Big Questions

Starred review from August 22, 2011
Epic in its scale and circumscribed in focus, Nilsen’s incisive Big Questions is a philosophical novel that uses the techniques of fable to investigate faith, society, disillusionment, and catastrophe. A dozen years in the making, Nilsen’s 600+-page story depicts the lives, bonds, and quarrels of a group of quizzical birds whose ontology is challenged by the appearance of a bomb, a crashed airplane, and a narcoleptic human pilot. At first these talkative avians resemble Charles Schulz’s Linus with their naïve philosophizing. But as the situation escalates, the book demonstrates how, in the absence of knowledge, germinal philosophy and early religion can be much the same thing. Competing mythologies, ideologies, and messianic fervor cause rifts within a community that otherwise unites as part of nature’s predatory food chain. Nilsen outlines his figures with a thin but commanding line, and builds texture and atmosphere with dense stippling and hatching, creating a lush, verdant landscape. His breathtaking vistas resonate with his characters’ struggle to assemble meaning from incomprehensible events—and to rebuild their world from the pieces left over.

Starred review from November 15, 2011
Gray finches eat seeds on grassland sparsely punctuated by trees and a one-room house and cut through by a shallow river. Of two close together, one eats steadily, while the other raises existential questions. Later, a big bird swoops down and drops a huge egg. A charismatic finch develops a kind of cult around the egg, which eventually explodes, killing most of the cult, including its leader. Simultaneously, a military plane crash-lands, demolishing the house, killing an old woman, and leaving her grandson, a speechless simpleton, alone on the veld. Some remaining finches regard the plane as another big bird and its pilot as somehow its offspring after he clambers unscathed from its cockpit. Eventually, there's a deadly clash between pilot and finches when the former assaults the idiot grandson. All the birds have names and personalities and converse like humans in this enormous and elusive allegory, 15 years in the making, in which Nilsen employs the lightly magical realism of Dogs and Water (2004) rather than the absurdism of his two books of monologues. The artwork that fleshes out that realism is the most elaborate in all of Nilsen's work, with beautifully detailed landscapes set in large panels, a broad palette of grays, and a cinematographic quality that suggests constant movement. Utterly distinctive work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)