The stars grow pale

the long version

In this brilliant autobiographical novel Karl Bjarnhof tells the story of a boy marked out from his fellows by the gradual onset of blindness. The boy himself is not depressed, though other people may make him miserable: the boys in the yard will not play with him because he is too 'stupid' to see the ball; his mother nags at him for being 'peculiar'; his schoolmaster punishes him for not being able to do the sums set on the blackboard. When eventually he is taken to an oculist he is told he has 'eyes like a hawk' because while he was waiting for his test he memorized the letters on the chart. The story is devoid of self-pity or sentimentality. It gives a complete picture of a childhood in a small town in Denmark, with a gallery of unforgettable characters, both comic and pathetic.