(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
An elderly man sits in his wheelchair and lets life, the life, roll over his inner eye. He remembers.
“My memories are my holiday guests, you ask me. I think there are events, contexts in my life that are still distant and unknown. They are important to me, and I am constantly searching for answers as to why my life turned out the way it did. There is no bitterness in this, but an ever-increasing curiosity, what really happened? I live, I still sense, I can search and collect remnants of a past that can at least give the hint of an answer. ”
It is therefore this answer that this text seeks to give, both the reader and the narrator Thorvald, and not to imply that a number of books have been published from the nearest and farthest parts of the sky that deal with exactly this: childhood and childhood. The question is therefore whether it is possible to say something new about the action never so much added to a small town north between the brewery, shop and bakery.
So who is the Thorvald narrator? He is the son of Hagar, of Finnish-Russian descent, and Sandof, who sailed the seas (this novel is full of other well-sounding and strange names such as Irmelin, Viola, Alyson, Jutta). The climate in this small town somewhere in Finnmark county is harsh, direct and tough, both physically and mentally.
As a 14-year-old, Thorvald experiences that the big brother and a friend drown, a scathing story that he carries with him all his life. And worst of all, Thorvald asks himself if he could have done something to prevent this from happening. He never gets rid of the question.
He who has met death at a young age will never forget it. Here we are many who can speak from personal experience. Or as Jutta Bach, one of the characters in this novel, who knows he has lost his brother, says: "Such things never go away, Thorvald, losing one's loved ones can never go away." She also knew this from experience: "There are only three of us left, father, a brother and I, in a family of eleven people we are only three left… only three left."
Dag Skogheim's "Memories of Thorvald" is a classic upbringing and formation novel. Life itself, as it is so imprecisely called, the rural community and everything that happens there, big and small, is the real school, the best arena for learning. The official school with mathematics, Norwegian, English and snowball war in the free minutes, it comes here in the second row. And that has probably been the case for most of us, to the despair of the country's professional educators.
Because like Thorvald, we all come from a local environment. It is in our hometown and hometown that we learn life's first fumbling step, that is where we lay the foundation. In these often small but always real and original environments, what we create is where we become what we rarely or never manage to free ourselves from. And here there are winners and losers, here some are converted to angels others to murderers. These environments, and the events we experience here, we will never fully finish, they are inscribed in our lives until death sets us apart.
That's the way it is for Thorvald too. The valley of his childhood seems small and closed, especially in hindsight, but is the world – the only possible – he has. Just the way it is for all of us. Maybe that's why we have such a great need to enlarge this world? Because by making our world big and meaningful, we upgrade ourselves as well. By hearing about, reading about, the upbringing of others, our own upbringing, in a completely different place, also becomes important and valuable. Is that why growing up novels continue to fascinate us? Is that why we (at least some of us) can read one after the other – every book harvest – without getting bored?
However, the most important awakening for the 14-year-old Thorvald does not happen through the grief and loss of his brother or the fact that death exists as a necessary and unpleasant part of life. No, it is perhaps the even more inexplicable eroticism, the tension between the sexes, that he first and foremost encounters and ignites in this phase of his life. He understands as little as most of us did back then when we explored our own and others' bodies. This will be a violent meeting for Thorvald. At the same time, he experiences rejection, and not being accepted as something in an adult world. He is simply overlooked by the adults, he is not counted, is not prosecuted by name. He's just someone – not Thorvald.
Skogheim's prose is simple and straightforward. The sentences are essentially clean and relatively short without difficult foreign words or picture-creating constructions. The metaphorical language dresses this low-key story very well.
But sometimes, abruptly and when you least expect it – often when something dramatic is to be told – the language changes to a completely different tone and gets more intensity – such as here: “Then I am suddenly in the woods, eating leaves, eating carries while my heart is still pounding in me as I stand embracing a pine tree and closing my eyes to the rays of the sun between fragrant branches and twigs, laughing, laughing shrillly and hitting my flat hands against the pine egg, shouting and laughing that I am soon fifteen years old, that I probably have never climbed a church spire or sat on a Christmas night in a morgue, but I have been the one who with my own eyes full of September sun has seen Åsa naked in a blue bed and had to stroke her knees and kiss both her breasts and is infinitely more than anyone and my name is Thorvald and I want nothing more than to meet her in this forest tomorrow that day. ”
Thorvald is hit one day by a double accident. Then, while life looks darkest, love turns out to be bigger than anything – yes, almost bigger than life. Without love, without Irmelin, things could have gone terribly wrong for Thorvald. I'm so romantic that I think it would have been a much worse book even if that had happened.
The ending of this novel is not particularly original, but still strong in a way that a Hollywood production can never be. It shows how much it means that people care about each other, that care and togetherness are forces that are stronger than the most powerful earthquake. Skogheim describes a love force so strong that it makes an impact on Richter's scale.
"Memories of Thorvald" is a little innovative novel about the eternal problems of life – and literature. What amazes me most, however, is that despite having read many similar stories like this one, it makes me tear up. The novel does not sparkle with surprising language images, playful formulations or original narrative techniques or other literary means. It is simply nothing more than a surprisingly beautiful story. Unfortunately, I do not have any other and better reason why I liked this novel – and recommend others to read it.
