The boat in the evening by Tarjei Vesaas

 

 

The boat in the evening by Tarjei Vesaas

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Båten om Kvelden

Translator – Elizabeth Rokkan

Source – personal copy

Well when Karen and Simon announce the last year club this time around it is  1968 , I decide I would get at least one book for it so I set to the internet and find a  book published in 1968. I found two books published in their original language in 1968. This is the first and is by Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas, he has long been on a list of writers I have been wanting to feature on the blog. He grew up in the remote Telemark region of Norway. Where he had the chance to take over the family farm but didn’t do it. This one event influenced his later life and writing he is considered the best Norwegian writer since the second world war.

There he stands in sifting snow. In my thoughts in sifting snow. A father – and his winter-shaggy, brown horse, in snow

His brown horse and his face. Sharp words. His blue eyes and his beard. The beard with reddish tinge against the white. Sifting snow. Blind, boundless snow.

Far away, deep in the forest. Sunken roads in the drift, gullies dug out of the drifts, logging roads walled in by snow

The opening lines give a sense of the wintery nature of the world Vesaas lived in

This book is a series of pieces that are all set in the wild north of Norway. They all draw on the nature of the land around that region. From watching the cranes arrive from the south and later glimpse the magical dance they do as a child.A man is drifting done a flooded river with just a log clinging to his life.This is a man looking at his homeland in an abstract nature the land and weather and creatures of the land drift off the page in his faint sketches. This is a world of tough nature and land.From the family caught in their home by a snowstorm view the white world around them. The stories are hard to capture as they are more meditations on the world and draw you emotionally into the world, rather than narratively.

The cranes intensify this feeling. One can always find out more. As long as the mirrored head or the upsight head is above the surface. As long as one manages to travel accross floating, shivering tussocks one can find out more.

From these bewitched birds one can find out more.

If only one could give them a message about this, telling them to dance ore and to dance differently, very differently. They look as if they can do it

The cranes mating being watch by father and son

 

This is a complex book that is more like a skeleton leaf caught in the ice the very fragile nature of what it once was is there and this is the same here in Vesass prose have a  sense of what might have been. The fragile nature of the world he lived in, there is no names to his character. But people living on the edge of nature. A man gripping a log, a family in the white out of a snowstorm. A father and son glimpsing the cranes the child’s wonder at the dance. But at the heart of this is the world he grew up in this is a novella that will make you want to wear a jumper as you read it. As you view human life as just a flake in a snowstorm of nature its self and how powerful nature is and what memories it can lay on a man’s mind. I see why he was actually nominated eight times for the Nobel prize this is a work of a thoughtful and deep writer more the sort of writer we want winning the Nobel. Also a testament to the catalogue of Peter Owen books