Bøger i Norwegian Literature serien

"Originally published in Norwegian as Selvbeherskelse by J.W. Cappelen, Oslo, 1998."

Icy, intricate, and unflinching, Edy Poppy’s Coming. Apart. captures the zeniths and nadirs of the human experience. With the stark, poetic voice that garnered her collection Anatomy. Monotony. cult status in Norway and abroad, the writer–performance artist offers a vision of sexuality and alienation unlike any other. Coming. Apart. is Poppy’s first collection of short fiction, and her second to be published in English. Beautifully translated from the original Norwegian by Dr. May-Brit Akerholt, her stories explore moments of labyrinthine intimacy with a cold intensity that proves impossible to forget.

Jon Fosse said farewell to theory early in his career, choosing poetry, fiction, and drama as his mediums of choice. Here, however, in a selection from his two books of essays, we see just how incisive a critic and memoirist he can be. Not only including a generous portion of Fosse's writing on literature and theater--including the irresistable "Thomas Bernhard and His Grandfather"--this collection also includes such personal essays such as "My Dear New Norwegian." "Old Houses," and "He Who Didn't Want to Become a Teacher." --

Replacement, Ulven s only novel, is a miniature symphony, uniting the perspectives of fifteen unrelated characters into what seems a single narrative voice, dramatizing the tension between concrete realities and our interior lives.

Like Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, Annihilation is about a day in the life of a town - in this case, a Polish-Jewish town shortly before World War II. The reader participates in the life of the town instant by instant - from the moment when the local courtesan pours the contents of her chamber pot out her open window up to the moment when the city policemen return to night duty. For the narrator, every object, every person and event belongs to the world he strives to save from impending annihilation: the landscape of beer drops left on a counter, the dance of the Hasidim before the Town Hall, the taste of mint drops in an attorney's mouth. As the minutes on the Town Hall's clock measure the day's passing, and as this day's passing brings the town one day closer to its historical annihilation, a Book of the Day writes itself, preserving the town in memory against the ravages of time and history. Already a success in Poland and in translation in France, Germany, and Italy, Piotr Szewc's novel has been compared to the novels of Proust and to the paintings of Chagall.

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 such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Peter Handke. Replacement, his only novel, published two years before Ulven's suicide, is a miniature symphony, wherein the perspectives of unrelated characters are united into what seems a single narrative voice: each personality, directing the book in turn; each replacing its predecessor and forming another link in a chain leading nowhere. These people reminisce, reflect, observe, and talk to themselves; each stuck in their respective traps, each dreaming of escape. 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.

In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their whole life together, and beyond: the bonds of one family and their battles with implacable nature stretching back over five generations, to Asle's great-great- grandmother Aliss. In Jon Fosse's vivid, hallucinatory prose, all these moments in time inhabit the same space, and the ghosts of the past collide with those who still live on. Aliss at the Fire is a haunting exploration of love, ranking among the greatest meditations on marriage and loss.