The source of this story is a cache of seven notebooks found at a remote site in the northwest high desert by a geology student. The anonymous author-the lack of attribution crucial-is finally discovered to be an autistic genius who many years earlier disappears.
The student's mentor, upon retirement, seeks the source of the find and puts together
this book. Essentially the notebooks are the diary of the last member of a family whose handed-down wealth allows him to circle the country for eighteen years, living on trains, in stations, and camping more or less randomly in the surrounding wilds.
Prior to this, the diarist lives in a mansion, cloistered in the in-house library built by a father who has achieved some renown as a scientist. But the father has not the genius of the son. In the son's own words: "While he built the library, I put it to use."
The son's publications in science journals earn him an invitation to join a university. Then things fall apart. His father commits suicide, his mother (a complex figure) is likely murdered, whereby at her funeral our subject is whisked away by a random female mourner we never get to know.
That's where this diary (his journey) begins.
The Man I Never Was asks: what defines identity - places, persons, events? Can its roots and causes be identified, found through exploration? Where in one's untold pages can formative triggers and trajectories be discovered, altered, erased? Seeking answers our subject travels into his past, present and future circuitously seeking (perhaps cleverly evading) an anchoring self, all the while testing if predestination is all and immutable.
Movement and the strangeness of a self in alien spaces is the centrifugal force driving the novel. While the tale never slows or gets lost in detail, the reader is drawn to focus on the existential exploration of a personal reality.
Sjogren began his writing life while subsistence living on Florida's Big Pine Key, fishing, gathering, embedded in and contending with existence in its most basic form. From the beginning, living through and within spaces colors and directs his literary sense, first in
an old Ford, then traveling nearly a million miles on motorcycles, going repeatedly across
the country and down into Central America to Panama.
Finally he "settles" on charter boats sailing around the Caribbean while raising a family on a houseboat on St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands.
The Man I Never Was is the second volume of a trilogy-The Separated Woman being the first-augmenting and redefining the form of existential expression in the modern novel.
