We imagine we’ve seen this: Trond Sander, an Oslo professional who has
recently lost his wife and sister, hopes to
cure his loneliness by a plunge into
solitude; nothing dramatic, he wants to pension out and make a few changes.
Scandinavians differentiate between loneliness and solitude as a matter of
course. But Trond, insinuating at times, but colloquial and close to one’s ear,
tells a candid story so concretely that the reader has to live it out. “I have
been lucky,” he says of his life, while acknowledging that he has always longed
to be alone. Has the death of his wife liberated him? He says only, “I lost
interest in
talking to people.” He will indeed learn to talk, alone, in the
middle of a train of thought when “the difference between talking and not
talking is slowly wiped out.” Reflecting upon his move to the country, he says,
“I had put myself in an impossible situation.” He sleeps poorly because in the
quiet, the past presses in upon him and it is disturbing. The millennium is nigh
but he expects it to mean nothing. While the fireworks are elsewhere, he will
get drunk and listen to Billie Holiday on his record player. We accept that
cultivated people turn up in such places, though Americans tend to view them as
Edward Dahlberg described the conventional view of Thoreau, “as a kind of cranky
male sibyl, a crabbed and catarrhal water sprite of our woodland culture.” Trond
is no Thoreau — he’s more like us than other Scandinavian protagonists including
Knut Hamsun’s Lt. Glahn or Halldor Laxness’s Bjartur — but his efforts require
peace and quiet.A vital man in his 60s, Trond tells himself he has turned a corner; he moves
to a
rural cabin, worries about his old Nissan in a village where only Volvos
are routinely fixed; worries about having the wrong brand of chain saw and knows
no one who will plow his driveway if he is snowed in. He would have liked
four-wheel drive but didn’t want to be perceived as “new rich.” Planning to chop
firewood, he also has an electric heater. Despite the straitened circumstances
of many of the local people, no one walks, so wedded are they to their machines.
This, in contrast to the pastoral subsistence Trond remembers from the boyhood
he is bent on reimagining as he searches for the mysteries that have ruled his
life. The place has a sort of grandeur: the nearby river flows through the town
then loops north into Sweden and beyond, how far beyond we can only guess; but
the suggestion is of a spacious and not fully known North, even into the Taiga,
whose extent, said Chekhov, is known only to birds of passage. It’s a pleasant
place withal — a farm here, a cottage there, a bit farther along a store where a
child could buy sweets. “The feeling of pleasure slips into the feeling that
time has passed, that it is very long ago, and the sudden feeling of being old.”
He has a dog, Lyra, with whom he has a somewhat formal relationship. He listens
to the BBC all day long, which helps cement his feeling that he no longer
understands the news or at any rate that it is too late for him to make plans
based on something he might hear on the radio. Television would be a problem as
he despises being entertained, though when he wonders how he learned to sharpen
a chain saw he concludes he must have seen it in “a feature film with a forestry
setting.” He seems to appreciate this detached state.
The rural lands of northern Europe have had a long if spare human presence to
which modern people feel akin; of course the same could be said of America,
though details of our self-regard suggest we are uncertain if our Indian
predecessors were actually human. When the characters of Hamsun or Laxness take
to the wild it is not to a place they think they have conquered, gouged and
depopulated; it is part of a fondly held origin story offering redemption and
eternal peace. Be that as it may, to Trond and his neighbors the natural world
is an intimate presence, and it is benign. But city dwellers heading for the
country hope to find a picturesque past and are not pleased when rural people
are catching up too quickly, have new methods of farming, spend too much time in
their cars or perform dances they have seen on television.This short yet spacious and powerful book — in such contrast to the
well-larded garrulity of the bulbous American novel of today — reminds us of the
careful and apropos writing of J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald and Uwe Timm. Petterson’s kinship with Knut Hamsun,
which he has himself acknowledged, is palpable in Hamsun’s “Pan,” “Victoria” and
even the lighthearted “Dreamers.” But nothing should suggest that his superb
novel is so embedded in its sources as to be less than a gripping account of
such originality as to expand the reader’s own experience of life.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.