Tor Ulven is one of the most renowned Norwegian authors of the twentieth century, beginning his career writing poetry and ending it with unclassifiable explorations of the possibilities of prose, reminiscent of writers as disparate as Laura Riding and Peter Handke. Replacement, his only novel, published two years before Ulven’s suicide, is a miniature symphony, wherein the perspectives of fifteen unrelated characters are united into what seems a single narrative voice: each personality, having reached a point of stasis in their lives, directing the book in turn. These people reminisce, dream, reflect, observe, and talk to themselves; each stuck in their respective traps, each fantasizing about how their lives might have turned out differently. A masterpiece of compression and confession, Replacement dramatizes the tension between the concrete realities we think we cannot alter, and our interior lives, where we feel anything might still be possible.
