Tag: James Anderson

Death with romantic complications: Love by Tomas Espedal

Each and every leaf is unique. And yet not, the leaves grow together and clothe the tree like a unifying thought: we are the tree. The tree is us. We are spring, summer and autumn. In the winter we’re gone, laid beneath the soil. Dead and overgrown. In the winter we dissolve. The winter is when we die.

Love, the eternal flame that has sparked many a tale of passion, loss, betrayal. So often two essential human experiences, love and death, are bound in life and literature, but leave it to Norwegian writer Tomas Espedal to turn the classic love story on its head with his tale of a protagonist who is committed to keeping a self-imposed date with death—decided a year in advance without any idea of how or where he will meet it—a commitment that is challenged when he unexpectedly falls in love and his new girlfriend becomes pregnant with his child.

As ever, the Espedal hero/anti-hero is a complicated and conflicted character. His narrators are often outsiders, lonely and lovelorn. His last two books, Bergeners and The Year, feature a writer named Tomas whose wife has left and daughter moved away. His latest to be published in English, again translated by James Anderson, is Love, a slender novella centred around “I,” that is, a person referred to as I—a name rather than a pronoun, but clearly a choice that blurs the distinction—who has abandoned love. After the death of his first wife and six years after the end of a second long-term relationship, he is living alone in his childhood home. A writer who has enjoyed some success and experimented with living for better or worse, now that I has made “the exquisite decision to die,” he is filled with a fresh new purpose. He wants a good death, a beautiful death, and he has granted himself one last year to live his best possible life in anticipation of that final moment. Go out on a high, he might say.

Love is a most unusual novella. With a protagonist called “I,” the third person narrative has an initially jarring feeling. Once one gets used to the oddness, the occasional sentence that naturally reads as a first person statement reminds you of the internal otherness of the character whose thoughts and feelings you are following so closely. Not long after his springtime commitment to one final year of life, I is invited to join some friends for a week in Loire where they have rented a large house. He purchases a one-way ticket to Paris and makes his way by train to where they are staying. He knows everyone there except two women, Rie and Aka. He keeps his distance from them, in fact he prefers to enjoy all his friends from afar. Yet when the week is over, he announces that he is planning to walk to Paris and wonders if anyone would care to join him. To his surprise, Aka offers. She is young—thirty-two years-old to his fifty-six—carefree, confident and creative. I is smitten, but he’s careful to maintain his space. By the time they reach Paris he is in love. At an exhibition of the work of Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken it happens:

I had lost faith in a new love, nor did he want one; but here in the gallery amongst the van der Elsken photographs, standing behind Aka, who suddenly turned and kissed him, he was struck by something unexpected, like a bolt of lightning, or a shaft of light, as if the light from the photographs flashed into his eyes and exposed an inner picture, a picture of Aka and himself as lovers, as a couple; he was filled with a yearning for love.

The advent of a passionate love affair gives I the desire to live, but also causes him to wonder if this is not the perfect time to die, right at the height of happiness? A romantic death. And as the seasons pass, these paradoxical desires will intrigue and trouble him.

Naturally he tells Aka nothing of the pledge he has made. When she discovers she is pregnant and wonders if she is ready to become a mother he insists he does want to have a child with her. Yet he remains torn between the longing to live and the notion that it is the knowledge that he intends to die that heightens the exhilaration he feels in his relationship with Aka. He cannot stop thinking about where and how he will come to take his last breath even as doubts about his decision and the desire to live both continue to plague him. What unfolds is an existential exploration of the tensions tearing I apart inside. As he reveals more of his past experiences with difficult, painful deaths, one can imagine what he might be hoping to avoid, but it seems I is as afraid of life as he is afraid of dying. Or of simply growing old. The past holds a series of lives of loves and losses and the future holds, what, more of the same?

The drinker empties his life of content, fills his life with meaning. The drinker fills his life with death. Those who have been close to death know how beautiful life is. And life is beautiful and precious because death has set its mark upon it. The sick will be cured. The dying will live. But I wanted to die. It was this resolution that made his life beautiful. Which filled his last year with meaning.

Spare and poetic, this slender volume raises infinitely more questions—ethical and existential—than it answers, its weight and intensity resting in the strange contrary emotions of a man who is possibly happier than he has ever been, steadily making his way through a year of doubt, delight  and determinedness toward a destination at once individual and universal.

Love by Tomas Espedal is translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson and published by Seagull Books.

“We know something of ourselves, but not much.” The White Bathing Hut by Thorvald Steen

Beneath my clothes there is 1.8 square metres of skin stretched over five litres of blood, thirteen billion nerve cells and twenty-five billion red blood corpuscles.

I’ve got twenty-three chromosomes in each cell.

The chromosomes in each pair are the same length, apart from the fourth. There, one of the chromosomes is fractionally shorter than the other.

That’s why I can’t get up and walk out of this text.

One might hope that, at this point in time, especially more than two years into a global pandemic, that illness and disability might be understood as something that could strike anyone, at any time, even you or someone you love. But, as we have seen, human beings have a stubborn capacity to blame those who fall ill, experience extended symptoms or die for their outcomes, citing age, lifestyle, or co-morbidities. The stigma and shame well known by those of us who live, love someone and/or work with people who have a disability, has been replayed and reinforced  during this extended period of co-existence with a persistent, evolving virus with unknown long term consequences.

The events chronicled in Norwegian writer Thorvald Steen’s The White Bathing Hut illustrate the extent to which societal attitudes toward disability can lead to deception and family dissolution. The unnamed narrator is a man nearing sixty whose deteriorating physical condition has left him dependent on a wheelchair. One day, with the Christmas season approaching, he receives a call from a woman who identifies herself as his cousin, the daughter of his mother’s brother. The existence of an uncle and a cousin come as a complete surprise to him, but, as this woman, Eline, explains, his family had refused to have anything to do with hers and she had only come to know of him by chance. She also reveals that her father and their mutual grandfather both died of the same disease he has. This unexpected information leaves him wondering if his entire life was constructed on a web of lies and sets off a chain of urgent inquiries. His account unfolds through a spare, tight narrative reported from an unusual perspective, so to speak.

Several weeks after Eline’s call, while seated at the table trying to find a location on a map of Norway, our narrator leans forward, realizing too late that he’s forgotten to apply the brakes of his wheelchair, and he and the chair topple over as if in slow motion, each movement described and dissected in poetic and anatomical detail. “I land in a heap. / Soft and hard. / Textiles, hair, flesh and bones. / That’s all there is.” His wife has just left for a week-long business trip, his daughter is away for the weekend and his caregiver is off for the holidays. His phone and alarm are on top of a shelf out of reach and he is now consigned to a new vantage point… the floor.

Unable to get up, his thoughts turn to his own past, to the development of his disease, and the more recent investigations and interrogations triggered by his cousin’s phone call. He had been diagnosed in his teens with a progressive form of muscular dystrophy that causes gradual muscle degeneration and eventual paralysis—news that was a terrible blow to him as an athletic young man with a promising future as a ski jumper. But the reaction of his parents was even worse. They warned him to tell no one. They refused to speak about it. Tried to wish it away. So he was burdened with a secret that slowly unveiled itself as his muscles weakened. Now, armed with new information there is a further significance to his desire to better understand his place within the broader context of his family history: his daughter Karoline appears to have inherited the same crippling condition.

The spare, tight narrative proceeds in short, nonchronological chapters that move between the protagonist’s childhood, youth and adult years, and the few weeks that have just passed. He has recently made two visits to his recalcitrant mother who informs him she is dying of cancer but refuses to answer his questions. What little he can glean guides his search through archival sources for biographical details about his uncle and grandfather. As he looks back over his personal life experiences, his efforts to conceal his pain and growing weakness—often by putting himself at risk—is contrasted against the demonstrations of physical strength that marked his earliest years. The increased awareness of body difference and stigma lead him to believe he will be forever unloveable. As a young man, his future, as he sees it, looks bleak:

How could I make a plan of any kind? I didn’t know what I’d look like or be able to do in a few years’ time. I hated my body. If anyone had told me that I ought to think positive, I’d have hit them. The weekends were the worst. Sometimes I lay in bed the whole of Saturday and Sunday without the energy to sit, eat or drink. In the mirror I could see that a few of the little muscles around my eyes and mouth had completely disappeared.

This is a very physical text. A story that is bound to the body. Driving this physical aspect home are the poetic interludes, often containing minute skeletal and cellular descriptions, that regularly relocate the narrative in the immediate space, on the floor, where the narrator observes his surroundings and struggles to shift his reluctant limbs into a position that might enable him to push himself up. It is an exhausting, futile effort. With a steady resolve he returns to his account.

Although the disability central to this novel is explicitly visible, The White Bathing Hut manages, without ever exercising a heavy hand, to call attention to the extent to which any disability—physical, cognitive or mental—is met with a social stigma that extends beyond the afflicted individual to the family and their contacts. It also alludes to an even darker subtext, that of Norway’s difficult historical relationship with eugenics. Of course, neither of these factors are unique to Norway, nor are they entirely behind us. Shame associated with disability still exists, and the ability to selectively control for desired sex, against congenital conditions, or even for other qualities raises serious ethical questions. Through this book’s very honest, resilient and endearing narrator, many of these critical issues are brought to light.

The White Bathing Hut by Thorvald Steen is translated by James Anderson and published by Seagull Books.

The loneliness of the Norwegian writer: Bergeners by Tomas Espedal

During the day he knows nothing but dreams.

During the day he knows only the lethargy the white, billowing curtain and the humming fan give him as a kind of comfort.

At night he’s wakeful.

At night he knows only the loneliness that lies down beside him in the bed and keeps him awake.

It was not until I finished Bergeners, that I stopped to take a closer look at the biography of its author, Tomas Espedal. I had sensed we were close in age, this introspective Norwegian writer and I. The eponymous narrator of this novel is in his early fifties during the period that frames this wandering meditation which opens in Paris during the dying days of a serious love affair and closes two years later, in Berlin, where he is still carrying  a lingering, immersive heartache and loneliness that won’t abate. So deeply did I connect with the protagonist’s emotional exile, even though my own life and shades of loneliness take on different hues, I could not help but wonder how closely our timelines align. Rather closely, as it turns out, we are only a year apart.

There is, throughout this work, a certain vulnerability that permeates the narrator’s musings. He bemoans his losses; he knows well that he is wallowing. Yet, in contrast to Knausgaard, the friend and fellow countryman whose name is synonymous with intense navel gazing, Espedal’s autobiographical fiction is spectral. He is there and not there. More spare and varied in style, the narrative has an erratic quality, shifting in perspective from first person to second, third and back again, incorporating stories, poetry, fragments and a fair share of modest, self-deprecating humour. And for all the deeply personal emotional moments, the heart of this novel is occupied by Bergen and its residents. The narrator does travel, for work or pleasure, but at this mid-point in his life, suddenly abandoned by both his grown daughter and his girlfriend, he seems intent on staying put, on burrowing himself into the familiar haunts and securites of his family home and community.

Espedal has a sober affection for his native city that comes through in his wonderful observations, character studies, and anecdotes. He argues that the city is difficult to live in, that the persistent rain and dampness enforces a confinement that creates an urban existence conducted almost entirely indoors, or perhaps, in vehicles travelling from place to place. As such, he claims that one could “empty the city of all its inhabitants and fill it up with entirely new people, but the city would remain the same.” However he captures its interior and exterior spaces, and the characters who occupy them, so memorably:

Eerland O. Nødtvedt smokes like an athlete. He’s dressed in a white shirt, a light brown cashmere sweater, the jacket of a green-check suit and light trousers. Good shoes. At night, he plays pieces he’s composed himself on a pump organ which he got from Yngve Pedersen. During the day he writes poetry. In a small one-roomed flat in Lodin Leppsgate, he writes poetry that is bigger than the city he lives in but maybe not as big as the room he inhabits.

The central part of Bergeners reads like a series of entries in a scrapbook—portraits and sketches of a place that contains all that is rooted and central to his existence, except that now, as he walks its streets, plumbing his memories, it is absence rather than nostalgia that weighs on him, pushing him to retreat further into his small house. His narrative, as the book progresses, is freighted with a loneliness no words will write away.

That first evening I sat alone in the living room, both my daughter and my girlfriend had moved out of the house, almost simultaneously, and gone to Oslo, I sat with my head in my hands feeling sorry for myself. I wept, repeating out loud (there was no one who could hear me after all): How could both leave me like this? I, who’ve done my best for you all these years, I said, who’ve given you all my love and nearly all my time, and you just move out  and leave me sitting here all alone like this.

How can you, at the age of almost fifty, adapt to an empty house?

How can you adapt to your own loneliness, what can you fill it with?

On a trip to Albania, Tomas meets a German writer who, at one point, asks him what he writes about. He answers: “Monotony.” That is not quite accurate, but he does have a gift for capturing the ordinary and seeing in it the universal and the exceptional.  His loneliness is not unique, but it is caught in the prism of middle-age. His characters are often eccentric, settled into their habits, their singular lives. However, for our protagonist, the attempt to redefine himself without the two women who meant most to him is an uneasy process. He has lost his anchor and does not know where he belongs. He tries to adapt to his newly defined life, but finds that Bergen, which he knows so intimately, cannot assuage his restlessness. He tries to escape, but finds foreign locales too alien to his own nature:

You can’t anticipate growing old here
age was not formed in you as a child
and now it’s too late
to grow old

Bergeners is my first encounter with Tomas Espedal. There is something very attractive about his autobiographical fiction, a form that can be too claustrophobic at times. The varying perspectives, the passing portraits of people and places, the fragmentary fugues, brief stories and snatches of poetry that are worked into this wandering meditation make for an unusual and absorbing read.

Longlisted for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award, Bergeners is translated by James Anderson and published by Seagull Books.