Category: Norway

The Seed by Tarjei Vesaas

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The seed by Tarjei Vesaas

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Kimen

Translator – Kenneth G. Chapman

Source – Personal copy

I move on to one of my all-time favourite writers in Tarjei Vesaas; although I have only read a few books by him, there is something about how he describes his world: the second you open a book by him, you fall into it. I have a number of his books on my shelves, and I had a look at them all for men; this stood out as it sees him move from his earlier books, which are maybe the lesser known of his works now, to the later books that are more symbolic and set in the world he lives in the place almost becomes a character in the lot of the books I have read the ice in the Ice Palace. This Island reminds me of the Island we spent a summer or two on when I was younger. The cost of Donegal Islands is that they are such little microcosms in themselves, although there was never a murder like in the book.

 

Inside the summer-hot barn itself there was commotion and turmoil – in sharp contrast to outside. The youngest sow was having her swarm of young.

A girl sat there and saw that everything went as it should. But she sat staring and absent-minded.

The barn was full of buzzing flies. All the windows and doors were open. The strong sun intensified the odor from the pig pens.

The flies buzzed dully, as if on the point of falling asleep in a dark

corner.

The girl was young. She sat bent over on a stool. Leaned forward with her adolescent arms pressed against her breast. What was happening in front of her eyes was nothing new to her and it was going well, so it was something else that was causing her tenseness, her sadness. She thought: I’m not happy. Things should be different.

How? I don’t know, just somehow

The young girl looking after the pigs when he meets her

This novella is brutal at times. A Troubled man with apparent mental health issues comes to the tiny island where Pig farming is the primary industry and way of life and kills a young girl in the height of summer. This sets off a chain of events where the locals all go feral and chase this man down, and the brother of the dead girls kills the man. This book mixes the brutality of nature with the darkness of the human soul and the way one moment can change so many lives and affect so many. All this is mirrored as a mother pig eats its own young, A piece that reminds me of the line in Snatch where a gangster talks about how pigs will eat anything. This is also a scene in the film Hanibal where a foe of Hanibal ends up getting eaten by the pigs. We also have echoes of the madness in Lord of the Flies. One of the characters is called Piggy, and I wonder if Golding had come across this book as it came out 14 years before the lord of the Flies, and one also thinks of the island-wide madness of Whicker man. But this also is the way he uses the scenery of his homeland. In this case, it adds to the darkness on a bright summer day, which, when reading it, can send a chill down your spine. Sun and Darkness can lead to madness. One only has to think of the Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing, where heat adds to the tension and leads people to act differently.

The baby pigs lay in a pile in a corner. They had ducked down, and lay there unmoving. Something in them had forced them into this position. The danger. The tumult. Something incomprehen-sible. They ducked down and lay still.

A crash. The pen gave way under a heavy side blow. The sows tumbled out into the barnyard and headed for the people standing there. They attacked the people – at the same time that they were fighting with each other to the death and gashing each other’s sides.

They attacked everything that moved.

The two men and the woman ran for the house. The girl slipped. back into the barn.

But the devil was in the sows now. No sooner had the people begun to collect themselves a bit behind the closed door of the tidy house than the door flew open. They had not thought to lock it, and the door opened inwards. The sows were suddenly there and stuck their bloody snouts through the door. They stopped and stood still an instant to take aim.

The effect of this sight on the three people in the room was para-lyzing. An instant of fear. Wild beasts. Demons.

What was it? What would happen?

Nothing! It was only the two sows that Bergit carried food to many times a day! No; they were transformed. They were something else. Bestiality itself stuck its snout into human life: dark, filthy and consuming.

Thje brutal nature of the pigs later mirrored in the islanders

This saw Vesas shift in his writing style; he had written 12 books before this, and the books after this all have a more symbolic nature. But also his world of rural Norway, which, like I said in the start, really draws me in with his writing, is that mix of symbolic world and the rural Norway he so loved, which becomes another character in his books. Do you know any other writers whose place is so connected to their works?

 

The Ring is Closed by Knut Hamsun

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The Ring is Closed by Knut Hamsun

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Ringen sluttet

Translator – Robert Ferguson

Souyrce – Personal copy

It was hard to pick this up as Hamsun is a writer that is full of controversy later in his writing life his connection with the Nazis during the world war. But Hunger is still held up as a masterpiece and I had brought several other books by him a few years ago when the Dear Rob of Robaroundbooks a much missed lit site, highlighted the Spuvenir press collection of his lesser-known books, which all featured paintings by the Norweigan artist Edvard Munch which seem to go well with the books. Anyway, this is his second to last novel, written in 1936, which has at its heart a flawed character trying to escape his small-town roots only to go full circle in his life. Like his father, the lighthouse keeper, keeping a light going full circle every night, we see Abels’s life do the same, and as we do, like the lighthouse light, it hits the rocks and pitfalls in his life.

are!

Now that the old lighthousekeeper was a widower he couldn’t manage without a little female help around the house. He advertised for a housekeeper and got Lolla. A great bit of luck! Lolla would be fine, she was quick around the house, used to chickens and pigs, unmarried, four years older now, in good health and quite pretty. Tengvald was after her, a trained blacksmith now and working as a journeyman, they could have got married any time and started a family. But Tengvald held back. Why? Probably because he lacked the courage. He was a quiet, rather shy blacksmith, nothing especially outstanding about him, but honest and steady. It wasn’t easy for him to break up with Lolla, but she had those crazy nostrils that fluttered every time she looked at him.

His excuse was that he had to take care of his mother. Okay then, said Lolla, who wasn’t too brokenhearted about it. What was Tengvald the blacksmith to her? But when, a little while later, the very same Tengvald began courting Lovise Rolandsen, and even ended up marrying her, Lolla started started passing alot of sly remarks: that, by God, those two were made for each other

His father the lighthousekeeper

At the heart of this book is the life of a care free male, as he drifts and floats through life, Abel and his life. He has a love interest all through the book with Olga, the local chemist’s daughter; we see this man drift away from his small-time life in a book written by an older. Man, in a way, Hamsun thinks of a more carefree world for him as a younger man is Abel part of Hamsun he never quite got too. Was there an Olga for him. We follow as Abel tries to escape the small-town life. He inherits and gives away to those around him an inheritance, and he fritters away. He eventually ends up in the US. But then things happen, and he has to escape that world and head home for a simpler life in a way echoing back to his father’s life. The title may be a clue to the book: Can we escape Fate, or are we just running towards it?

ABEL WAS INFORMED BY TELEGRAPH OF HIS FATHER’S DEATH, but he was in no great haste to travel. The months passed, and if he responded at all to announcements and calls to attend meetings of the beneficiaries of the will it was only to answer that he was doing just fine where he was and felt no call to travel home.

But things must have been pretty tough for Abel one way and another, because he wrote that he had neither clothes nor money for his ticket.

No clothes and no money for his ticket… and him the son of a wealthy man!

Hisa father left him a little bit of money

Its fair as I l, liked part of this book. Abel had a feeling of a character we see in a lot of books that young man escaping his world, Holden Caulfield or even a character like Blaugaust, where you never escape your fate his fate I sto be like his father a man in the solitary world in a way. I also see a connection in a way with How Hamsun maybe connected with Nazis like Henry Williamson had that a simpler world was sold as part of fascism’s false dreams. But Abel also felt like part of an older man, maybe living a different life through his narrator looking maybe at that love that he never quite had a dream of a different lie he never quite got. It also captured a world gone after the war, a world where a young man could be carefree with money yet, because of who they are, get around the world. Some years ago, I read Hunger, his other book, but it also had a strong character at the heart of the book. Anyway, this is my second book for Norway in November. Have you read any Hamsun?

Brightly Shining by Ingvild Rishøi

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                                                                                                                                                    Brightly Shining by Igvild Rishøi

Norweigan fiction

Orignal title – Stargate – en julefortelling

Translator – Caroline Waight

Source – Review copy

There is nothing better than an unexpected review copy that actually matches something upcoming, and this literally fell on the doorstep a few days after I had mentioned her new month, Norway in November, by Meredith (Dolce Bellezza Blog), one of the fellow judges on the Shadow Booker panel. So, as I often think, the is a synchronicity to book blogging. So this is the first novel from a talented short story and children’s writer appeared with its wintery theme around a family in the run-up to Christmas. She has previously won the Norwegian book critic prizes. It is a perfect first book for Norway in November. The book is about a family in which two daughters decide to help their father, who is out of work. So when they find a job at the Christmas tree lot is available.

And Monday came and Tuesday and Wednesday, and he talked about the cabin we would buy if he could just get a regular job. Thursday came and Fri-day, and he talked about the path and the fence and how we’d sit out on the doorstep and look up at the Big Dipper, and then it was Saturday, and there was a knock at the door.

Dad let go of my hair and stood up off the bed. But ours wasn’t really a flat where people came knocking.

Only Aronsen came knocking round our flat, I’m calling the police, he’d say, but he never called the police. But before, when I was little, I thought he would. He’d be standing there in his dressing gown and I’d be clutching Dad’s legs and crying, don’t call, don’t call, until Aronsen looked down and said, hush now, I’m not calling anybody, I’m just trying to get this into your dad’s head.

Dad is a violent drunk at times

Ronja, the ten-year-old daughter, first sees the job on the Christmas tree lot and initially thinks her father will be perfect for the `Job. He does take it, but then he is drawn back to the pub, so the cupboards start to go bare again at this point, the older sister Melissa steps in and takes her father’s job selling Christmas tres a world as she observes isn’t as cheerful as it may seem to sell the tres is a hard job and those doing it aren’t that full of the Christmas spirit. But she puts her head down as her sister dodges the Drunken father, a neighbour dying to report the father and his daughters to social services. We see a family on the deg a world of getting by day to day and the bond between to sisters. But there is also some great characters they meet at the tree lot. This is a book that will break your heart and then see the hope of the two sisters.

“Melissa,” Tommy yelled. “Come here.”

Melissa was sitting on the ground, midway through righting a fir. She looked up from underneath the branches and crawled out. She looked scared.

“Relax,” Tommy said, “It was me who went and got her.”

He walked over to the shed and opened the door.

“Take a seat,” he said. “Have a ginger biscuit.” There was warmth inside, and a radio, and the floor brown with dirt. Some children singing “O Holy Night.” I sat down on one camping stool, Tommy sat on the other. Melissa stayed standing in the doorway. A thrill of hope, sang the children.

The weary world rejoices.

“Melissa,” said Tommy. “Your sister can’t spend all day sitting out there on a box when it’s below freezing out.”

The sister freezing but trying to get by the best they can

I must admit I am a fan of the sad Christmas story from Dickens with Scrooge, a story tinged with Sadness, then films like A Boy’s Christmas and, of course, It’s a Wonderful Life. But you know what? One of my all-time favourite Christmas stories is from the Late Paul Auster, his Auggie Wrens Christmas story, which was filmed by Wayne Wang as part of the film Smoke when Auggie tells William Hurt’s character who had been asked to write a Christmas story for New york times and tells of a boy that dropped a wallet whilst stealing and how Auggie went found a blind woman who thought he was the grandson who had stolen from his store and they have dinner and he steals a camera from a pile he finds in a room at the woman’s house but has in the meantime had Christmas lunch with her act as the grandson Hope and love in denial at the same time just perfect like this. It has hope that comes and goes with love and fear. I was going to say about how it would be ideal. Book to be made into a film like Auggie Wren’s story was, only to google the original title of the book and find it is being made into a movie (let’s hope it isn’t then ruined by a Hollywood take on it ). This is prime Ken Roach material if it is to be made into English. The heartbreak of drunken father-daughters getting by would suit his style of filmmaking so well. This book is perfect for a winter evening in the build-up to Christmas as we follow Melissa and Ronja. One sister sells trees, and the other tries to avoid social services and just get by. Do you have a favourite Christmas story or film?

 

The Shining by Jon Fosse

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The Shining by Jon Fosse

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Kvitleik

Translator – Damion Searls

Source – Personal copy on kindle

Well, this is the first book after Fosse won the Nobel. I did a short post on the day he won the prize. I had reviewed three books from him before the Prize, the first of his septology, Aliss in the Fire and Scenes from a childhoood. I had read the other two parts of Septology and as I often do, hadn’t got to review them. As I said in my last post, my dreams of blogging more often fall short, but I am getting there, so this isn’t me moaning it is just a fact of life I read more than I can possibly ever review, but yes, this is my sixth book by Jon Fosse and to be truthful, I loved this it is a short book 48 pages in the paperback so in comparison to his other books this is actually probably the favourite I have read from him. Although at some point, I will go back and read septology in a single bite. Anyway, I was going to wait for this, and then I listened to the Mookse and the Gripes podcast with the translator about Jon Fosse, and I just had to get it so for quickness, I got it on the Kindle as it is about the length I can read on kindle.

What am I talking about, I thought. There’s the forest in front of me, it’s just a forest, I thought. All right then, this sudden urge to drive off somewhere had brought me to a for-est. And there was another way of talking, according to which something, something or an-other, led, whatever that might mean, to something else, yes, something else. I peered into the forest in front of me. Forest. Yes.Trees right next to one another, pines, pine trees.

He questions his action heading down the path

The book is in the mind of a man who has, for some reason, headed down a forest track, turning off the main road. He is in his car, and then he gets stuck on the path. As he does, he thinks about the points he could have turned back. Then he initially stays in the car warm and just waits for someone to come. Then he decides to head into the forest it is turning to night but he feels to drawn into the forest. He then starts to see a glow in the distance. What is it as he is drawn to the light, the light seems to come closer and closer. But what are these lights?He seems drawn to the lights and maybe is in a moment of his life is he alive, or is this his soul drifting you are never quite sure if this is real or imagined. Then it moves on when he reaches the lights, but that would spoil a 48-page book to say more it is wonderfully evocative.

No reason at all. And so why did I drive onto the forest road then. It was purely by accident, maybe. Pure chance.Yes,you probably couldn’t call it anything else.

But chance, what’s that anyway.No, I can’t start in with that kind of silly thinking. It never goes anywhere. And what I have to do now is get my car free, yes, just that. And then I have to try to turn it around. But that.Yes it’s because I didn’t pass anywhere I could turn the car around, if I had then of course I would’ve turned around, a long time ago, because the forest road is pretty much the most boring road to drive on that you can imagine.

He is maybe in a altered state I wondered at times or has something alse happened to him ?

I loved the short nature of this after the septology it is like a  palate cleanser in a meal, it is full of Fosse but intense and just a mouthful of him. I love the otherworldly ness of the lights, and the events after the lights appear in the forest. The forest has long been a place for things happening but also the mind to wander from the tropical Jungle of Wilson Harris and the way spirits and the forest can talk to you. Through things like Twin Peaks which is what I thought of her I had to wonder if a log lady would turnup there is also a sense of the spiritual of been between worlds what has happened to draw him down the forest road and why did the car break down? Why wander off these are all questions unanswered about our narrators actions. Have you read this the first of his books to come out after his Nobel win this year.

Winstons score – A an Espresso shot of Fosse

Is Mother Dead ? by Vigdis Hjorth

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Is Mother dead by Vigdis Hjorth

Norwegian fiction

Original title –Er mor død

Translator Charlotte Barslund

Source – personal copy

This is the second book by the Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth I have read; I have a copy of Will and Testament by the same writer and have reviewed A House in Norway. It was mentioned in the review comments to Will and Testament, and this book, it seems, are thinly veiled works of auto-fiction that use her own life as part of the story. This book came after the family reaction to the book Will and Testament. This book follows her own splitting with her mother and sister. It is a novel but has part of her own experience sprinkled over it. This is open book from the longlist I would have gotten to. At some point, I am a sucker for these great Nordic works of fiction that blur the writer’s own life and their fictional worlds.

Ruth thinks talking to me won’t do Mum any good. Mum can’t take any more. Mum hasn’t been able to cope with what has already happened, my sudden departure, my work, which exposed her to shame, that I didn’t come over during the diff-cult time, for Dad’s funeral. Mum is finally over me and any contact with me might reopen old wounds. I understand.

Early on we see what ghas caused the rift with her mother.

The book is a novel about family and family connections, in this case, two daughters with their mother, but what happens when one daughter has made a piece of art that has upset the mother as it is about the mother and their childhood. What is it like to be that daughter, the artist looking in now on the relationship with your mother that is broken and her relationship with your sister? This is the premise for the book Joanna recently widows and has had to return to her home country of Norway. She had been on course to become a lawyer in her earlier years when she met an art teacher and fell in love. The course of her life changed, and she produced art that made a rift. Now she has to confront the rift her art has caused her works on motherhood as we see her become a spy on her mother and watch her. Still, also, as she is doing this, we see her looking back at her and her sister’s interactions with the mother her hatred is focused on the sister Ruth in a lot of ways after a rather blunt text from her sister about she’d only let her know when her mother was dead.We see Joanne spy from as distance in the house they grew up in many years after her last visit past and present merge in one as she tries to get a handle on the now from what has happened.  The title in Norwegian is a play on words around death and murder, as the words are similar in Norwegian. Will she be able to fix what she has broken her parental and sibling relationships with her art.

In the house where I grew up and the house we moved to when I was in my early teens, there were several photographs of Ruth and me on the large antique bureau in the living room. A black-and-white photo of each daughter on her third birthday, taken by a professional photographer. We had bows in our hair to keep our fringes out of the way. Confirmation pictures and then wedding photographs followed, first Thorleif and me in front of the old stone church, then Ruth and Reidar in front of the same church, the summer before I left.

As Joanne sits opposite hidden watchuing her Mum’s house the house she grew up in

I said it was autofiction because it is partly the fallout of her previous book, which made accusations that her father had caused a rift in her own family, like what Joanna’s paintings have in this book. There was a similar reaction to Knausgaard’s work when he brought out his epic book. Sometimes it is hard to face the truth as Joanne sees it in her reaction to the past and her art  and then to deal with the aftermath of your truth. It also looks at sibling relationships the feeling that can bubble under with those you are closes to the things you see from the outside like Joanna does that make her wonder around what happened years ago. This is a work that uses a writers own life in opart but then uses it to build a compelling npovel about loss of a relaionship , the past and what to do with it. The triangle of the relationships in this mother daughter and sister with sister. Yet another twist on the theme of motherhood on this years longlist reading. Have you read any books from Hjorth ?

Winston score -A  This novel pulls apart a mother daughter spilt can it be mended ?

The ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas

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The Ice Palace by Tarjei vesaas

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Is-slottet

Translator – Elizabeth Rokkan

Source – Personal copy

In my second book of the year we are back in Europe and in the north with one of Norway’s greatest writers. we marvel at knausgaard and fosse for their insight and vision into the human character these days. But Tarjei Vesaas was doing the same fifty years before them and in his time he wrote for more than fifty years his book was mainly based around his rural life his farmhouse is a place of pilgrimage for fans of his writing. He was known for his insights into everyday life he won the Nordic book council prize the biggest book prize in Scandinavia. He was nominated 30 times for the Nobel Literature prize and in strong contention on three occasions. This is one of a number of books that were brought out by Peter Owen a publisher I think has such a great list of writers. So here we have the forerunner to those great Norweigian writers of today.

Unn must have been standing at the window watching for Siss, for she came out before Siss reached the doorstep. She was wearing her school slacks

“It must have been dark?” she asked

“Dark?” yes, but that doesn’t matter; replied Siss, although she had been quite nervous of the darkness and the short cutr through the wood.

“It must have been cold too? It’s dreadfully cold her this evening”

“That doesn’t matter either,” said Sim

Unn said: It’s such fun that you wanted to come.

The night of the event that is at the heart of the book

The book is the story of two girls just on the cusp of being young adults they are the sort of girls that wouldn’t usually get on as one is quiet and the other is boisterous and a live wire. The quiet girl Unn is new to the village and has arrived to live with her Aunt and her friend is Siss. What follows is the outfall of an evening the two girls get close as they get to know each other at her aunts she shows Siss the pictures of her father as they relax in each other company the young girls undress and watch each other. But when they have done this it feels strange and not quite right to Unn after the event one of those things that happen at that age of just having feelings and thoughts that are awakening. So when next Day Unn decides to skip school and head to the Ice Palace of the title a place the girls are due to go to a frozen Ice palace but when she ends up in trouble it is Siss left as she viewed the event very differently. She later has to cope with the gap of her friend that has gone and what had happened haunts her as she struggles to move on with what happened.

Unn had not arrived when Siss hurried into the warm classroom. Several of the others were there. Some of them said casually, “Hi SIss.”

She did not say a word about yesterday’s meeting. They probably expected it, because of the exchange of notes, but they contained themselves. They were probably waiting to see what would happen when Unn turned up. Sdiss had it all worked out: as soon as Unn appeared in the doorway she would go to meet her so that eveyrone should see how things stood. The Idea made her so happy thart she tingled all over.

The next day Siss is awaitng Unn at schoolbut she never comes to school again !!

This is one of those books that takes a single event the one evening that the two girls had stripped and watched one another a strange act but given there age one that happens this one night is the hook for the book the death of Unnn and the aftermath for Siss. It shows how we can view things from different ag=ngles after the event. It is a story of the loss of a friendship broken but there is a third character in the book and that is the place rural Norway the ice palace and all the other places he describes jump off the page this is the second book I have reviewed by Vesaas I will over time review more as I get them. One of the things I love about the time I have been blogging is seeing how a writer like Vesaas has had a knock-on effect I can see his influence in fosse work and other Nordic writers. Sparse in his style this work is hard-hitting in it’s impact this is one of those books that pack a punch far more than its length and will hit the reader hard. It is also short enough to be read in a single sitting which I did. Have you read any books by him?

Winstons score – A, a gem of a book that should be better known.

Ankomst by Gøhril Gabrielsen

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Ankomst by Gøhril Gabrielsen

Norwegian Fiction

Original title – Ankomst

Translator by Deborah Dawkin

Source – personal copy

This is the second of this year’s Peirene series books this year a series called closed universe. It is the second book by the Norweigian writer Gøhril Gabrielsen that they had published the first is one of the few books by them I haven’t reviewed I have a copy so will at some pointreview that one. This is another one for women in translation month. It is the fifth novel from the writer it won the 2017 book prize fort the best book from the North of Norway. 

The bay lies wrapped in darkness, but in the light of the waxing moon. I can make out the waves frothy white crests rushing up into the sshallows. they glide between the rocks on the shore and retreat with a pale metallic sheen. I attach the trailer to the scooter and load it with the mast for the automatic weather station, along with my measuring equipment, guy wires and data logger, the bucket for the precipitation gauge, some antifreeze, my snowshoes, a couple of spades and a can of petrol. Before pulling on the protective cover . I check yet again that my equipment is properly secure.

The remoteness is there as she arrives and start to set up for her experiments .

I picked this as I have always had a love of birds and the fact this follows a scientist in the far north of Norway who has gone to spend a seven-week period as the seabirds she wants to see are due to migrate over and be around she is seeing if climate change is affecting the birds she is her to see the Auks Guilmonts and puffins. As she has done this, she has left her young daughter with her Ex called S who she has regular contact with Skype conversations with her daughter as communication is just basic for her as it is so remote so at times she has no outside contact. There is a lover that may be joining her but the loneliness starts to creep in and the is a s=feeling of a woman on the edge trying to escape the messy break up of her relationship and the idea of this time away seems great but the positiveness of the early part of the book gives way to paranoia as she questions her life and the work draws her to the much earlier owner of the hut she is using. This is a bleak place full of sea birds and nature as it is brought to life in the prose her world collapse will her lover arrive who where is he ?

On one of these January days, as as I sit and ponder the colours in the sky., I think about preception and the sense of sight. I consider those episodes in which I see Borghild and Olaf. I find myself thinikng if them as electrons in the mysterious world of quantum mechanics. electrons jumping from one orbit to another, releasing, with each leap closer to the nucleus, energy in the form of light. Light of varying wavelengths, each ommiting a distinctive colour.

The worldshrinks ghost of the past mix with the colurs in the sky as she finds her minding wandering and drifts.

This is another Peirene gem it took me two sittings thou it is 187 pages long which is one of the longer books. This is a woman on her own going over her past but you can also feel the world around her crashing her life has a rigid routine as she observes the bird, but also a sense of a past in the place she has chosen to live to watch the birds a sort feeling of woe in this place that has seeped into her. Her wanting to make a difference with her work plowing on whilst she reflects on the personal collapsing of her life whilst the lover that is due to arrive never seems to come as time almost slows even when she arrives and sees the boat lights fade off in the distance the remote and rugged world she has left envelopes her. I was reminded of the great book Tartar steppes which saw a soldier in a remote Desert as he waits for someone to attack him. There is a shared sense of remoteness and drifting towards madness. Have you read this books ?

A House in Norway by Vigdis Hjorth

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A House in Norway by Vigdis Hjorth

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Et norsk hus

Translator – Charlotte Barslund

Source – personal copy

I brought will and testaments earlier this year then remembered I had this by the Norweigan writer Vigdis Hjorth. Vigdis grew up in Oslo she studied Philosophy, literature and political science and has been writing both adult and children’s fiction. She writes about the dilemmas of living in Modern society, her character struggles to come to terms with a rapidly changing world and to find a meaningful way to integrate with others and realize their own potential. She has won many prizes and has a number of her books translated into English she said her influences are Dag Solstad, Bretold Brecht and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. This is the first book by her I have read.

A few days later a woman phined and introduced herself as the interperter for “your tennt Slawomira Tzebuchwaskai”. She spoke broken, but clear coherrent Norweigan. It was concerning her tenant’s housing situation. She said and she wanting to meet with Alama. And Alma was delighted and said yes because she wanted nothing more that to resolve the tenant’s housing situation. The interpreter would visit. Alma in a few days, and the pole would be there as well, almaunderstood, so did this mean that she was moving back in ?

After her husband has to return to Poland she is left as a single parent Alam still willing to help ?

The book follows the life of a divorced textile artist. She lives in an old villa that has an apartment that she has rented out once unsuccessfully so when she lets a Polish Family move in she sees them as steady and she starts work on a large commission doing a tapestry to celebrate a centenary of women’s suffrage in Norway. But then as the Famil have kids and things start to happen like the Husband has to return to Poland leaving the wife and the kids alone in the apartment but they start knawing at Alma like the Mouse that her Polish neighbor says she has but won’t take the traps out like this and other little things start making Alma regret her decision. this leads to a series of letters rent rise changes in the size and description of the apartment it size. This carries on will she get her house back will she finish her commission?

Alma wrote the long-planned letter to her tenant in order to make same demands of her as she would have done of a Norwegian by informing her of the Norwegian attitude to electricty consumption. To be more conscious of her usage and turn down the radiators at night, sort her rubbish for recycling and not mixpaper and cardboard with other waste, and she also requested that she parked her car alongside Alma’s and always in the tarmac rather than on the ground between the treesfurther down where Alma wanted the grass to grow in the summer .

The crack in their relationshipo start after her husband isn’t their little things that build up over time.

 

This is done exactly what the description of her writing does in the book we have Alma she is a fair mind woman in her eyes her kids come ever so often. especially Christmas but in your heart you feel she is only renting the apartment for the money and no matter who was there she would eventually pick fault and her we see this she wants to be fair but at the back of her mind is the wanting a quiet life and the things like clearing the snow which when she contact the landlord advice line she does this a number of times not wanting to be seen as a bad landlord. This is all about manners and trying to be polite but there is a simmering undercurrent slowly growing in Alma that silent anger that is hidden just under the surface we see it building I was reminded of the few books I read by Anne Tyler a writer that also is great at capturing a woman at a certain age that simmers so well like Alma does here. Have you read Hjorth?

Restless by Kenneth Moe

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Restless by Kenneth Moe

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Rastløs

Translated  by Alison McCullough

Source – review copy

Well,

I have reached it the 100oth review and I had a few books to choose from but I chose this as it best signifies what the blog has tried to do the last few years and that supports smaller presses through my reviews. Writers and writing that test the bounds of what is literature. So I chose Restless.grew up near Larvik, a small town outside Oslo in Norway. He currently lives in Oslo. He has studied creative writing in Bø, Bergen, and Lillehammer, Norway. Moe’s debut novel Restless won the Tarjei Vesaas debut award. This is the latest book from Nordisk books that have specialized in fresh voices and books from Scandinavia. This book is coming out this month.

We talk all the time in the dark. I give good explanations of everything, persuading you day to day. You’re not really here, and so can never really leave me, either. At nights you snuggle up to me in bed: your slim body with its small breasts against mine. I think even your body is humble. It dosen’t make much of itself. You leaf through the pages of the books- tell me I read such stranges ones. you tease me. I read Marcus Aurelius in bed I read La Rochefoucauld. He writes “weak people cannot be sincere”. I read the sentence aloud to you

ONe the opening paragraghs in the book.

As I said this is a challenging read as it has an unnamed narrator. He is trying to write a letter to women who rejected him but as the pages go on it drifts more into a personal insight into the young man’s mindset and insight into his life a lonely one. A drifter living on a student grant for a course he had left months ago. He observes the changing season the longer days of the summer as the dark night’s end he says to give him a sense of hope but that is short-lived. As he sits in his father’s armchair sinking deeper into it every day as he drifts more into a sort of modern lonely life that many people have. As he drifts off the sense he is losing it as he talks about feeling ill with this and that symptom. Just as he talks about his flat falling apart his blinds being broken and old women in the park having her last summer. Then something happens!

Today the sun is shining on my street again, but I have my back to the light and the trees outside the window. I’ve always been the type to shut myself in my room for days, weeks at a time, to work on some project or the otherthat I think will save me, withput any clear ideas as to exactly why this ine should save me when none of my previous projects have. Right now, for example: a book, a letter. I’ve chosen to prefer solitude, and would have preferred to prefer something else. All my longings are equally paradoxical. I constantly doubt whether I should want you and what I’d use you for should I get you, but I know that…

Later on and the sense of his mind drifting and his sense of lonliness.

This price winning debut is made up of short paragraphs and even a single sentence his aphorisms of the world around him. it is a book that has a restless feel a man that has been rejected wrestling with his life rejection the coming summer that changed from the dark nights and the light evening the soul of a man wrestling to write but also with discovering who he is himself like those other men on a quest Pessoa or even Leopardi he wrestles with why we are here as he tries to write this letter this is a shorter work but maybe like those great dishes you see in modern Scandinavian cooking where the portion is small but the enjoyment is in the complex nature of the taste mix the best of what i at hand to the chief at the time and this is a writer doing the same in a way. A modernist gem a man hunting for the what of modern life after a rejection one of those milestones on a young man’s journey. Another unusual gem from Nordisk books I have their last book to review but it is worth looking at all eight of there titles.

The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting

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The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting

Norwegian fiction

Original title –  Søsterklokkene

Translator – Deborah Dawkin

Source – Personal copy

I reviewed his debut novel sixteen trees of the Somme, a couple of years ago. Lars Mytting first caught the English readers with his Non-fiction book about wood Norweigan wood chopping, stacking, and drying. Then his debut np0vel that tracked history via a tree and a coffin and a family history was touching so when I read it. So when this dropped in on winstonsdad’s tower. This is the first of three books and it is based around a wooden Stave church on the side of a lake that is meant to be moved to German to make way for the New.

The sister rarely left the Hekne farmstead, even though they got about better than folk might think. They walked in a waltz- like rhythm, as if carrying a brimful water pail between them. The slopes below the farm were the only think that defeated them. Hekne was situated on a very steep incline, and in the winter the slippery paths were treacherous. But since it was a sunny slope, the spring thaw came early in the year, sometimes by March, ad then the twins would come out with the springtime sun .

Henke was amoung the earliest settlements in the valley and the family had chosen one of the bestg spots for a faermstead. They owned not one , but two seters- summer farms further up the on the mountainside, each boasting a fine milking shed and dairy and a herd of well-fed cows that grazed on the deep green grass all summer.

The Hekne have long been there and have one of the best farms that the conjoined twins live in.

we first find out about the sister bell that is in the church. The church was made in the 1200’s and the bells where cast in silver after the story of two conjoined sisters Gunhild and Halfrid Hekne. The sisters learned to weave four-handed. whose story mixes myth and history and the story of the casting of the bells that are still two hundred years later in the church. But the myths have grown as the bells have a truly unique sound. So When the village of Butangen is given a new young priest Kai Schweigaard is trying to bring the parish into the modern world as the village is caught up in myths and folklore of the local area like that of the sisters and their bell. As part of that modernizing of the parish s the removal of the stave church, he has found that some Germans want it they send a young german architect to oversee this job now add to the mix that descendant of the sisters Astrid she is a headstrong twenty-year-old. She isn’t the usual village girl that wants to settle down she is caught between her modern mind and her family history add to that she falls for the German Gerhard and struggles to battle the new priest and his changes as she juggles her history and the wanting to find out more about Gehard why this man is a ray of light to her with his city ways. Then the bells take over!!!

Gerhard Schonauer stared after the girl for a long time, Her features made him want to draw her, there was a unique quality about her. She was quick and less reserved than the other villagers he had met that morning. The description in meyer’s seemed to sum them up precisely. “The Norwegians are a proud and strong race of Germanic descnet, They are more stoic and slower than the Swedes, but not a phlegmatic as Danes. They can seem very closed and sceptical, but once one earned their trust they are loyal and open-hearted, and they are outstanding sefarer, with the world’s best martitime pilots.

The first meeting of Astrid and Gerhard left a huge impression on him as he watched her walk off after first meeting.

This is a wonderful work there is a real feel of a village caught out of time in the way the voices of Astrid and the other locals have been translated with what feels like a country twang to there voices. The book is about change that old clash of an old and new world together and the actual history of a place the village is fictional but the small mountain village he describes and the way of life lived in the village is described as very well crafted in a Norwegian review of the work I looked up to see how much research he had done on the churches places and time. This is a novel that captures you from the first line to the last and brings the reader a real sense of place it is a well craft historical novel that has a love story, family history and folklore.

The other Name by Jon Fosse

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The other name septology I-II  by Jon Fosse

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Det Andre Namnet 

Translator – Damion Searls

Source – review copy

I have twice before reviewed books from Jon Fosse I first reviewed him as he was a name that always is high on the list of Nobel Hopefuls. So when he made the Booker longlist I was happy.  He is a writer that is considered one of the best around the world at the moment and this is the first two-part of seven books. He has won the Nordic council prize and in Norway was given a Grotten one highest honors from the Norweigan royal families for his contribution to the arts. The translator learned Norweigan just to be able to translate his books. That is how good he is as a writer that said he isn’t the biggest on plot but there is more questioning within his writing on many levels.

The Art School, I think, and ever since my first show at The Beyer Gallery it was Beyer who’s sold my paintings, I think, and he always manages to sell almost allof them, but sometimes, in the first couple of years. I have to admit, they sold for a terrible price, to tell the truth, but most of the pictures sell for a good price now, and there are always a few that don’t sell for a good price now, and there are always a few that don’t sel, the best pictures too a lot of the time, and beyer doesn’t sell those ones cheap any more, he stopped doing that a loing time ago, He’d rather put them in what he calls the bank, the sideroom of the same gellery. Where he keeps and storees the lictures gthat aren’t in the show

He has brought his painting for years to help him make a living.

Here the question is one of what makes us who we are the two books tell the tales of an Asle and aging painter. They had a happy marriage but is now lonely with only his neighbor Aselik a fisherman and Beyer that runs a gallery that sells his work this is one story. But then in the same town is another painter Asle.  but this is where the paths split as one seeks salvation in people the other takes it in a bottle this leads to the usual questions of life why are we here. This is a slow work nothing really is quick it is a slow descent into the bottle and then the flip side of finding a different path out of grief this is about love but the aftermath of love those space in our world an artist can fill them with art but then as we have seen other time overs break and fall into the bottle. As they asses their lives they see that in the same place and same time things can be different. At times the prose cross and events in one life seem to be happening in the other lives.

You and this faith iof yours. Asleik says

I don’t always understand you, he says

But no one can think their way to god, I say

Because either they can feel that god is near or they can’t . I say

Because god is both a very faraway absence, yes well, being itself, yea and a very close presence I say

Maybe it’s like that for you. Asleik says

But it doesn.t really make sense, he says

God is there as well well faith and what it means at times .

I read an FT interview with Fosse in looking for info about this book he described his books as slow prose. He taught Knausgaard a long time ago. He is often compared to his pupil but I feel they are different this isn’t about his own life. In a way he is the anti-Knausgaard this is slow-moving works that explore the innermost thoughts and desires that drive us all but also those demons yes Knausgaard talks about demons in his life and his family but this is in a different way Asle’s show the flip side we all have like the dice man is life can sometimes just be broken down to a few decisions or events. so yes even a turn of dice can decide a life as death and loss of a loved one can lead to many different paths. I wonder where he will take us in the next five books this is the quiet man’s Knausgaard this is a work from a quiet man that loves to challenge his readers and himself as a writer. What are your thoughts of his writing I am a fan I like Karl Ove but this guy is next level to me he is one of the most human writers you can read?

Termin by Henrik Nor-Hansen

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Termin front cover.png

Termin by Henrik Nor-Hansen

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Termin

Translator – Matt Bagguley

Source – Review copy

I said last night when the winner was announced for this year’s Man Booker that small publishers like the winner Sandstone press and the publisher of this title Nordisk small presses are the lifeblood of fiction in Translation. They bring us those gems that the big boy publishers can’t so here is a book that was nominated for the Nordic council literature prize. Henrik Nor-Hansen has written four novels and poetry and short story collections this book was his latest novel. There is an interesting interview with the translator Matt Bagguley He describes the trouble find terms in English and the uniqueness of the voice

Kjetil Tuestad reportedly moved to his own place in late august. It was a basement flat in Bjergsted. It is known that he called his parents and wife. He had apparently said that he needed time alome. They showed understanding. In hindsight, this approach has been questioned. the immediate family were perhaps not good enough at recognising changes in Kjetil’s personality.He remembers very little from this period. In many respectshe still required help .The flat never quite came together.

The first signs he isn’t quite the man he was when he tried to set up hime alone.

The full title of the book is Termin An inquiry into violence on Norway. The book is only 80 pages but what we see is the aftermath of a violent attack on one mans life. Kjetil Tuestad was a normal man working in the Stravanger shipyard as an electrician. He had married his wife Ann and they had decided to settle down in the small village of Hommersak a place that was growing as the oil boom was in full swing at the time. that was all in 1998 and in Midsummer night he was found beaten on the outskirts of the town. The actual injuries are listed three fractures to the jaw his teeth completely bent the wrong way. Blood coming from his ear what follows is an account of his life for the next twenty years from his slow recovery with first his parents than trying to rebuild his relationship with the wife they try and have a normal life and have kids. But he is a changed man and there is a detached nature to the way his life is described and the world around him. But his world is changed and he is on the path to be a loner as he has lost that ability to connect with people. This is one man’s life falling apart after a vicious attack but also a changing world around him and a village that has changed after his attack.

Kjetil Tuestad stresses that he is only occasionally able to picture his wife in the home. He says it is also difficult to visualise the infant as he would have  looked in the summer of 2001. Kjetil reacts to the fact that he did not participate more often in this. Other memories well up quite clearly. During the holidays what would become a string of severe animal welfare cases began. Cats in particular were made to suffer.

His behaviour years later is very different and his brain injury becomes much clearer.

I choose The years as my Man Booker winner. as it broke the boundaries of what fiction is here and for me, this is what Nor-Hansen has done here it is the sort of anti-Knausgaard as whereas Karl Ove tells us everything. this book is a sort of bare minimum of a man’s life over the same period from 3000 pages to 80 pages.  I remember the scene in the film a river runs through it where the writer Norman Maclean is given a task to write by his pastor father but as he says the less we say the more we say. In fact, there is another connection as the book follows the vicious attack and in a river runs through it the end is like the beginning of this book when Normans brother is attacked. So this has a blunt style a detached nature as Kjetil life is told post attack. The only thing I have read that repeats the style of the narrator is the character in curious incident of the night there is a similar way of view the world I found that it is now just black and white but also there is no real emotion in it  that is what he lost more than the outside injuries it is the loss of empathy this maybe is one of the best views of a man with brain injuries trying to live his life as best he can when what is us is gone and maybe the shell is left to carry on and rebuild. In what is a harsh world than it was. This book comes out this week from Nordisk books.

Zero by Gine Cornelia Pedersen

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Zero

Zero by Gine Cornelia Pedersen

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Null

Translator –  Rosie Hedger

Source – review copy

Today sees the start of Woman in translation month a month that has taken off over the years I haven’t much planned but will try and fit a few books in among my Spanish and Portuguese lit month books. So to Kick off I have a powerful debut novel from Norway from Gine Cornelia Pedersen is both a writer and Actress this her debut novel won the Tarjei Vesaas award for a first book. She has also starred in the tv series Young and promising also Valkyrien both of  which are  on Walter in the Uk.

I’m 10 years old

I absorb everything unfiltered

I think that gos is listening whien I pray

I’ve seen three dead bodies, two old and one young

I cry at night and feel as if I’m all alone and no one can save me

I feel sorry for mum and dad

I realise that the concept of home has never truly existed.

I think about the fact that when I grow up and I’m allowed to decide things for myself, my joy will be complete.

I feel certain I’m going to live forever, but I think about death almost every day

The opening lines even at ten there is something in what she says that seem more than a normal ten year old would say.

This is a story told in Burst the narrator is a yoiung woman growing up. We follow her from teenager till she is in her early twenties. We find her life told in single sentences. like tweets where when they first started this is a novel in pieces.  This is a tale of a woman on a downward spiral of her life. We are let into her troubles bit by bit from the early feeling of being trap. Also not wanting to be too visible as her body changes in her puberty. Her wanting to go to Oslo. She has  a spilit with her boyfriend  of two years before she goes to the city. When she finally gets her mother to let her go. Then a spiral of self abuse, drugs and violence she ends upo for the first time in a ward then has a support worker. Then Peru and getting their becomes a dream that she finally does susing her benfit money to get there but then ends up on a holidat from hell with Men and drugs that leads her down a disaterious hole.

People on the stret stare at me

Everywhere I go they stare

I scream at one woman on the tram

Tell her she’s a bad person, that it’s people like her who are destroying the planet

She loooks away

I tell her she can look the other way for what it is worth she can turn away, but that only makes things worse

I ask if there’s something odd about me

She shakes her head

I tell her that she’s one who’s odd, with her ugly clothes and her wrinkles

Money can’t save her, I tell her

She can’t take her fur coat to hell

Later you she her parnoia when she verbally attacks a woman on the tram thinking it is her that is in the wrong for starring at her.

This was described a being like a Punk rock single by a revieew in Norway. The style is like a punk song short repeative sentences thart are like snapshot and captured insights into a life falling apart and how Mental helath can affect someones life so completely. The narrator is always claiming to be better as she hates her meds and said she doesn’t want them on more than one occasion but as the book goes on youn can see how a life can fall apart and that the drastic nature of someone offf their meds for a serious mental health issue can lead her as in the book to a far away country and into the arms of preditary men. Which leads to her downfall as she heads towards Zero. An interesting debut novel about a subject that isn’t touched enough in fiction. That of Mental Health but also what it is like being inside that downward spiral that to the narrator doesn’t seem a downward spiral.  read it in a day the pace is so fast with these choppy sentences you get drawn through the world she lives in as she describes some horrific events in snatches. This is the latest book from Nordisk books there third book 

Scenes from a childhood by Jon Fosse

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Scenes from a childhood by Jon Fosse

Norwegian short stories

Original title (part of ) – kortare Prosa

Translator and selector of the collection – Damion Searls

Source – review copy

It is strange I choose this book today. As it was just a couple of days ago we found out that the Nobel prize for this year is due to be announced in a years time alongside the 2019 Nobel. Well, today’s writer Jon Fosse is a writer that has been slowly climbing the ladder of Nobel betting. He has written a number of Novels and plays. He has won various awards Including the Nordic lit prize and the French order of merit. I have featured him in his novel Aliss at the fire . So I was pleased to see a collection of his stories, coming out from Fitzcarraldo.

THE AXE

One day Father yells at him and he goes out to the woodshed, he gets the biggest axe, he carries it into the living room and puts it down next to his father’s chair and asks his father to kill him. As one might expect, this only makes his father angrier

One of the vignettes from the first piece.

 

This is a number of stories collected together the first part of the collection is a collection of Vignettes about a childhood , there is a child like sense to the prose from Father holding an axe, through those points in childhood when things start to be notice like the time someone has a pink handbag, girls, the first smoke, the odd youth Asle we see through the young boys eyes drunk at first on some community steps and then later the older lads father grabs the youth as some pallets come crashin down on the dock near where he just was. Then we have a longer novella which in some ways had a similar theme to the curious incident of the dog in the night as a dog is killed. This death involves a dispute between neighbors. It is told from a young boys perspective so we see his view of the world. Then the last part is an older brother still a young voice talking about his young sister in another collection as his sister is born and the times they have together like falling asleep in the same bed his sister’s hands in his hair.

I think the man by the bend has shot your dog.She says

I hear her say that she thinks the man by the bend has shot my dog. What ? what is she saying? shot the dog? What can she mean someone’s shot my dog.

I saw the go and I heard a bang.

What the fuck is she saying ? shot the dog ? What the fuck does she want ?

Just now, she says

Shot the dog? I say

Yeah. I saw the dog, she says. I saw the dog run up to his house and then I heard a bang, it had to be a gun.

I looked at her and I know that if someone’s killed my dog i’m going ti kill whoever did it

THe novella “And then my dog will come back to me ” about a dog dying and who did it

This has a real sense of a writer at the height of his powers. That as a writer Fosse likes to use the bare minimum view of the world. These stories show what a subtle touch can do, these stories are like the diamond that is seen by the diamond cutter as they see it in the rough diamond each story has been cut and polished til they sparkle. The vignettes are like a captured glimpses of a life almost like the snatches of dreams those glimpse we each remember in the morning maybe not even place or time just what happened. Fosse has been compared to the greats and as this is the second book by him I have read and I am still left wanting to try more. Have you read Fosse?