Quotes of the Day

Between the journalist and his subject lies an unbridgeable chasm. Invisible in peacetime, in war the division becomes as clear as the desert horizon. Confronted even by tragedy or death, the witness must stay detached, or risk being consumed.

There is a war in Gunnar Kopperud's meditative novel Longing (Bloomsbury; 256 pages), and it takes place in the memories of his unnamed protagonists: a European reporter who's a veteran of the human-misery beat, and a conflicted North African freedom fighter. Lovers during her bloody war, peacetime erodes their relationship. She recovers a sense of normalcy, however fragile, while he is unable to break his obsession with covering Third World suffering. He is a witness and death is his subject, and as time passes he seems to long for his favorite métier. A concerned editor sends him on the reporting junket of a lifetime, traveling to mythical lairs—Babylon, Tibet, Shangri-la and more—to study man's dreams instead of man's misery. Man has forever sought power, immortality and peace, the journalist discovers, and they will forever elude his grasp.

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Kopperud is a philosophy student turned war reporter, and he brings those disparate experiences to bear on a novel that swings between metaphysics and the stark facts of violence. The journalist and the freedom fighter alternate in narrating their story, though as the book progresses their voices blur, even as their relationship decays. The absence of names or a clear chronology can confuse the reader, but man's sense of displacement is one of Kopperud's central themes. A Buddhist monk spells it out for the journalist: "Everything and everyone that comes together must sooner or later be parted, and until you are able to accept that, you will suffer." He suffers.

Kopperud spins some memorable scenes: a desert girl in a white T shirt dancing to Bob Marley, a boy monk in a burnished temple dispensing wisdom with a marble. The best of these freight the tale with visual and emotional meaning. Longing needs the ballast. Kopperud has a philosophy student's weakness for spiraling, unanswerable rhetorical queries.

But sometimes the matter at hand lends itself only to those sorts of questions. Longing is concerned with these essential contradictions of existence, the difference between the witness and the subject, the gulf between two human beings. We spin myths of Mandalay and Shangri-la to transcend, if only in fan-tasy, the conditions that bind us. Even as we come together, find love, dare to dream, we suspect that love, like life itself, will eventually be broken. Kopperud's war-weary, war-loving journalist seeks refuge in the perfect consummation of dreams. He finds mirages.

• Bryan Walsh
• Longing ponders the divide between love and suffering