can. I deserve to be punished because I’m a horrible wife. I’m a bad, bad mother.” Jungersen might have avoided this reductiveness if his writing wasn’t quite so childlike and expository. He (and his translator, Anna Paterson) use language as a tool of mere utility rather than art, and they treat The Exception as a novel of Big Ideas rather than one of nuanced storytelling.
I am saddened by the failure of Jungersen’s experiment (if the recipient of international accolades can be called a failure). His political philosophy is provocative but marred by inattention to story mechanics. Or alternatively, his story is an exhilarating psychological drama overburdened by politics. Either way, neither the ideas nor the story emerge intact. Iben, at one point, denounces “the lack of political awareness in American literature.” But when literature is done right, we shouldn’t see its political motives, much less be distracted by them. Subtlety is its own Big Idea.
The Exception centers on four women, coworkers at the nonprofit Danish Center for Information on Genocide, who begin to receive anonymous death threats. Their camaraderie soon devolves into a frenzy of accusations and scapegoating. Everyone is a suspect. Iben and Malene are best friends and romantic rivals. Anne-Lise is the office misfit who feels bullied by Iben and Malene. Camille shies away from the combustible office politics but has a torrid secret past that may implicate her in the threats.
Jungersen is at his best when jabbing at the hypocrisies of Western liberalism. He depicts the nonprofit world as one part hipster bacchanalia, two parts moral smugness—a keen and skewering observation that is conveyed with just the right amount of understatement. Early in the book, Iben finds herself speaking to a man who has abandoned his dream job, and its attendant financial insecurity, for a position in advertising. “Human rights and art,” he says, “great stuff but there’s no money in it.” Iben is incensed. She “jump[s] in and defends traditional values, such as ‘Money isn’t everything’ and ‘You can’t buy happiness,’” forcing him to justify not his profession but the very concept of remunerative employment. “In no time she realizes that this discussion is just a rerun of their old debates, as if they are all battle-worn politicians in the last days of an election campaign, able to predict their opponents’ arguments.”
Iben isn’t the only one intoxicated by moral superiority. The novel is determined to dismantle all delusions of moral grandeur. The four main characters each lay claim to innocence, even as they rationalize committing acts of increasing cruelty against each other—from petty lunchroom slights to outright assault. Meanwhile, their boss is engaged in a more systematic kind of duplicity, aligning himself with the country’s anti-immigration party in order to deny power to a rival board member, ultimately allowing the organization to become an instrument of the reactionary politics he claims to personally revile. There are also meaningful parallels between these characters and the Western world at large. When Iben “tries to concentrate on what a group of Dutch experts has written about Muslims in the southern Russian states,” her arrogance overlaps neatly with Western political arrogance—a Venn diagram of sanctimonies. The irony is delicious.
Interspersed throughout the novel are Iben’s fictional academic articles on the psychology of evil and the genocides in Bosnia and World War II Germany. Here we find Jungersen’s thesis: We—all of us—undermine our neighbors and our colleagues to acquire trivial advantages for ourselves, employing increasingly elaborate rationalizations to assure us of our rectitude. These acts are evil writ small, genocide in miniature. They are murder of the conscience, and with enough license, they become actual murder.
There is power in this argument, which explains The Exception’s enthusiastic reception. It raises important questions about the relationship between privilege and moral authority, and about the motives underlying liberal self-satisfaction. But this is also where the story begins to fall apart. A whodunit simply can’t end with every character equally culpable for the crime. So Jungersen undercuts his thesis with a twist ending that leaves one character as a literal martyr and another as a literal psychopath—embodiments of good and evil if ever there were. The Exception aspires to a moral calculus, but it achieves only arithmetic.
Even worse, Jungersen arrives at this unsavory conclusion by grossly misrepresenting the nature of mental illness. In order to designate a villain, he conflates a wide range of psychiatric disorders, implicating his evildoer first with an anxiety disorder, then with a split personality, and finally with antisocial behavior—as though common psychiatric illnesses can just flower effortlessly into psychopathy. It is a lazy trick to tidy up an unwieldy story, one that promotes a dangerous and outdated equivalency between mental illness and evil.
Worse still, Jungersen’s women all become obnoxious female stereotypes. Iben and Malene’s romantic rivalry is a Betty-and-Veronica frenemy cliché that borders on offensive. Camilla throws herself headlong into bad relationships, propelled by both her reckless libido and her reckless desire to please. And Anne-Lise is simply a hysteric who, at one point, must be restrained by her husband: “Anne-Lise runs around as a rush of thoughts overwhelms her. Why should I have believed they could bear to live with me? I’m bursting with evil thoughts…I must hit my face as hard as I can. I deserve to be punished because I’m a horrible wife. I’m a bad, bad mother.” Jungersen might have avoided this reductiveness if his writing wasn’t quite so childlike and expository. He (and his translator, Anna Paterson) use language as a tool of mere utility rather than art, and they treat The Exception as a novel of Big Ideas rather than one of nuanced storytelling.
I am saddened by the failure of Jungersen’s experiment (if the recipient of international accolades can be called a failure). His political philosophy is provocative but marred by inattention to story mechanics. Or alternatively, his story is an exhilarating psychological drama overburdened by politics. Either way, neither the ideas nor the story emerge intact. Iben, at one point, denounces “the lack of political awareness in American literature.” But when literature is done right, we shouldn’t see its political motives, much less be distracted by them. Subtlety is its own Big Idea.
November 14, 2019
Opin paljon sosiaalipsykologiasta ja pahuuden psykologiasta -- toivottavasti lukemaani voi luottaa! Lomassa hyvä ja vetävä tarina, mutta lopulta neljän naisen toimistodraama on turhan keskeisessä roolissa..
July 3, 2025
I happened across this book when searching for “office horror” novels; I was looking for a story that could articulate the quiet claustrophobia I’d been feeling in my own daily routines, something that mirrored the numbing panic of my days: the repetition, the weaponized AC, the hot desking wars, the fluorescent haze, the silence after someone laughs too loudly in a meeting. Hoping that somewhere, someone had transmuted that suffocating banality into narrative form; unfortunately, this was not it.
Imagine if The Office met Lord of the Flies but the characters are grown ass women that act like petty, gaslighting, high school drama queens. Welcome to Christian Jungersen’s The Exception, where women don’t break glass ceilings but gnaw on each other’s ankles beneath their ergonomic desks. The Exception (original title Undtagelsen and translated from the Danish by Anna Paterson) is a psychological thriller that explores the dark side of human nature; right within the confines of a modern office.
This book says: “Genocide? Sure, yeah it’s bad. But have you seen women gossip?!”
The novel centers on four women (Iben, Malene, Anne‑Lise, and Camilla), each carefully curated from the Discount Bin of Gender Tropes. There’s the Ice Queen, the Martyr, the Mouse, and the Pretty One. Set in a Copenhagen office devoted to the study of genocide, they turn their job into a psychological cage match.
When Iben and Malene begin receiving anonymous death threats, the immediate suspicion falls on Mirko Zigic, a Serbian war criminal recently exposed by their organization. As tension rises, the group’s internal dynamics unravel, and they start turning on each other.
There’s also one of the more memorable portrayals of women I’ve stumbled across in modern literature. Here’s one of a clinical psychologist named Grith:
Meet Grith, a clinical psychologist, but more importantly a tall, gangly enigma with “large, slightly droopy breasts.” Because obviously, that’s what you lead with when describing a medical professional.
Apparently, she has that body, y'know, the mythical one that ruins men's marriages, but only when she's not moving. What kind of women are the Danes into?! (I’m being cheeky; I might resemble this human stork myself, and in my experience, men mostly react with the enthusiasm of someone finding a weirdly shaped yam at the farmer’s market.)
Then, there’s the rational men; the walking Xanax in khakis, sipping their coffee, staring wistfully out windows, and existing solely to remind us that the world would be such a better place if women could just. calm. down!
Jungersen’s prose is okay. As is often the case, I’m inclined to view translated works with a degree of caution, aware that nuances (both linguistic and cultural) are frequently diminished or altered in the process of translation.
The writing is laden with description, and the narrative structure relies heavily on repetition, as key points are told and retold in multiple perspectives. Jungersen quotes Arendt, Milgram, Browning, Zimbardo and others with frequency, but instead of weaving these ideas into the sinew of the story, he presents them more like lecture slides. I found these disquisitions along with the tidbits on the multiple historical genocides (so many I wasn’t even aware of!) to be more interesting than the main storyline itself.
The women study genocide, yet remain blind to the cruelty within their own walls. This irony is not incidental; it is the novel’s sharpest mirror. The metaphor is caustic: knowledge does not protect us from cruelty; it may, in fact, distract us from it.
It is a potent metaphor, but Jungersen handles it with such literal-mindedness and pedagogical insistence that the novel buckles under its own self-seriousness. Every character is treated as a case study, every interaction a thesis statement. The women at the heart of the novel too often devolve into archetypes. Their inner lives are excavated at length, but what we find is more often redundancy than revelation.
The title, The Exception, is also a metaphor. It reflects the ways we see ourselves as outside the rules that bind others, as morally exempt. Each character believes they are the exception to the harm they inflict or enable.
The novel’s most conspicuous flaw, in my opinion, lies in its fascination with psychopathy (specifically dissociative identity disorder), a concept invoked with unnerving frequency and little nuance. The specter of the “psychopath” stalks the pages like a deus ex machina of evil; an irresistible, reductive shorthand for everything unfathomable or cruel. Jungersen is hardly the first to lean on such a trope; the literary marketplace is strewn with psychopaths, often more symbol than subject. But here, the term functions less as a tool of understanding and more as a cipher, a label that obliterates context, history, and ambiguity. We are meant to shudder, not to think.
The psychological dimensions of the story are at times, a troubling echo chamber of popularized science; flattening the complexity of human behavior into archetypes that feel more diagnostic than human. Jungersen gestures toward trauma psychology, mob behavior, and projection, but these concepts appear more as narrative conveniences than investigative tools. Workplace bullying, in this context, becomes less a sociocultural phenomenon and more an existential inevitability. The possibility that people might behave atrociously without recourse to grand psychological explanations is seldom entertained.
And yet, the most frustrating thing is not that the book fails outright, but that it flirts so persistently with success. There are moments (quiet, razor-sharp moments) when Jungersen captures something chilling and true about human frailty, about the ways people weaponize trauma and silence in equal measure. But such moments are too rare, too thinly stretched across a narrative bloated with false urgency and over-determined meaning.
Finally, the novel doesn’t push racism as a theme, but there is a feeling of casual xenophobia. It reveals something insidious; how prejudice can nest quietly in the lives of those who believe themselves immune to it. Even characters devoted to the study of atrocity, of genocide, are not exempt from the small, reflexive impulses that categorize, exclude, and diminish. Jungersen shows us that the machinery of cruelty is rarely spectacular. It begins in overlooked glances, in unexamined fears, in the ease with which we define the unfamiliar as threatening. What emerges is a reminder that the capacity for “othering” is not confined to the hateful. It lives, sometimes most comfortably, within the well-intentioned.
Jungersen does not give us bombs or barbed wire; he gives us memos, bruised egos, and the monstrous hush of polite complicity. Yet beneath this surface, the novel teems with the same mechanisms that permit greater horrors elsewhere; those refined psychological sleights by which the decent become indifferent, and the indifferent, eventually, dangerous.
In the end, The Exception is a novel that wants desperately to matter. But like so many of the characters within it, it does not quite know how to live with the burden of its own moral ambition. The punchline ends up being this: the real horrors aren’t the death threats, but the fact that we’re meant to believe this is how women really behave when left alone!
Imagine if The Office met Lord of the Flies but the characters are grown ass women that act like petty, gaslighting, high school drama queens. Welcome to Christian Jungersen’s The Exception, where women don’t break glass ceilings but gnaw on each other’s ankles beneath their ergonomic desks. The Exception (original title Undtagelsen and translated from the Danish by Anna Paterson) is a psychological thriller that explores the dark side of human nature; right within the confines of a modern office.
This book says: “Genocide? Sure, yeah it’s bad. But have you seen women gossip?!”
The novel centers on four women (Iben, Malene, Anne‑Lise, and Camilla), each carefully curated from the Discount Bin of Gender Tropes. There’s the Ice Queen, the Martyr, the Mouse, and the Pretty One. Set in a Copenhagen office devoted to the study of genocide, they turn their job into a psychological cage match.
When Iben and Malene begin receiving anonymous death threats, the immediate suspicion falls on Mirko Zigic, a Serbian war criminal recently exposed by their organization. As tension rises, the group’s internal dynamics unravel, and they start turning on each other.
There’s also one of the more memorable portrayals of women I’ve stumbled across in modern literature. Here’s one of a clinical psychologist named Grith:
Grith is a tall, thin woman with large, slightly droopy breasts. She has the kind of body that’s supposed to drive men wild. Watching her, Marlene thinks that Grith’s erotic pull must be limited to when she sits down or stands still. When her long limbs are moving, she looks like an awkward fourteen-year-old. -page 95
Meet Grith, a clinical psychologist, but more importantly a tall, gangly enigma with “large, slightly droopy breasts.” Because obviously, that’s what you lead with when describing a medical professional.
Apparently, she has that body, y'know, the mythical one that ruins men's marriages, but only when she's not moving. What kind of women are the Danes into?! (I’m being cheeky; I might resemble this human stork myself, and in my experience, men mostly react with the enthusiasm of someone finding a weirdly shaped yam at the farmer’s market.)
Then, there’s the rational men; the walking Xanax in khakis, sipping their coffee, staring wistfully out windows, and existing solely to remind us that the world would be such a better place if women could just. calm. down!
Jungersen’s prose is okay. As is often the case, I’m inclined to view translated works with a degree of caution, aware that nuances (both linguistic and cultural) are frequently diminished or altered in the process of translation.
The writing is laden with description, and the narrative structure relies heavily on repetition, as key points are told and retold in multiple perspectives. Jungersen quotes Arendt, Milgram, Browning, Zimbardo and others with frequency, but instead of weaving these ideas into the sinew of the story, he presents them more like lecture slides. I found these disquisitions along with the tidbits on the multiple historical genocides (so many I wasn’t even aware of!) to be more interesting than the main storyline itself.
The women study genocide, yet remain blind to the cruelty within their own walls. This irony is not incidental; it is the novel’s sharpest mirror. The metaphor is caustic: knowledge does not protect us from cruelty; it may, in fact, distract us from it.
It is a potent metaphor, but Jungersen handles it with such literal-mindedness and pedagogical insistence that the novel buckles under its own self-seriousness. Every character is treated as a case study, every interaction a thesis statement. The women at the heart of the novel too often devolve into archetypes. Their inner lives are excavated at length, but what we find is more often redundancy than revelation.
The title, The Exception, is also a metaphor. It reflects the ways we see ourselves as outside the rules that bind others, as morally exempt. Each character believes they are the exception to the harm they inflict or enable.
The novel’s most conspicuous flaw, in my opinion, lies in its fascination with psychopathy (specifically dissociative identity disorder), a concept invoked with unnerving frequency and little nuance. The specter of the “psychopath” stalks the pages like a deus ex machina of evil; an irresistible, reductive shorthand for everything unfathomable or cruel. Jungersen is hardly the first to lean on such a trope; the literary marketplace is strewn with psychopaths, often more symbol than subject. But here, the term functions less as a tool of understanding and more as a cipher, a label that obliterates context, history, and ambiguity. We are meant to shudder, not to think.
The psychological dimensions of the story are at times, a troubling echo chamber of popularized science; flattening the complexity of human behavior into archetypes that feel more diagnostic than human. Jungersen gestures toward trauma psychology, mob behavior, and projection, but these concepts appear more as narrative conveniences than investigative tools. Workplace bullying, in this context, becomes less a sociocultural phenomenon and more an existential inevitability. The possibility that people might behave atrociously without recourse to grand psychological explanations is seldom entertained.
And yet, the most frustrating thing is not that the book fails outright, but that it flirts so persistently with success. There are moments (quiet, razor-sharp moments) when Jungersen captures something chilling and true about human frailty, about the ways people weaponize trauma and silence in equal measure. But such moments are too rare, too thinly stretched across a narrative bloated with false urgency and over-determined meaning.
Finally, the novel doesn’t push racism as a theme, but there is a feeling of casual xenophobia. It reveals something insidious; how prejudice can nest quietly in the lives of those who believe themselves immune to it. Even characters devoted to the study of atrocity, of genocide, are not exempt from the small, reflexive impulses that categorize, exclude, and diminish. Jungersen shows us that the machinery of cruelty is rarely spectacular. It begins in overlooked glances, in unexamined fears, in the ease with which we define the unfamiliar as threatening. What emerges is a reminder that the capacity for “othering” is not confined to the hateful. It lives, sometimes most comfortably, within the well-intentioned.
Jungersen does not give us bombs or barbed wire; he gives us memos, bruised egos, and the monstrous hush of polite complicity. Yet beneath this surface, the novel teems with the same mechanisms that permit greater horrors elsewhere; those refined psychological sleights by which the decent become indifferent, and the indifferent, eventually, dangerous.
In the end, The Exception is a novel that wants desperately to matter. But like so many of the characters within it, it does not quite know how to live with the burden of its own moral ambition. The punchline ends up being this: the real horrors aren’t the death threats, but the fact that we’re meant to believe this is how women really behave when left alone!
March 17, 2015
For me personally, this is a 5 star book, though it is not a book I would recommend to just anyone. Subject matter can at times be harsh.
I would lump this in a Secret History/The Likeness/Natsuo Kirino's Out category. The category of a "normal" or good person doing evil things and how that manifests within them. This was a very slow book to start and patience will win out. There are some very tense parts of the book and at times I felt there were some very Hitchcock like moments. The slow simmer builds and reaches a full boil that has left me now after finishing putting the sequence of events/reality of events together. The articles within on genocide are at times hard to read due to their harshness, but at other times very interesting in their psychology, and they definitely run parallel to the main story. I am expecting this to be optioned for a movie and will hope that it is a foreign film (at least first, ala the Stieg Larsson books). I expect I will re-read this, in whole or part, to see it through new eyes. This one will stay with me for a while.
I would lump this in a Secret History/The Likeness/Natsuo Kirino's Out category. The category of a "normal" or good person doing evil things and how that manifests within them. This was a very slow book to start and patience will win out. There are some very tense parts of the book and at times I felt there were some very Hitchcock like moments. The slow simmer builds and reaches a full boil that has left me now after finishing putting the sequence of events/reality of events together. The articles within on genocide are at times hard to read due to their harshness, but at other times very interesting in their psychology, and they definitely run parallel to the main story. I am expecting this to be optioned for a movie and will hope that it is a foreign film (at least first, ala the Stieg Larsson books). I expect I will re-read this, in whole or part, to see it through new eyes. This one will stay with me for a while.
January 27, 2008
Anytime I try to describe this, it comes off sounding boring or depressing. While it's not a light book, and I wouldn't describe it as a page-turner, either, it was gripping and I could easily read it for an hour or two at a time, only putting it down and turning off the light when my eyes started to hurt. It was, bizarrely, a perfect accompaniment to the library management class I'm taking - but please don't interpret that as meaning it's boring. The management class is dull, but not this book. Really interesting things with multiple viewpoints, interweaving fact with fiction, and the way groups of people behave and distort reality.
May 29, 2011
I found this book to be quite riveting and thought provoking. Set in Denmark, it explores the relationship between four women who work at the Danish Center for Information on Genocide. When two of the women receive death threats the office is thrown into turmoil. The subject matter was quite dark but by shifting the narrative among the various character's points of view the suspense was sustained throughout the entire 500 pages.
April 21, 2019
Heartily recommend this. A Scandinavian thriller about four women who work at an NGO that studies genocide, using the language/concepts from that field to explore the conflict, which ranges from office drama to murder to genocide.
November 9, 2024
‘Undtagelsen, der bekræfter reglen’ er en tilgang, der laver en binær opdeling, som blot ikke er ligeligt fordelt. Jeg havde en fremragende læseoplevelse af en psykologisk refleksions-thriller, som udforsker undtagelser i flertal, men også nuancer som udvider kontinuummet fra binært til mange-facetteret. Ydermere springer den i perspektiver fra den ene person til den næste og gør dermed de mange-facetterede kontinuum’er endda tre-dimensionelle.
Dejligt komplekst modsat fattigt forenklende. Også svært overskueligt, men måske målet ikke behøver være fuld overskuelighed og afklaring - hvilket de forskellige perspektivers (personers) afslutninger i bogen også meget fint understreger. Gode billeder på menneskelige omstændigheder.
Essayet “Ondskabens Psykologi II” fungerede undervejs for mig framragende rammesættende, med de fire perspektiver:
1. Handlinger skaber holdninger: Kognitiv dissonans
2. Roller skaber mennesker: Stanford Fængsel Forsøget
3. Grupper bygget på næsten ingenting: ‘Os og dem’-kategorisering
4. Ofret er selv ude om det: Virkeligheden tilpasses vores behov for mening
(“Kognitiv dissonans er en personlig tilstand karakteriseret ved mentalt ubehag, som opstår, når der er uoverensstemmelse mellem ens viden og ønsker for, hvordan man gerne vil handle på den ene side, og så ens faktiske handlinger på den anden side.”
https://lex.dk/kognitiv_dissonans)
Handlinger skaber holdninger: Kognitiv dissonans
“Kun de personer der havde løjet for et meget lille beløb, følte et pres mod at ændre deres holdning for at få sammenhæng mellem handling og holdning. De oplevede den ubehagelige tilstand af indre uoverensstemmelser der er et kernebegreb i socialpsykologien og som hedder ‘kognitiv dissonans’. (…) Denne holdningsændring er ikke udvendig og påtaget. Holdningen sætter sig fast som personens oprigtige mening. Konklusionen er: Handlinger der i sig selv tilsyneladende kun gør begrænset skade, fører til psykologiske forandringer. Og de forandringer gør større og mere ødelæggende handlinger mulige.” s. 352
Roller skaber mennesker: Stanford Fængsel Forsøget
“I 1971 ville socialpsykologen Phillip G. Zimbardo og hans kolleger ved Stanford University undersøge hvad der psykologisk sker med mennesker der sidder i fængsel eller arbejder i fængsel. (…) Dette forsøg er, ligesom Milgrams lydighedsforsøg, blevet et af de klassiske og berømte forsøg i socialpsykologien. Siden er det vist i mange andre sammenhænge hvordan ‘rollen’ og ‘selvet’ let glider sammen. Mennesker bliver ofte det rollen kræver af dem, og som nye mennesker finder de en mening og sammenhæng i det de foretager sig.” s. 355
Grupper bygget på næsten ingenting: ‘Os og dem’-kategorisering
“Det er eksperimentelt vist utallige gange at vi tænker i ‘Os og dem’-tænkning. Der gælder forskellige regler for ‘os’ i vores gruppe og ‘dem’ i den anden gruppe. Grunden til at vi tænker sådan, er enkel: Alle mennesker er nødt til at forholde sig til en uendelig kompliceret og uoverskuelig verden. For at forenkle den og hurtigt frasortere irrelevante informationer rubricerer vi mennesker i kategorier. Denne kategorisering er en del af den menneskelige måde at tænke på. Den er nødvendig for os, og ingen af os kan undslippe den.” s. 356
“Socialpsykologien har imidlertid vist nogle gennemgående forvrængninger i den måde vores ‘Os og dem’-tænkning fungerer: Vi overdriver lighederne mellem medlemmer af vores egen gruppe, vi overdriver ensartetheden blandt medlemmer af andre grupper, vi overdriver forskellene imellem grupperne, og normalt bryder vi os mere om medlemmer af vores egen gruppe end medlemmer af andre grupper.” s. 357
Ofret er selv ude om det: Virkeligheden tilpasses vores behov for mening
“Vi ved alle at gode mennesker også rammes af forfærdelige lidelser, men langt de fleste af os forsøger alligevel at holde fast i håbet om en grundlæggende retfærdig verden. Der skal være noget godt vi kan sende vores børn ud i. Utallige undersøgelser viser hvordan det håb, og en ubevidst stræben efter mening og sammenhæng i vores informationer, får mennesker til at fordreje virkeligheden så den passer med opfattelsen af en velordnet verden. (…) Denne psykologiske mekanisme betyder at vi er tilbøjelige til at presse virkeligheden meget langt for at kunne tro et menneske der er ramt af en stor ulykke, selv har været ude om det der er sket. (…) Vi er alle tilbøjelige til at danne vores virkelighedsbilleder som de tyske civile der af engelske soldater kort efter krigen blev tvunget til at spadsere gennem en kz-lejr. En af dem sagde: “ Sikke forfærdelige forbrydere der må have været her når de får sådan en straf”.” s. 358
Dejligt komplekst modsat fattigt forenklende. Også svært overskueligt, men måske målet ikke behøver være fuld overskuelighed og afklaring - hvilket de forskellige perspektivers (personers) afslutninger i bogen også meget fint understreger. Gode billeder på menneskelige omstændigheder.
Essayet “Ondskabens Psykologi II” fungerede undervejs for mig framragende rammesættende, med de fire perspektiver:
1. Handlinger skaber holdninger: Kognitiv dissonans
2. Roller skaber mennesker: Stanford Fængsel Forsøget
3. Grupper bygget på næsten ingenting: ‘Os og dem’-kategorisering
4. Ofret er selv ude om det: Virkeligheden tilpasses vores behov for mening
(“Kognitiv dissonans er en personlig tilstand karakteriseret ved mentalt ubehag, som opstår, når der er uoverensstemmelse mellem ens viden og ønsker for, hvordan man gerne vil handle på den ene side, og så ens faktiske handlinger på den anden side.”
https://lex.dk/kognitiv_dissonans)
Handlinger skaber holdninger: Kognitiv dissonans
“Kun de personer der havde løjet for et meget lille beløb, følte et pres mod at ændre deres holdning for at få sammenhæng mellem handling og holdning. De oplevede den ubehagelige tilstand af indre uoverensstemmelser der er et kernebegreb i socialpsykologien og som hedder ‘kognitiv dissonans’. (…) Denne holdningsændring er ikke udvendig og påtaget. Holdningen sætter sig fast som personens oprigtige mening. Konklusionen er: Handlinger der i sig selv tilsyneladende kun gør begrænset skade, fører til psykologiske forandringer. Og de forandringer gør større og mere ødelæggende handlinger mulige.” s. 352
Roller skaber mennesker: Stanford Fængsel Forsøget
“I 1971 ville socialpsykologen Phillip G. Zimbardo og hans kolleger ved Stanford University undersøge hvad der psykologisk sker med mennesker der sidder i fængsel eller arbejder i fængsel. (…) Dette forsøg er, ligesom Milgrams lydighedsforsøg, blevet et af de klassiske og berømte forsøg i socialpsykologien. Siden er det vist i mange andre sammenhænge hvordan ‘rollen’ og ‘selvet’ let glider sammen. Mennesker bliver ofte det rollen kræver af dem, og som nye mennesker finder de en mening og sammenhæng i det de foretager sig.” s. 355
Grupper bygget på næsten ingenting: ‘Os og dem’-kategorisering
“Det er eksperimentelt vist utallige gange at vi tænker i ‘Os og dem’-tænkning. Der gælder forskellige regler for ‘os’ i vores gruppe og ‘dem’ i den anden gruppe. Grunden til at vi tænker sådan, er enkel: Alle mennesker er nødt til at forholde sig til en uendelig kompliceret og uoverskuelig verden. For at forenkle den og hurtigt frasortere irrelevante informationer rubricerer vi mennesker i kategorier. Denne kategorisering er en del af den menneskelige måde at tænke på. Den er nødvendig for os, og ingen af os kan undslippe den.” s. 356
“Socialpsykologien har imidlertid vist nogle gennemgående forvrængninger i den måde vores ‘Os og dem’-tænkning fungerer: Vi overdriver lighederne mellem medlemmer af vores egen gruppe, vi overdriver ensartetheden blandt medlemmer af andre grupper, vi overdriver forskellene imellem grupperne, og normalt bryder vi os mere om medlemmer af vores egen gruppe end medlemmer af andre grupper.” s. 357
Ofret er selv ude om det: Virkeligheden tilpasses vores behov for mening
“Vi ved alle at gode mennesker også rammes af forfærdelige lidelser, men langt de fleste af os forsøger alligevel at holde fast i håbet om en grundlæggende retfærdig verden. Der skal være noget godt vi kan sende vores børn ud i. Utallige undersøgelser viser hvordan det håb, og en ubevidst stræben efter mening og sammenhæng i vores informationer, får mennesker til at fordreje virkeligheden så den passer med opfattelsen af en velordnet verden. (…) Denne psykologiske mekanisme betyder at vi er tilbøjelige til at presse virkeligheden meget langt for at kunne tro et menneske der er ramt af en stor ulykke, selv har været ude om det der er sket. (…) Vi er alle tilbøjelige til at danne vores virkelighedsbilleder som de tyske civile der af engelske soldater kort efter krigen blev tvunget til at spadsere gennem en kz-lejr. En af dem sagde: “ Sikke forfærdelige forbrydere der må have været her når de får sådan en straf”.” s. 358
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