Tarjei Vesaas

 

In a recent edition of Granta, Karl Ove Knausgaard reviewed -- and recommended -- the work of Tarjei Vesaas, the Norwegian author nominated on multiple occasions for the Nobel Prize. Needless to say, I'd not heard of Vesaas, but having finished The Birds, I can confidently say: Vesaas strikes an unusual, and successful, balance between the calm and the anxious, between independence and belonging. 

First published in Norway in 1957, The Birds tell the story of a brother and sister -- Mattis and Hege -- living in a remote corner of the country. Mattis, who has a cognitive impairment, is dependent on his sister, who spends the majority of the novel knitting sweaters to generate sufficient money to support them.

Mattis is intellectually disabled, but he is not defenseless: indeed, his physicality -- his power and agility -- marks his character and movements. Mentally, Mattis is not entirely disabled: his thoughts emerge at all moments, but they tend to be truncated or selfish, or shared without sufficient context. The result is a reliance on Hege and the sense that Mattis will never advance beyond his current station. 

As the novel progresses, it is clear that Hege -- for her own part -- has changed, and that her relationship with Mattis has fractured: this is the result of one of the book's great ironies: that Mattis brings into their home the man who will become Hege's lover. 

That fracturing results in a question Mattis must ask himself: whether he belongs in this new world, or whether his dependence has run its course. Ultimately, Mattis sets a test -- a tragic test -- for himself, leaving his future to something approaching fate.

This short novel generates an immediate emotional response, and the foreshadowing that Vesaas develops -- by way of a secondary plot involving birds -- is very well done. I don't know enough to say whether, as Knausgaard suggests, this is the "greatest Norwegian novel," but I can say that it operates on a number of levels, and that its culmination is one I won't soon forget.