The latest addition to my website is Vigdis Hjörth‘s Om bare (If Only). Ida Heier is married with two children and a successful playwright. One day at a conference she meets Arnold Bush (short, balding). He is a professor of German. They end up in bed. The rest of the book describes her obsession with … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jon Fosse‘s Trilogien (Trilogy). This work consists of three linked novels. We start with Alida and Asle. Both are seventeen. Asle’s father is dead and his mother now dies, meaning he has to leave the boathouse where he and his mother lived. Alida’s father is also dead and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jon Fosse‘s Kvitleik (A Shining). A man who lives alone drives his car into a forest and gets stuck. There has been no sign of human habitation for a while so he does not know what to do. He sees a path into the forest and thinks it … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jon Fosse‘s Morgon og kveld (Morning and Evening) . We first meet Johannes as he is being born, the second child of Marta and Olai. When we next see him, he is old and aching. His beloved wife, Erna, is long since dead as is his best friend … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jon Fosse‘s Naustet (Boathouse). This is an early Fosse novel but still recognisable as part of his exploration of the dark Norwegian soul. Baard is in his thirties but still lives with his mother and has no job except occasionally playing guitar at weddings and dances. One day … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Jon Fosse‘s Det er Ales (Aliss at the Fire). Signe and Asle are a married couple with no children who live in the large house where Asle and his forebears grew up, next to a fjord. In this book they spend much time staring out of the windows … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Vigdis Hjorth‘s Er mor død?(Is Mother Dead?). Johanna, now sixty, is a Norwegian artist, living in Utah. Her husband, Mark, has died and her only child, John has moved to Copenhagen so she decides that it is time to return to Norway. However she is estranged from her … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Erlend O. Nødtvedt‘s Vestlandet [Westland]. This is about a road trip made by the author and his friend the painter Ingve Pedersen. In a battered Ford Camry, they set out from Bergen to the Westland region of Norway (the rainiest region of Europe) carrying the skull of Anders … Read more
I have now read twenty Norwegian novels in a row. To sum up a national literature, let alone an entire nation on the basis of reading twenty arbitrarily selected novels may seem foolhardy but nothing ventured…. The first point to make about these novels (and other Norwegian novels I have read) is that many of … Read more
Yes, this novel is about borders, particularly national ones but also borders between people. Apart from a very large section involving the Battle of Stalingrad, much of this novel is set around the Luxembourg-Belgum-German border. We start with the Ardennes Offensive (aka the Battle of the Bulge) when a soldier serving in the US army … Read more