You ought to rediscover this novel | EUROtoday

The fourteen -year -old Hallstein is alone in the home along with his sister Sissel, who’s 4 years older, and the entire home feels completely different, “because this had driven away both, father and mother.” The home is lonely on the road, the subsequent city is a couple of kilometers away. Hallstein is comfortable to be alone with the sister, unobserved, undisturbed in his youngsters’s world on the brink to develop up. He is a dreamy boy who is an indication and secret. Living very a lot about childish-magical considering, he lives in intimate reference to nature. “Hallstein (…) crossed his hands in his back and carried out soft secret signs in his fairytale world with them: for angelica, snails, rain – he said silently.”

It is a sizzling late spring day, nearly summer time, it hardly will get darkish at evening, rain is within the air. Sissel has a go to from her admirer targets, the 2 hear radio, Hallstein, overlaps her, and when targets it goes disillusioned (he did not get what he wished from Sissel, an admission that she likes him like him), is confused Hallstein and descends to “his” meadow, the place the extremely faint angel root is, that “just very wonderful flowers”, which “so” so “externally blank with roaming Flower wheels ”and whose flower screens spray sparks. Where there are snakes and black snails that already feel the upcoming rain and crawl out of their hiding places. This is “his” meadow, its place, its empire, but Sissel is allowed to go, and then they both sit together with the snails in the rain, in a quiet sibling consent, this evening.

But then everything turns very differently. Not a nice evening, in safety and freedom at the same time, where you sit in peace and peace together in the house, while the rain flows outside, as the two just thought, no, suddenly it taps hard on the door and the whole house is still full of people, excitement, incomprehensible, with requirements that the children are not up to and whom they have to be up to.

A car had a breakdown, and a woman came up to Sissel and Hallstein, Grete, who lies in the contractions, her husband Karl, his father Hjalmar and his second wife Kristine, who cannot go or can speak all right, has to be worn, but the scenery is preceded by her immobility and silence. A thirteen -year -old girl is also there, Gudrun, the younger sister of Karl, who not only means how Hallstein imagines his thoughtful playmate, but also looks like this: with the same wild hair that falls on her forehead. Hallstein is deeply touched and enchanted.

What a night. The little novel, which has started lyrically and cheerfully, a little melancholy, develops into an Ibsen family drama with the appearance of the nightly guests. Business, suspicions, allegations, silent and loud dialogues, interrogations, incomprehensible, intangible. Karl and Hjalmar fight the eternal struggle between father and son, a child is born who dies enigmatic Kristine. And right in the middle of Hallstein, who does not understand anything about what happens around him, really understands and still takes part, fights and who experiences with Gudrun tender, tender scenes of childlike and preliminary intimacy, who fulfill him with throbbing joy and then, when he realizes, that only he is granted by first love.

Nobody gets a lot of sleep that night, it is an eternal lying, nodding, getting arguing, waving around, hiking, speaking, listening, startling, mixing with external events, trips to the hospital, for example, which get something hallucinatory from the veil of tiredness. We just dreamed of all of this!, Think Hallstein in the morning, when silence occurred for a short time and he sits with Sissel on the sofa in the living room, his head in her lap. And also for the reader, the reader reminds the told of a dream where you watch and at the same time stuck in Hallstein and perceive it through him. For a child, for an artist, maybe for all of us, such a dream is often more real than the real world.

The great art of Tarjei Vesaas’ is that it makes the boundaries between inside and outside permeable and lets his narrator meandering between objectifying and highly subjective perspective, auttorial and figure perspective – this often goes into one another in a half sentence and brings things that float, they only create it in the medium of language, his language art.

The logic of a so -called realistic world only rules the outer points of the action, creates the factual events – in the space that is so tense up, the actual of Vesaas’ tells: which means that he and only his own world real, that means really perceived relationships between humans and people, between humans and people: “It was the sunshine on the market. The haze, over the angelwurzwiese with the nice flower dolders, about the whole lot that was hidden within the grass bushes.

The flowing transition from notion to consciousness to expertise as an interior expertise that wishes to be communicated is Vesaas’ writing path, which we observe: Finest vibrations, moods take up vesaas, finds phrases which can be easy and extremely poetic on the identical time, noticed, projected, interpreted, enjoys, creates a world wherein, quasi osmotic, our personal emotions, longings, softness, reminiscences could be skilled and so could be skilled because the very personal, confidante – and on the identical time ranging, repressed.

Because Vesaas all the time clearly marks that we, the readers, are situated elsewhere than on the location of the story; The narrative goes by means of ourselves, by means of ourselves, and on the identical time it all the time stays for us by a tiny one, stays brittle, cool. It is the opposite that comes near us and wherein we uncover ourselves, discover the spilled in us once more, in order that we will discover perceptive, emotions, susceptible, youngsters, on the brink to develop up.

Tarjei Vesaas: “spring night”. From the Norwegian by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel. With an afterword by Hanne Ørstavik. Guggolz Verlag, 240 pages, 25 euros.