Tag: nordic fiction

The Bridges by Tarjei Vesaas

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The Bridges by Tarjei Vesass

Norweigan fiction

Original title – Bruene

Translator – Elizabeth Rokkan

Source – Personal copy

I said in my look back at last month at feeling under read, well I always feel under read to me I feel you need real depth in writers you like and place you like to read from to build a huge canon as a read so for me as a reader I feel I maybe on the lwer reaches of the everest of what for me it is to be a reade yet to get to base camp.  Even after over 1500 books for me, I feel it needs to be ten times that amount to have the real breadth of knowledge. Anyway, back to this book and a favourite writer of mine, Tarjei Vesaas, this will be the fourth book on the blog from him. I still have to read The Birds, his maybe best-known book nowadays, alongside Ice Palace.  So this is a lesser-known work, but for me it’s one I feel Jon Fosse might have liked as a reader.  I see echoes of this book in Fosse’s works.  The book follows two teenage friends

Standing on the bridge, remembering.

Even though it was summer and holiday-time and there was swimming and lazing about, and much traffic over the bridge, they still kept to themselves. Other companions seemed so distant that they had no need of them, even those who did not live far away. Aud and Torvil’s friendship was such that they were afraid of anyone disturbing

It was a confident friendship most of the time, but not always. He remembered clearly how he had touched Aud one warm, lightly clad day. They had often clutched each other wildly when fighting, but this nervous hand was light as a leaf, so that Aud had started in surprise.

He did not say anything, not even her name. Just that hand.

She had started in surprise. “What is it?” Her face was burning.

Nothing,’ he said.

‘Don’t do it, then?

‘All right?

‘Or-?’

‘All right, I said.”

Both their faces were burning.

Then they had been bewildered sixteen-year-olds.

Looking back at the two friends that live at the twin houses by the bridge

The book is set around a small village that is split by a bridge. The bridge in this book is more than the actual bridge as the book unfolds. The book follows two teenagers, Torvil and Aud, who have been friends for a very long time and are just turning 18. Then, they are in the woods, and Torvil sees something is wrong with Aud and her manner towards him.  He manages to find out what has made Aud act so oddly. When she shows him a shocking discovery: a dead snake and a newborn baby hidden under some twigs, and just left there. There is no indication whose the babe is, but the rest of the book follows the two on the aftermath of finding this dead child and the effect on them psychologically in the aftermath, the fallout from this event,t but also what it is like being 18 and growing up the bridge from youth to adulthood is a recurring theme in the book.

A few yards is no distance at all. There stood the twin houses. They were not built by twins; they were called that because, from the outside, they looked identical. Two good friends had decided to build them like this in their younger days when they both married at the same time and needed a house. They wanted to live close to one another, so they each bought building land here by the bridge. And here they had Aud and Torvil at about the same time. They had the same kind of work too, at the same school.

Two trim houses, wall to wall on a flat piece of land by the river.

Torvil went into Aud’s house. Outside the late summer dusk had just begun to fall, and from indoors the lamplight filtered cosily through the curtains. The glow was welcoming. This is where a nice girl lives, and her mother who I like so much.

They have been next door to each other all their life to this happens

I said the slow style and tense psychological feel of this book reminds me of Fosse. Fosse has said he sees Vesaas as one of the writers he has modelled his writing on, and for me, of the four books from Vesaas I have read, this is maybe the nearest to what Fosse does, the sense of slowly seeing a world fall apart, with the same useof simple, terse language.  But also, they both evoke a place in their books.  Here again, Vesas make the house and bridge come to life, but also the metaphor the bridge means in the lives of the two main characters, the crossing of it for so many as the two grow up, but also deal with the dark discovery they made and the aftermath of the dead baby under the twigs haunts the events after they find it.  Have you read this book? Do you see a connection between Vesaas and Fosse? (I used a old cover as mine is a plain black print on demand of this book )

The old man and his sons by Heòin Brú

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The Old man and his sons by Heoin Bru

Faraoese fiction

Original title – Feðgar á ferð

Translator – John F West

Source – Personal copy

I find it harder to find vbooks from countries I haven’t read but I do have a srtsh of books to read every know and then and last month I ended the year with two new countries this rthe first is a book written by Heoin Bru which was the pen name of Hans Jacon Jaocbsen a faroese writer this boook came out in 1942 and was first translted into Danish in the sixties. Then, in 1970, the first novel from the Faroe Islands was translated into English. The book captures one of my favourite subjects in fiction: the clash between generations, and between old and new worlds.  The book follows parents and their children as the world around them becomes more expensive; the book, although written 80 years ago, still rings true.

His wife came in. She too was aghast and baffled. The doctor and his wife had both arrived in the country only recently, from Denmark, so that Faroese ways were strange to them. She had no idea that this thing was a whale’s kidney.

To her it was just something with blood oozing from it, that reminded her of recent and violent death. She did not doubt that Ketil was a human being, but he was not the usual kind she was accustomed to. And it cannot be denied that he did differ a little from the average Copenhagen businessman. He stood there in his home-made skin shoes, his loose breeches and long jacket. His blood-flecked beard hung down towards his belt, and on this hung a double sheath with a pair of white-handled knives, one above the other. And he was extending his earthy hands – holding up that bloody thing.

Whale meat after the hunt is shocking to some

The Partriachs of this book are Ketil and his wife live in a small village with there last son at home Kalvur a lad that has maybe a learning disablitie but is seen as unable to leave hios parents the other children have all left the small village the parentas still living a simple life and when after a whale drive a Faroe tradtion of hunting whales and then selling the meat of to alll those around in an auction means that when Ketil buys a larger than usual amount of meat he is left struggling to get by in a world where the tradtional way of living has unkown to him move to modern marketforce so this simple living man and his wife are now struggling in the world and there kids don’t help as they constantly need the parents help this is a world in flux a man caugfht out by the movement of time and how money is now king in his island home.

He went into the kitchen and squatted down on a low chair right by the door, and looked about him. Here there was brassware and linoleum, curtains, crocheted and embroidered drapery – everything you could think of, and every scrap of wood was painted. Still, he thought, if they can afford it, and like to have things this way, who are we to criticise?

‘Is the lad in?’ the old man asked as his daughter-in-law

appeared.

‘He’s in the dining-room. Carry on in, Father?

The old man hesitated a little before he went, because he knew his daughter-in-law did not really care for him, but he plucked up courage. ‘Maybe I do smell of the peat fire and the cow byre, he thought, ‘but I pay my own way, and nobody can drive me out of house and home. So he stuffed his hat into his jacket pocket and went in.

‘Fine weather we re having, Ketil began.

His son looked up. ‘Yes, good weather, he replied absently.

‘Extraordinarily good weather’ He sat at the table, fingering through a great heap of papers.

Kentil is caught up with money he hasn’t got

The book unfolds in vignettes as we see how the whale drive leads to the debt Ketil incurs and how the world he lives in is changing, though he hasn’t really noticed it.I was reminded of the west coast of Ireland, I remember visiting in the late 70s  a place that to my child eyes seemed to have been stuck in time and this is the feel of this the village and world of Ketil has missed the way the island as a whole has shofted and they are left hunting for driftwood for ther fire (This reminded me of tales of miners during the miners strike hunting sea coal on the beaches of Northumberland to keep there house warm). For me this is what i love about ficitoon at thimes is when we can make our own connections to a story that happened 80 years ago but the world is constanly in flux and there is many a Kentil from the peat cutters of Donegal to the miners of the pits of places like Shilbottle points where you and your job world is ending but no one has told you is a universal story.

Wedding Worries by Stig Dagerman

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Wedding Worries by Stig Dagerman

Swedish fiction

Original title –Bröllopsbesvär

Translators -Paul Norlen and Lo Dagerman

Source – Personal

I think we all have a canon of writers we have yet to read and review any reader worth anything or like me should I say spends a lot of times down rabbitholes absorbing the writers of the world some I forget a few days after I have read about them but others are on that list that little black book of writers you know for sure youy will get to one day something about them clicks that light in the room of your head where you have the library lof those writers you love well Dagerman has been that list for a long tiome I wait sometimes for years to I see the book in the wild and then when I see a book on a shelf I am like a hawk fast and confident i have found my prey sorry book I mean. Well, Dagerman is often mentioned alongside the likes of Joyce and Faulkner, a difficult writer, a modernist, the sort of writer I love to challenge myself as a reader. Now it is easy to see the comparison in this, his last novel, which is set over the course of one day. At a country wedding in the swedish village of  Älvkarleby

But when he comes back to the bridal bed, there has been no change. Siri is sitting like before, crying. And a fly is hovering in the corner. Then he notices that something has indeed changed: Frida is back hanging on her place on the wall. Holding herself firmly in the chair. Holding her place on the wall. Heat rises to Westlund’s head, a little fire-devil.

He grabs hold of his daughter by her slender shoulders, one in each large hand, and lifts her up toward his anger. But he encounters a fire no smaller than his. A bigger fire, actually.

He looks into a pair of eyes, a pair of eyes that he knows. That he usually closes his own eyes to. The eyes have a voice, and the voice is saying: Thus says the law, Westlund. If you had been living then they would have beheaded you. And that’s how it is with the dead, you cant look into their eyes. Just close your own.

Over the day we learn all sorts from the family members

The first thing I loved about this book was the list of characters. Now, as someone who is neurodivergent, I sometimes lose track of characters, and having a list to refer back to at the start of the book helps me greatly. The book is set on a wedding day as Hildur, the youngest daughter of the Palm family, is due to marry the local, much older Village Butcher, Hilmer. Now we get to see the day and the events that have led up to this young girl marrying a man twice her age and an alcoholic, but when she is with child and the farm hand that got her pregnant, a drunk is more appealing than being like her unwed sister who has a child. As the day goes on, secret affairs are being found out. The farm Hand Martin reappears as the day sways between a normal, nervy wedding day and heading to the abyss and oblivion, at times, where will it all be at the end when the feast happens?

“Since you’re getting married tomorrow maybe you’re in need of some trinkets, I say. Straight from the jeweler in Gävle, I say. Trinket me here and trinket me there, says West-Lund, but bring the case on over here so we can take a look.

Til be a monkey’s uncle, Westlund says looking. This here is fancy. He takes a brooch and places it on the plate. Oh my, now I know a bride who’ll be happy. Give me four, and I’ll be done, he says. One for Hildur and one for Siri. That will be six crowns even, I say. Best to take out my pouch then, Westlund says.”

All the village is caught up in the wedding and trying to be part of it

I loved this book; it had so many boxes for me as a reader. I love. Village anypone that has spent any time reading this blog know I am a huge fan of books set in villages, the microcosm of life hapopoens and this book is a perfect example as the day unfolds, we hear from a multitude of voices this remined me of the cacophony of voices we get in Faulkners AsI lay dting this is more as I head to a wedding or do I !. Secrets is another trope I love in fiction. A good secret can make a book and break a plot up into many pieces, like it does here. Love, hate, passion, and desire are all here as well. Truth and lies as well. Also that time frame one day 24 hours so much can happen I think of Ulysess but even of somehting like the Ron Howard fil where over the course of one day a story changes like this one does leaving you the reader not quite knowning how it will all end. Man, I so wish he hadn’t died. This was his final novel, written when he was 30. God, this is a masterpiece. What would he have done next?

Have you read Dagerman ?

 

 

Vaim by Jon Fosse

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Vaim by Jon Fosse

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Vaim

Translator – Damion Searls

Source – Subscription edition

It is always fun to get a new book from Jon Fosse. He is one of those writers in recent years whom I have come to love. His books are beautifully written, with recurring themes like duality, mirrors, existential themes, and motifs. This is his first book since he won the Nobel, and one always feels that one of two things can happen when a writer wins a prize as big as the Nobel. That’s why they struggle to match up to the earlier books, or they carry on, and I wondered which way Fosse would go. I don’t know why I was worried; this is another slice of what we have all come to like about his books, and the first in a new trilogy.

I can’t remember how many years, and of course it was a stupid idea to name the boat after Eline, but I’d probably heard that a boat should have a female name, and since the name Eline was the one that was constantly spinning around in my head, yes, the boat got named Eline, Eline the person had already been on my mind for several years, often to the point where it was hard to stop thinking about her, yes, and so that’s how the boat got named Eline, and there was a lot of talk going around about that name, yes, that’s what Elias told me, yes, apparently it was so bad that some people called me Eline instead of Jatgeir, there’s Eline, they said when they saw me, and when Elias told me that yes well I didn’t ask any more questions, that was just the way it was going to be on that subject, there was nothing I could do about it anyway, that’s how it was, and well it was nice that Elias dropped by to see me every now and then, he was the only person who did, and he was the only person I ever dropped by and visited either and now I can already see the bay there at Sund,

Elias and how Jatgeir called his boat after the girl he loved at a distance

This book is divided into three parts the first is about an older man Jatgeir we not told how old he is other than he has no family and his beard is greying and he has a boat called the Eline after a girl he had loved all his life and now in what from the way he talks is his lster life he has gone on a yearly trip to a city Bjorgvin from his small fishing village of Vaim. He has no real reason other than to fetch a spool of black thread and a needle to fix a button back on a shirt. When he ends up getting stung by the shopkeeper and her son over the thread, he goes back to his boat, then, after paying 250 krona for the thread, he heads out. This is where the story starts to get strange. He tells of the only other person to use the boat with him, Elias, and that he is now heading to Sund and to a smaller port for the night. He again visits the shop, purchases a second needle and thread, and is shocked to pay the same price. So that night, he hears a voice, and it is Eline, the girl he likes but never told, talking to him, and they elope as she has missed Vaim, his home, and where she grew up. Then, in part, we hear from Jatgeir’s friend Elais after Jatgeir has come back with Eline, and the two friends who often spent time together have not been together for a year and a day. This is a phrase Eline uses in the first part of the story. Then he is visited by a ghost, but who is the ghost? The third story loops back to Frank Eline’s husband on Sund and his story, but as ever, there are loops of names and phrases and boats with similar names in this tale, and it is very strange in the end

She called me Frank, from the first time we met she called me Frank – hi Frank, nice to see you, she said to me, or something like that, it was in Bjørgvin, it was at the restaurant called The Fowl where I’d gone with the two guys I fished with on the Elinor, the three of us did all kinds of fishing on that ship back then, and then it would sometimes happen that if we’d had a good catch and got a good price for the fish that we’d take a little trip to Bjørgvin, dock at one of the quays on The Wharf, spend a night there usually, getting in sometime in the afternoon and leaving at dawn or sometime the next morning

Frank or Olaf as he is meeting Eline for the first time in the third part of the book

This book is like a Möbius loop, as you have the feeling ELine is going around and around with these two men, like a moon orbiting two planets: as one pulls, she goes from Jatgeir to Frank, or is it Olaf who was Frank? Is he Olaf? Add to this: boats with similar names; both men have boats called Eline, and the other boat has a similar-sounding name as well. Then we have the recurrent mention of a year and a day in the book; it keeps cropping up, but at other times, time is fluid, and the events seem to have happened over a year, while in other passages, it is this year and a day that is said. Friendship love moen that are very quiet and a woman that likes to get her own way lead to a novella that twists in on itself and at times seems to repeat events and places in the first and last story, like the two men are ghosts that could have met at some point . This is a classic piece of Fosse, and I can’t wait to see where he takes this story, how many more twists and turns we get from the folk on Vaim.This is the best books I have read this year so far.

Advent by Gunnar Gunnarsson

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Advent by Gunnar Gunnarsson

Icelandic fiction

Original title – Advent

Translator – Philip Roughton

Source – Personal copy

I saw this on a YouTube video a while ago. It was mentioned it was a novella, and with the Christmas theme, it seemed great as it is Advent time. The book is by an Icelandic writer who wrote more in Danish than Icelandic. Back then, when he was writing, this meant his writing had spread to the Nordic countries and Germany. He was up for the Nobel Prize many times. In fact, when Haldor Laxness won, there was a brief time it was considered that Gunnarsson could have shared the prize with him. So it is great to see a new translation of a book that was first published in English in the 40s.It also had an afterword by the great Jon Kalman Stefansson, one of my favourite all-time writers.

Benedikt sniffed the hay, lifted the sack: You thought more about Eitill’s belly than my old back when you filled this!

The farmer chuckled, and as they went in, he pinched the candle’s wick between two fingers. It’s most merciful to a candle not to allow it to languish uselessly, but rather, to revive it on occasion to a life of service – and this, of course, is most thrifty as well.

They went to the family room and there met the housewife and group of children, and the Benedikt who was a guest in the house had food set for him on a table leaf under the gable window: smoked meat straight out of the pot with potatoes in white sauce – good food for cold days, real Christmas food.

As he sets off getting ready

Advent takes us to the dark, cold winters of Iceland and a yearly activity that is done by a shepherd, Benedikt, for the last 27 years, he has headed up to the distant fields with the sheep. Had fed on during the summer to fetch back the last few that have got stranded and cut off there. He does this with his trust dog Leo and a ram called Etill (which made me smile, it brought back memories of a story of a family friend in Ireland that adopted a lamb that grew and thought it was a house pet, like a dog). This was how I imagined the ram part of the sheepdog. What we follow is this journey he has done many a year with his backpack supplies as they head from bothy to bothy in search of those last sheep. That is it, but the beauty is in the atmosphere.

Now the stray sheep in the mountains would surely be buried in snow, covered over by a snowy winter blanket before he could find them and bring them home. Because you really couldn’t hope that they would have the sense to seek the heights – the heights, where the wind blew hardest, but which were their only salvation when earth and sky stand as one. When wildness rages, you hardly dare hope.

And if they had indeed headed to the heights, they may just as well have frozen to death! But now he wanted to sleep. Or just lie there alone. A person shouldn’t share his anxieties with others. Everyone has enough of their own.

And now they slept in the farmhouse’s small family room, where heath and mountains met.

And outside, the storm raged, raged and razed; many a storm raged around the world, many things happened. For this was just a small recess of the world. Here, practically only the sky raged;

winter is hitting hard will he find the sheep !

I don’t have an adult Christmas book. One of the reasons I picked this is to add to the few things I like this time of year. I love the box of delights, I will flick through and every. A few years ago, I read through this Christmas kids’ book. Another go to is Conna Doyles tale The Blue Carbuncle A holmes story. Now I will be adding this to my winter reads, a tale that brings you to this yearly Advent adventure of fetching the lost sheep. It isn’t the journey so much as the way Gunnarsson builds the atmosphere; the three face the biting winds, snow, and the depths of the Icelandic winter. The country and weather is almost the fourth character in the book.  The snow almost falls off the page; you nearly need mittens to hold the pages as you read !! It is about existence and nature and so ,uch more as we see in Steffansson after word.If you have read him, you’ll like this short novella, and if you haven’t read him yet, what great writers have you yet to discover! Do you have a favourite Christmas tale?

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

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The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

Danish fiction

Original title – Voksbarnet

Translator – Martin Aitken

Source -Personal copy

The blog has shrunk so much it means I buy a lot more books than I used to in fact in a way. I hated asking for books and only got sent books from people who just sent them to me or asked me. I always hated asking and rarely do now. Hebnce in recent time a lot of the books I read are books i buy which means on the whole they are books I want to read or books I want give the writer another chance the larter is the case with this I think when we read the employees for theshadow booker international a few years ago . I was’t the biggest fan of employees. I like some of the prose style and the way you could capture even in the translationwho seemed to be human and who was artifical in fact in the few years since the book it is maybe more apt as a story with the jump in ai or thou I still find the use of the word AI isn’t right it is still just complex algorthims and compiled information worked together is that thought I think not but that is just me anyway I am drifting. The reason this appealed to me is the fact that I love old witch tales from the witch trials in the US, to women buried under stones on beaches in Scotland, through things like the Pendle witches. There was something mad about this time in the world. So when  I found out Olga Ravn had looked into the case of Christenze Ktuckow and came up with this novel

Whenever a woman nearby was about to give birth, a messenger would make haste to the midwife and whoever else the pregnant woman had asked to help.

All let go then of whatever was in their hands, and came as quickly as they could. Some in the night, others in the frost of morning; with fleetness of foot they came, and barely inside the door would take upon them the housekeeping. They would introduce a new and temporary regime, which meant that those who normally frequented the house would have to find new places to stay. I saw these women form a ring around the one in labour and lead her to the bath house. I saw them douse the burning-hot rocks with water; I saw the steam and the scalding herbs. They undressed the birthing woman, and the naked one was Anne Bille, the young mistress of Nakkebølle. And by the stone wall of the bath house they had placed me in the ground, and I lay and listened there as Anne Bille gave birth to the first of her children.

because she didn’t want a child she was considered dangerous

The novel has a narrator that isn’t human, a lump of beeswax in the form of a human child. That Chistenze had made and carried around. Add to that she seemed to have no interest in the local men or settling down, and married, this was enough in the 17th century for her to be considered a witch. What this is about is fear and prejudice, as Christenze and her friends are seen as outsiders for their views. Added to this, about the time she makes the doll, A lot of strange shit happens. We have what always happens. She tries to escape to the city, but this makes things worse. But it is also about a woman in love with other women at a time that was a totally unthinkable idea. But this could be set to any modern situation, being Trans, being an immigrant, just not fitting in. What she has done is wonderful: she has made a tale set in the past that shows us now what is so wrong. It is also told in a broken style of crumbs and fragments, often with very visceral words.

I saw in the night cats leave the church in droves, I saw them conduct themselves with swine in the street, and I saw the gravedigger in the churchyard puff on a cabbage pipe; I saw in a single vision the town’s fleas in all their thousands, I saw blood in small and large quantities, I saw barley porridge and the insipid salt herring. I saw funeral pyres and body parts displayed on the square as a deterrent. I saw money change hands and land be par-celled out, I saw humans bought and sold, lace underneath a skirt. I saw brother turn against brother, and mother against daughter. I saw hearts thirst for revenge and hands that craved for violence. This was not Nakke-bølle, it was not even Funen; shudders ran even through my hardy wax, this was Aalborg, 1616, city of hate.

there is just a beauty in her writing style here and Aitkens translation of it

This is a book remarkable for this time of year, a sort of neo horror with a lot of folklore and fear dropped in. It has a very fragmentary structure to it. But it also has a dark ending of what happens to these women. This is an accurate tale. This happened, and this is what grabbed me: one of my favourite albums is Giles Gorey, a farmer who was killed in Salem, famous for his last word More weight as he was crushed between two boards. What these tales show that then it was being a witch that got people killed. Being Gay would get you killed through time. Now, just wanting to find a better life will get you killed. We live in a time where witch hunts still happen, but we don’t call them witch hunts. Group Panic and fear, we think the dark ages have gone, we are heading headlong back into them !!! Anyway, if you want a thought-provoking and different book about one woman’s life told from a wax doll she made herself, this is the book for you. Safe say I am now more of a fan of Ravn;’s books. Have you read this ?

 

 

 

Nothing to be rescued by Ásta Sigurdardóttir

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Nothing to be rescued by Ásta Sigurdardóttir

Icelandic short stories

Original title – Sunnudagskvöld til mánudagsmorguns

Translator Meg Matich

Source – Review copy

I had held this back with this post in mind I love celebrating milestones on the blog, and this is a milestone, although I had hoped to reach it a few weeks ago. However, this book is the 1,500th book I have reviewed since the blog began. I chose this for several reasons. Nordisk Books is a small publisher and has always sent me their books to review. Plus this is the type of writer I like to review those lost gems. Asta Sigurdottir lived in the wilds of Iceland until she was 14. With no formal schooling to complete, she earned her diploma and a teaching qualification. She also stood out by styling herself like the Hollywood idols she loved, and she lived a bohemian life, which at the time was very challenging. She had a drinking problem, which ended her life early, and paid for her life via Nude modelling for art students.

The oystercatcher is black with red feet. Its call is a strange plip-plip. The redshank is grey and has a loud twang. The ring-necked plover is small, its plumage is striking, and it can sprint faster than all the other birds.

There’s a lot for poor little children to see in the heath

and at the sea.

There are shells, pretty stones, and mussels. And many strange things, too: profuse barnacles on seaside boulders, snails and tiny shrimp under pebbles.

And though most things are off-limits to a miserable four-year-old girl without parents, curiosity and the pursuit of truth run stronger in her than any fear or terror.

She set off, determined.

I said I loved this descriptions of birds they saw by the beach !

The collection consists of ten short stories, and in a way, it captures both her early life in the countryside and her later years. Reykjavik as an adult. We have a story like Lambing season set in the countryside, the harshness of nature’s Hardship, whether rural or in the city, is a recurring theme in the stories. In fact, nature is always in the stories in one ose the later stories. As the story unfolds, there is talk about the birds seen on the beach. Then there is stories set in the city. Like the street in the rain about a woman that seems to be a thinly veiled version of the writer herself, a nude model drunk at night falling around the street drunk.Just a glimpse into her own problems. This captures a world going from the isolated Iceland to the country we know now, but also the post-World War II struggles that partly affected females in the country as they were shielded from US servicemen. This is the dark female view of these years, what it was like to have an abortion, as in another of the stories, to be drunk, to lose a home. This is a walk on the darker side of the country.

…and then the big, big animal runs and runs, chasing the little animal, harder and harder, but it isn’t scared and it isn’t tired like the little animal because the game is such great fun. It’s like a cat tormenting a little mouse before killing it. It’s such great, great fun!

The man paused to catch his breath. He’d gotten himself excited. It was even better than the cinema. There, it’s dark and you can only hear the audience’s horror, but in this child’s pale and gaunt face, he could read the terror.

Her grubby little hands gripped her armrest like a vice and she sat pigeon-toed, her feet glued to the polished floor.

She looked like an animal that’s scared half to death.

He admired his own creative genius, his ability to play so with the child’s imagination. Of course, scaring a six, seven year-old child is no great feat, you could argue. After all, she was small for her age and immature; anybody could manage it. But that wasn’t the case here.

The opening story a father tells stories at night

I think this is perhaps the closest you can get to an Icelandic kitchen sink drama. Her female leads could have stepped off a page of Shelagh Delaney’s play;, these are the Nordic cousins of Jo from A Taste of Honey. Or a connection to the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, another writer whom we as English readers have only recently discovered. She would have been familiar with her works, I think, but they are often compared to one another. She was also around at the same time as the Atom Poets, a term for a group of modernist poets coined by Halldor Laxness, who were around the same cafes, bars, and places that Asta hung out and in the same magazines she published in as well. So if you are after a slice of what it was like to be poor, a drinker and struggling in Iceland in the fifties, this is the collection for you, a powerful little collection of a writer that should have been better known and a fiction book to be the 1500th book I have reviewed on the blog.

Do you have a favourite lesser-known writer in translation should be known to a wider audience?

Supporting Act by Agnes Lidbeck

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Supporting Act by Agnes Lidbeck

Swedish Fiction

Original title –Finna sig

Translator Nichola Smalley

Source – Subscription book

I have long been a fan of the books published by Peirene Press over the years, even though they are now in different hands. The concept of novellas that can be read in the time it takes to watch a film remains the same. Another of their years had miniature epics, and this book would fit in that selection of books. It is a small epic. One Woman’s Life is told over the span of this book. I find it amazing that this was the debut novel; the narrative and arc of the book feel like they are from a far more experienced writer. Agnes Lidbeck had worked for the Swedish Institute while writing this book and has since been a cultural commentator for a Swedish newspaper. Her father is a well-known Swedish director, and her half-sister is an actress.

When a woman becomes a mother, the unit of measurement for her worth shifts from that denoting her power to attract to that denoting her body’s durability.

Motherhood can be likened to the wearing of religiously coded clothing. The flesh becomes anonymous, suited for things other than desire.

The mother must not be an individual who – through the force of her unique proportions, waistline to nail length – can be distinguished from others.

For that reason, she must no longer be called by a name or by some onomatopoeic metaphor. Instead, she must, like all tools, be named for her function.

One of the quotes from what must be old gudies to motherhood!

 

The book follows Anna, whom we meet as she has become a mother, and how her life changes as a result of motherhood, as well as her connection with her husband, Jens. This is a book about what it is to be a mother. Still, it also has a sprinkling of what looks like old guides to being a mother and over the years, the relationship between her and Jens becomes flat, and she is now just the mother of his kids. She and Jens grab moments, but there is a sense it isn’t enough. The kids are growing and in time theystart having there own lives this is when the book sees whether Jens and Anna can spark there marriage back but when in the latter part of the book by chance she meet the writer Ivan she falls fr this older man, but this leads to her having another female role as soon after she gets a divocrce and they get together Ivan and Anna he starts to have dementia and with his kids she becomes a caregiver.

Lying beside the person you know so well and still trying to creep imperceptibly closer: as though rejection would be less painful if it were not spoken out loud.o.

She curves her back but still Jens does not press himself against her. She breathes as though she is sleeping and he soon drifts off. She lies awake, tense so as to be as clear as possible: here are my arse and thighs, there is no belly here, here are my breasts, where a hand might land as if by accident. Jens will not wake; she feels her construction crumble: her arse and thighs suddenly insignificant, her stomach bearing the traces of two children, her breasts too, they are used up and have no further meaning. What gives him the right to respond or not respond as he wants?

What is this mechanism that gives him this right to have other thoughts in his head?

The cracks appear when she wonders what Jens is thinking ?

I loved the arc of this book, it is one woman’s life. It may be, in a way, the female version of Stoner, a life in a book. Anna’s life seems on a course, and always when the light is there for it to get better, it disappears. But it also captures the traditional female role. I laughed at the interchapter quotes from what seemed to be old motherhood books and later about being single and a caregiver. Showed how the female role is viewed. I was also thinking of the before trilogy just as I had watched a video of that selection of film this is like a few glimpses of a life the passion of early mortherhood, then the mother role, then the empoty nest and what happens next and finally what happens when love dies and temption gets in the way. I said it feel like it is a book that is written by a writer that had written a lot if books it flows in Nichola translation, I have loved all the books she has translated in recent years. For me this should be on next years international booked it is high on books that will be on my books of the year. Do you have a favourite book you’d call a small epic?

Wayward Heroes by Halldór Laxness

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Wayward Heroes by Halldór Laxness

Icelandic fiction

Original title – Gerpla

Translator Phillip Roughton

Source – Personal copy

When I first looked at the list of books for the year of 1952,, this book was one of the first to catch my eye as I had a book set in Iceland in the last club year, and I have also covered a couple of other books from Laxness and I love the fact that his books are getting newer translations in recent years. This is the case with this book, which came out a few years ago. I bought the American copy, so I’m not sure how it was published in the UK. As I’m a massive fan of Archieplagpo books, I think they’re works of art in themselves. Anyway, this came in the later part of his writing years and was his take on the Icelandic sagas. But apart from that, he had used the saga style of telling a story to make an ancient saga, as told, reflect events that were happening at the time the book was published, not long after World War II, at the start of the Cold War. He has cleverly rebuilt the sagas to use the past as a mirror to the present

Then Jöour Klangsson rode away. It was near sunset. When Jour was gone, the boy jumped down, walked over to where his father was lying across the path, and took a closer look at his body. The blow had disfigured his face, and blood and brains oozed like porridge from the crack in his head. One of his arms jerked at the shoulder before the man went limp and died – that twitch was his last. Porgeir Hávarsson was astonished at how easily his father died, despite his having fought berserkers in Denmark and brought fire and slaughter to Ireland. He had always believed his father to be one of the greatest champions in the North. The boy stood outside for a long time before going to tell his mother. Finally, he went in. He was seven years old at the time.

The end of the first chapter

 

What he has done in his retelling of the sagas is turn them on their head and see how the violence the Vikings committed all over Europe was, at times, senseless violence that followed them around the world. So at the heart of the tale, brothers Þormóður and Þorgeir are based on actual figures in the Icelandic sagas. But what he does so well as he recounts their adventures and eventual deaths is that it is barbaric, and also tells the story comically, with a nod towards events happening in the world he knew in the 1950s. From them getting stuck and what others view as trollo like figures in the North of Greenland looking after them (I found it strange with all the recent coverage of another barbarian in Trump wanting this country) The style is like being sat at a fire for weeks at the brothers years of travel and m ishaps and violence is recounted!

PÓRELFUR, PORGEIR Hávarsson’s mother, came from Hordaland in Norway, a region harsh and forlorn, where it had long been the custom for men’s sons who had little chance to thrive to travel abroad and acquire wealth through plunder.

Some went to Russia, others to the British Isles. In Hordaland, those who never undertook a Viking raid were deemed worth-less. Yet none knew more valiant tales of the trials of the Vikings, their battles and sea-voyages, than those who never ventured from home. Among these, it was the nursemaids who had the best stocks of lore. In fair verses, they extolled the Vikings feats: the prowess, valor, and gallantry that true men display in distant lands, yet do so more rarely the closer they are to women. For the young sons of Hordaland crofters, such lore was the only provision and dowry that they received from their mothers before leaving home – and likewise, Pórelfur had little else to lavish on her son than tales of the prowess of champions of yore and paeans to kings who win the devotion of ambitious crofters’ sons with their bounteousness, rewarding stout hearts with weighty rings.

The openiong of the third chapter capture that saga style well, as far as I know !

Now I haven’t read the Icelandic sagas, I felt this might help with the style of the book, which has a specific flow that feels remarkably like it is trying to be in the style of the sagas with a modern twist and comic in style, which is hard to pull off. Still, he does in parts, and thus the novel could be told by firelight. At times, this makes it hard to follow as every detail of people is built as the prose slowly builds at times and is also maybe a little hard to follow as A reader, I had start this monthgo and if it wasn’t for the fact I had pick it up now for this week I would maybe waited a while to get back to it. But it is also easy to see how the brother’s adventures could be a mirror of all that is going on at the time the book was written, and also now. A lot of the book is around the brother sailing and taking over different places, but also in a way, this has a modern twist to the time, just as the Cold War is beginning, and those lines around Europe are being changed, and violence and people taking over places is still happening. Have you ever read any books by Halldór Laxness?

 

 

On the calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle

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On the calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle

Danish fiction

Original title – Om udregning af rumfang

Translator – Barbara J Haveland

Source – Review copy

This book wasn’t out when the long list came out, so I managed to get a review copy of it. It is the first of a series of five books that the writer initially self-published. But it has since gained ground and has been translated into many languages. Solvej Balle had an earlier book translated into English in the nineties and also wrote radio dramas. She was heard as one of the new female writers in the nineties from Nordic countries with a modernist writing style. But this book sees her taking a turn with the style of this book, which is the first in a series of seven books that follow people like the main character in this book, Tara, as she is caught in a loop of time reliving the same day. Now Balle says she had the idea for this book years before Groundhog Day, which is a film with a similar idea. But the time loop was in science fiction before Heinlein wrote a short story in the late fifties around time travel (I used to like his books and short stories as a kid)

I have moved back to the table by the window and before long I hear Thomas’s feet on the stairs and the passage again.

I hear him in the kitchen and the hall. I hear him open the door facing the road and go out to fetch a leek from the garden and some onions from the shed. I can hear him pulling on the pair of wellingtons by the door. I can hear him walking down the side of the house, and then nothing until he returns with his vegetables. I hear him chopping vegetables for soup.

Hear the rattle of the pot on the stove and, once the soup is ready, the scrape of chair legs on the kitchen floor. A little later I hear the gush of water through the pipes as Thomas washes his plate in the kitchen sink, then I hear him putting the plate back in the cupboard before going through to the living room. He spends his evening reading Jocelyn Miron’s Lucid Investigations and it’s almost midnight before he switches off the hall light and goes upstairs, but that is a while off yet, the evening is just beginning. Thomas is getting changed in the bedroom above and I am remembering a long succession of November days that have begun to run together in my mind.There are 121 days to remember. If 1 can.

The opening as she starts tio record the days in a journal

SO the framing devices of this book are that Tara and her husband Thomas are antique book sellers and are in Paris  for one night on the way to attend an auction and buy books. But we meet Tara as she wakes on her 121st, 18th November. One day she got stuck in. The lop of this day, but for her, she has just settled for this as her life, and what we see is what happens when you accept b43eing in the same day, how those subtle little changes occur every time she relives the day, change the day slightly this is a nuanced book about little changes. The only actual event in the whole day was meeting an old friend and his girlfriend for a meal, in which her hand was burnt and thus held in cold water. The title is a nod to this moment, and it is a way to calculate volume from the displaced water. Paret me things, this book has a huge nod to the French Oulipo group. The circumstance of this book is that the character is stuck on 18th November for a year, as the book carries on . But how do you take that as a way to write ?

Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside of our con-trol, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or that of even smaller particles. There are no precipices or distances in our relationship. It is something else, a sort of cellular vertigo, a sort of electricity or magnetism, or maybe it’s a chemical reaction, I don’t know. It is something that occurs in the air between us, a feeling that is heightened when we are in each other’s company. Maybe we are a weather system – condensation and evaporation: we are together, we look at one another, we touch one another, we condense, we come together, we make love, we fall asleep, we wake and revert to our strange bond, a quiet weather system with no natural disasters. Or a weather system which, until the eighteenth of November saw no disasters.

Later in the book her view of it all in a way

That is the question she has taken a different route to than Groundhog Day. What happens when the person stuck in the time loop just accepts it instead of making use of it like in Groundhog Day? What happens when the changes over the day after day are ever so subtle and gradual? This is what she has captured. If Knausgaard wrote sci-fi, this would be the subtle little things that happen in the days as they unfold. As I say, it reminds me of the sort of challenge Oulipo writers set themselves in their writing. A sort of waiting for Godot, but this is a woman just waiting for the 19th of November, stuck in the 18th, like Beckett’s characters stuck waiting for the elusive Godot. I love to see how she will carry this on in the following six books. I have been told there are other characters in the other books! Have you read this? What are your thoughts?

Caesaria by Hanna Nordenhök

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Caesaria by Hanna Nordenhök

Swedish fiction

Original title – Caesria

Translator – Saskia Vogel

Source – Review copy

I am a little late to this one. I had hoped to get to it earlier as Heloise is a small publisher bringing some exciting books out in translation from around Europe. I was drawn to this as I saw Hanna was a translator from Spanish to Swedish and had done books from Melchor and Zeran. Both of which works I have enjoyed. She also had success with this book, and her follow-up novel Wonderland made a number of the year lists in Sweden. This is maybe the perfect creepy book for winter.It follows what happens when a doctor performs a caesarian. He was an early gynaecologist. But he then keeps the baby for his own.

Maybe it really had been the badger that screamed on those summer nights, maybe the screams had not been Beda’s but the badger’s, but for some reason the animal had stayed silent on the night we took to the woods. And I wonder if any of what followed that winter, the winter during which the one who called himself Master Valdemar arrived at Lilltuna, would have happened had I not discovered my morbid disposition. The disease that had begun in one loca-tion, only to spread, which is when I’d started beating it into submission with tightly wound bandages.

The scream of the badger one night

A babe ripped from her mother’s stomach and whisked off to a remote country estate of Dr Eldh. He is an early gynaecologist who rescues the baby from a mother who later died. He kept the mother’s pelvis after she had died, something he tells Caesaria. The book is told in the years that followed as surrounded by servants, the young girl Caesaria is trapped in this rural doll house like a living doll just for the Doctor to see Caesaria, hence the title of the book and the procedure the Dr had used to bring the Baby into the world. We follow the young girl over the following years trapped in the estate as the only outside influences are the doctor’s visits over the years. Hanna captures the seasons so well, the height of summer and the bitter cold and darkness of the winters in this remote estate, as we see a girl heading to become a woman. What will be her fate at the doctor’s hands? What was his intention in having her there all those years? Will she be okay? Later in the book, another man also appears to be living on the estate. He, a conductor from Copenhagen, is invited to the estate to recover? But when we hear screams in the night as he has his way with one of the maids, we fear for Caesaria. The Dr seems to come less as she gets older as well!

Doctor Eldh had then made several small incisions in the exposed uterus, and jets of blood the length of quill feathers spurted from it.

The anaesthetised woman had then suffered a severe and prolonged contraction of the uterus, and sponges were pressed against the bowels to stem the haemorrhaging: when the contractions subsided, the uterus was cut right through, and the lifeless little creature, covered in birthing custard, who was me, could be plucked out and resuscitated, by means of insufflation and cold compresses.

How she was brouyght intpot he world as he did one of the first caesarian operations on her mother

The book is v told in observations and descriptions of the events with no real dialogue; it is a gothic tale of a girl growing up alone as a living doll for a doctor. Why he does it has never really gone into detail. It says a lot about the uncontrollable nature of Male power at the time, which was late 19th century Sweden in the early years iof Gynaecology and Dr Eldh is sadly a leading surgeon.. The fact he could just tear (Well, do a Caesarian ) the baby that became Caesaria from the dying mother and whisk him off. To live like a sort of child-like Miss Haversham in an estate, I can see Caesaria being like Haversham as the estate rots around her, trapped in the world as she isn’t allowed to leave and see the wider world she is trapped in the confines of the estate. A dark gothic tale of male abuse of a woman and a young girl a stolen choldhood. A girl becomes a living doll, a toy for the Dr to come and play with occasionally. But what happens when the doll becomes a young woman? What happens when his visits stop? How will a girl unaccustomed to the world cope? All this is captured in such detail that you feel the summer heat, rotting leaves, and snow in the winter. A book that is both disturbing for the reader but also thought-provoking. Partly based on actual events at the time, it seems even darker to read. Have you read this or any other books from Heloie Press?

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?