The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist

I am twenty-six inches tall, shapely and well proportioned, my head perhaps a trifle too large. My hair is not black like the others', but reddish, very stiff and thick, drawn back from the temples and the broad but not especially lofty brow. My face is beardless, but otherwise just like that of other men. My eyebrows meet. My bodily strength is considerable, particularly if I am annoyed. When the wrestling match was arranged between Jehoshaphat and myself I forced him onto his back after twenty minutes and strangled him. Since then I have been the only dwarf at this court.

The dwarf Piccoline resides at the court of an Italian prince in the 14th century. His position there is nebulous: he is not a buffoon, he informs us, as some dwarfs are, and though he serves the Prince he does not seem to be a kind of servant. He is rather like an emanation of the Prince himself, a ghost or shadow: "Even the ignorant mob understands that the master's dwarf is really the master himself," he writes. What distinguishes Piccoline, in his eyes, is that, while others hide their monstrous nature with pomp, play, and pretend, he resembles himself. He says: "Only I am."

Piccoline's view of humanity is a jaundiced one. His position as dwarf--literally overlooked, you might say--enables him to see what others cannot or do not: the way the Princess carries on her affair with the knight Don Riccardo, for instance, or their daughter Angelica's secret love for the heir of the Prince's foreign enemy. He sees the way courtiers give themselves over to lust and gluttony, both of which nauseate him, and which he considers a kind of vanity.

And yet his cynicism keeps him from seeing everything that he might, or understanding everything. He does not understand, for instance, why the sage Bernardo dissects a corpse to learn about the composition of the human body, something he considers both disgusting and irrelevant. His bafflement and disgust at the divulgence of what's inside the human body mirrors his bafflement and disgust at human feeling: "I cannot understand the love that human beings feel for each other," he says. "It merely revolts me." Piccoline is the shadow self of the Prince, and the shadow self of all people, maybe: the small voice that speaks to us from within and tells us that life is worth so little.

I was really captivated by the steely, sour persona of Piccoline. The story he narrates is one of national advancement and decline, though what happens seems less important sometimes than the power of his point of view on these things: the Prince wages war on a foreign power, sieging their city, and then uses the pretext of a peace treaty to ambush the opposing lord. Later, the Prince finds himself sieged by his enemy's vengeful heirs, only to be ambushed by a much more powerful foe in the Black Plague. The Prince's astronomers look for a narrative in the stars, but Piccoline knows that fate is a force beyond understanding: "I sit at the dwarfs' window and gaze out into the night, exploring it as they do. I need no tubes or telescopes, for my gaze itself is deep enough. I too read in the book of night."

Early in the book, Piccoline is tasked by the Prince to lead a mass for dwarfs, a performance which he turns into a grotesque satire, and for which he is punished. "I eat my own splenetic flesh," he says, "I drink my own poisoned blood"--a religion of solipsism, you might say. But Lagervkist, who wrote of the way Christ uses even the most wretched and vile refusers in Barabbas does so also here: toward the end of the novel--spoiler alert--Piccoline whips the Princess in a fit of disgust over her philandering. Racked with guilt, it is something she has craved, but still it sends her into a coma, then killing her. After her death she begins to be revered as a saint, and Piccoline is sent to the dungeon, made to suffer for years--thus becoming the kind of Christ figure, enobling the Princess' soul through his own suffering, in which he does not believe. The Dwarf is a story of radical ecumenicism, a novel that believes even hatred can be turned to the power of divine transfiguration.