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What Members Thought
My only regret is waiting to read this. Amazing storytelling, and I'm just in love with books from Scandinavia lately.
We do decide for ourselves when it will hurt. ...more
We do decide for ourselves when it will hurt. ...more
Just finished this, after staying up half the night to do so. I really liked it, though the clipped, starker-than-Hemingway, style does leave me craving lusher prose. More complete review to follow.
Edited to add this review:
It's late 1999 – a couple of months until the new millennium. A 67-year old man moves from Oslo to a remote cabin in the Norwegian woods. He intends to live out his days in self-sufficient isolation, in an effort to forget, and to move beyond, events in his recent past -- the ...more
Edited to add this review:
It's late 1999 – a couple of months until the new millennium. A 67-year old man moves from Oslo to a remote cabin in the Norwegian woods. He intends to live out his days in self-sufficient isolation, in an effort to forget, and to move beyond, events in his recent past -- the ...more
I loved the wonderful, descriptive writing in this book, like being carried along on a deluge of well-wrought words. Although this is a novel I found it rather episodic, more like a series of interconnected short stories. It really pulled me in but ended up feeling a bit empty at the core, which may have been intentional since that would also describe the main protagonist, who seemed to have held a small vacant spot inside all of his life without any desire to fill it. I liked that not all of th
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Quiet, understated, written in a careful contemplative manner; a novel straddling the abyss between memory and aging. A story where we know little about the narrator but we are immersed, as readers, in one summer when he crosses from childhood into the dark mystery of the adult world. The main character is time and the supporting character is place. Reading this book made everything else disappear for a small moment.
A story told in the first person, yet from multiple viewpoints, as a child, a young adult, an older adult. The Norwegian forest and farmland on the border with Sweden. WWII and its aftermath. Father and son relationships. Smooth reading, few of the little awkwardnesses that often show up in translated books. I enjoyed it a lot.
Lovely, quiet book--the ending was maybe a bit messagy, though.
Wow, I was blown away by this novel. I was thinking recently of books I'd like to have just finished the moment before dying and this is a nice one to end on, when all I can think is "wow." I give it four stars and not five only because there was awkwardness in the plot mid-way through the book, because I greedily wanted to know more about the intervening years of the narrator's life and, sad to say, because there are two passages of painfully implausible dialogue spoken by the character Lars Ha
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The story of a 67 year old man and his memories of the summer he was 15 and the things he learned about his father. Good writing, potentially interesting plot, but somehow this wasn't as great as it could have been.
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A lovely, quiet novel, reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. It's a meditation on the relationships between father and son and between boys on the verge of manhood.
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A stunning novel.
This is a compelling retrospective book that isn't as ambitious as it could be, by which I mean that the two characters Trond and Lars do not speak of that which the reader eventually learns. It is an unspoken conflict and you could make the argument that they should confront one another, to bring that conflict to the foreground. For me, their NOT speaking of it makes them far more interesting characters, even if the tension is not as electric as it could be.
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The book and writing style a 4. The ending a 3 or less. No resolution or oomph in the ending
Norway
Jun 17, 2008
Andi
marked it as to-read
Jan 02, 2010
Gail
marked it as to-read
Apr 05, 2010
Julia Fierro
marked it as to-read
Jan 17, 2012
Robert
marked it as to-read
Aug 20, 2022
Sherry
is currently reading it
