Norwegian Literature Series – serie

Edwin Mortens is almost blind, but has good hearing; his wife Erna is hard of hearing, but has excellent eyes. Paralyzed from the waist down, Edwin sits locked in his bathroom all day, every day, trying to liberate his mind from his body. The experiment is going relatively well: nearly all his bodily functions have ceased, his limbs are in a state of decay, and his digestive system is in the process of breaking down. “This body,” he says, “is a sewer.” To pass the time, Edwin dedicates his days to chewing gum and screaming at his wife, on whom he is, nonetheless, entirely dependent; while Erna’s life, despite Edwin’s constant abuse, revolves around her hideous husband. Edwin and Erna live in a state of perfect equilibrium—fueled by habit, cruelty, humiliation, and quite possibly love—until a young maintenance man is called to replace a lightbulb in Edwin’s bathroom, and the “Siamese twins” find themselves embroiled in a new and vicious struggle for power.

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.

The second volume in Stig Sæterbakken’s loosely connected “S Trilogy,” Self-Control moves from the dark portrait of codependent marriage featured in the acclaimed Siamese to a world of solitary loneliness and repression. A middle-aged man, Andreas Feldt, feeling that he is unable to communicate with his adult daughter over the course of a friendly lunch, announces on an inexplicable whim that he is going to get a divorce. Though his daughter is initially shocked, she quickly assimilates this information and all returns to normal. Faced with this virtual invisibility—for no matter what actions he takes, the world seems to take no notice—Andreas is cut adrift from the certainties of his life and forced to navigate through a society where it seems virtually everyone is only one loss of self-control away from an explosion of dissatisfaction and rage.

When seventeen-year-old Aksel Morander encounters Amalie, it proves a turning point in his life. Not only does he fall in love for the first time, but he is introduced to a world unfamiliar and unconventional, which places everything around him in a new light. Finding himself raised up from the loneliness and darkness of what has gone before, he is forced to reassess all he holds dear as he is initiated into what makes life worth living. But jealousy and fear of abandonment lurk in the shadow of this first love. An intense novel about loneliness and agonizing passion, employing a reverse chronology that moves toward a fateful beginning.

Inspector Kristian Wold is assigned to a year-old missing person’s case. His superiors’ instructions are clear: one last review before they shelve it. Neverthe- less, when the mother of the 14-year-old missing girl asks to see him, his conscience gets the better of him and he agrees to a meeting; a meeting that has unfore- seen consequences for both of them.

Dentist Karl Meyer’s worst nightmare comes true when his son, Ole-Jakob, takes his own life. This tragedy is the springboard for a complex novel posing essential questions about human experience: What does sorrow do to a person? How can one live with the pain of unbearable loss? How far can a man be driven by the grief and despair surrounding the death of his child? A dark and harrowing story, drawing on elements from dreams, fairy tales, and horror stories, the better to explore the mysterious depths of sorrow and love, Through the Night is Stig Sæterbakken at his best.

Mathea Martinsen has never been good at dealing with other people. After a lifetime, her only real accomplishment is her longevity: everyone she reads about in the obituaries has died younger than she is now. Afraid that her life will be over before anyone knows that she lived, Mathea digs out her old wedding dress, bakes some sweet cakes, and heads out into the world—to make her mark. She buries a time capsule out in the yard. (It gets dug up to make room for a flagpole.) She wears her late husband’s watch and hopes people will ask her for the time. (They never do.) Is it really possible for a woman to disappear so completely that the world won’t notice her passing? The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am is a macabre twist on the notion that life “must be lived to the fullest.”

A man and a woman in an isolated house, surrounded by nothing, or nearly nothing; besieged by urban desert or actual wilderness, by alcohol, cigarettes, and ghosts; by mothers, fathers, and lovers who have disappeared.Written in an unadorned style, with flashes of pitch-black humor, Kjell Askildsen’s devastating stories convey in few words life and thought as they are actually experienced, balanced between despair and hope, memories and expectations. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest Norwegian writers of the twentieth century and among the greatest short-story authors of all time.

One of Jon Fosse’s most acclaimed novels, Boathouse is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator leading a largely hermit-like existence until he unexpectedly encounters a long-lost childhood friend and his wife. Told partially in a stream-of-consciousness style and with an atmosphere reminiscent of a gripping crime novel, Boathouse slowly unravels the story of a love triangle leading to jealousy, betrayal, and eventually death.

Lou is a French novelist living in London, married to Vår, a small-town Norwegian woman. Together they form a couple with rather unusual ideas about marital fidelity, Vår spending much of her time on liaisons with the teenage Sydney, and Lou's work in progress detailing his own desperate need for new lovers. Of course, their polyamorous life is also freighted with jealousies as each deals with the difficulties and pains of their partners forming strong connections with other lovers. Told in a brisk, economical style, Poppy's novel compellingly explores the complicated matter of needing and seeking intimacy.