Actor Robert Berdahl, '90
In conjunction with the MAYDAY! Peace Conference, the Gustavus Adolphus College Department of Theatre & Dance and the Department of Scandinavian Studies will co-sponsor a reading of sections of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger on Tuesday, May 1, directed by Henry MacCarthy. The novel, originally written in Swedish, was translated into English by Gustavus alumna Rachel Willson-Broyles ’02. For the reading, the Departments welcome back professional actors Rob Berdahl ’90 and Kim Braun ’11, to work with senior honors in theater major Ben Kolis and first-year theatre major Hannah Enright. The reading of Khemiri’s Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger is set for 8:00 p.m. in the Black Box in the lower level of the Schaefer Fine Arts Center. Tickets are not required but seating is limited and you are asked to contact Director Henry MacCarthy at hmaccart@gac.edu to reserve a seat.
Of the novel, reviewer Steven G. Kellman wrote “To those whose experience of Swedish fiction has been as bleak as Nordic winter, Montecore arrives as a sunny revelation. An exuberant account of a son’s effort to imagine his vanished father, the novel in fact challenges assumptions about Swedish identity during a time when the face of Scandinavia grows darker. Abbas, the absent figure at the center of the story, is, like author Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s own father, a tawny immigrant to Stockholm from Tunisia.”
Actor Kimberly Frances Braun, '11
In his 2011 New York Times review Anders Monson, asked the question that is asked by Kadir, one of Montecore‘s pincipal characters: “Does anyone at all understand anything about a story that is not their own?” Monson contiues with “It’s an apt question in any novel which is told in two voices, a generation and the distance (literal, social, linguistic) from Tunisia to Sweden separating them. Khemiri offers familiar if not simple emotional territory, a story about a son and his estranged father — complicated by questions of culture and language, racism and violence, metafiction and postmodernity, formal conceit and constraint.”
It is a story of both cultural in interpersonal conflict and growth in a changing world.
This reading of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger begins 8:00 p.m. in the Black Box in the Schaefer Fine Arts Center. Tickets are not required but seating is limited. Please contact Director Henry MacCarthy at hmaccart@gac.edu to reserve a seat.