Tag: Tomas Espedal

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.

The seasons of love and death: The Year by Tomas Espedal

When something hurts
you shouldn’t avoid it
no
you should meet the worst
with all your weakness
and allow yourself to be destroyed.
You should seek out loneliness
to feel that you are alone
to feel that you are desolate
to feel that you have loved
to feel the love
that can obliterate you entirely.

Norwegian writer Tomas Espedal’s uniquely autobiographical fiction rests close to his own life. From one work to the next, his narrator, ever aging as he does, is restlessly questing, his explorations at once intimate and yet maintaining a certain personal distance, or opaqueness. In his last book, Bergeners, his protagonist, in his early fifties, is seeking to understand the meaning of home as he tries to adjust to both the departure of his adult daughter and the unexpected loss of his girlfriend. He wanders the streets of his hometown and travels abroad, but cannot escape the deep loneliness that settles into his bones. Now, with The Year, his most recent work to be released in English, a few years have passed but Espedal’s fictional Tomas has been unable to let go of his love for his former girlfriend, Janne, and now, wondering if he is destined to spend the rest of his life alone, he seeks advice from another man who loved only one woman, from his first sight of her to the end of his life—Francesco Petrarch.

Thus, The Year begins on a meditative, melancholy note. Our narrator states that he wants to write a book about love, with the initial objective to record the events of each day for an entire year. Ah, but where to start? He decides upon the sixth of April, which is, appropriately, the day in 1327 when Petrarch first set eyes on his beloved Laura, the date in 1348 that she died, and the framework within which he structured the 366 poems that comprise his great Canzonniere—his celebration of his boundless affection for the woman he loved so faithfully, from afar and forever. So, on the sixth of April, seven centuries later, another lovelorn man is making his way by train to Avignon, and then by foot to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse to stay for a time near the house that Petrarch built there. And we are with him, riding along on the flow of his thoughts. Bergeners combined a mix of fragmented poetry and prose, but The Year is a novel written entirely in free verse, a compulsively readable style that very effectively captures the protagonist’s reflective, frequently repetitive and increasingly neurotic consciousness.

Having already spent a year immersing himself in Petrarch’s writing, the narrator is on a sort of pilgrimage. If the Italian poet could love so completely and purely, he must have known something about living with the one he loved. After several weeks living in the area, it is time for him to approach the master directly. On Easter Sunday, an imagined encounter and walk along the river occurs, echoing the Petrarch’s imagined discourse with Saint Augustine recorded in his deeply personal Secretum. They even stop at a café where the narrator’s ghostly companion challenges him, accuses him of being banal, and shares some of the wisdom the saint disclosed to him. Still, the unanswerable question remains: How is it possible that love remains, year after year, even after the one you love has left you and hurt you so deeply? How?

After tracing and retracing Petrarch’s steps and agonizing over his peculiar predicament and the way it has left him emotionally paralyzed, it is time for the protagonist to move on. There’s a writer’s festival to attend in Montpellier where he drinks heavily, has a brief encounter with a woman, and escapes from the hotel the moment she starts to talk about catching up with him once he is back home in Norway. He catches the first southbound train. The atmosphere and mood has shifted.

There’s nothing better than being inebriated
on a fast train at such high speed racing away
from everything you’ve done as a stranger
in a strange city it’s almost
as if you’d never been there I say
aloud and drink some wine
write in my notebook I’m back
to normality writing and drinking
on a journey on the train
the first of May
under way
to or from
it makes no difference
it’s good to be on the move
it’s good to be nobody.

In Barcelona he has arranged to meet his father, for a time panicked that he won’t find him among the mass of tourists arriving, then disappointed to see how old he looks when he does. Together they board a luxury cruise ship, a self-contained city of its own where the days pass, their calendar designations blurring. Our middle-aged narrator seems to view his father with a mix of admiration and contempt. The older man, who has lived by himself since his wife died seventeen years earlier, now clearly shows the weight of his age. This triggers a range of complicated emotions in his son who is secretly fretting about his own life unfolding empty and alone to the end. When, sitting in the ship’s casino, his father says something he knows well—all my life I’ve loved just one woman—the truth suddenly hits home:

He’s always been what I shall become.
All my life I’ve loved just one
woman they’re my father’s words and
they’re Petrarch’s words in a letter
to Boccaccio
and as I’d searched for Petrarch’s history
I had without knowing it
searched for my father’s history
I’d searched for a love story
which I thought was my own.
I’d searched for my father
here he sits
and I hardly see him at all.

I know only too well
why I don’t see him
it’s because I
resemble him.

Father and son, hard-headed, each with a fighter’s instincts and a stubborn inability to let go of love, are an odd, yet endearing pair. The narrator cannot help measuring himself against his father, for better and worse. The dynamics of their relationship plays out while we learn more about the circumstances that led to Janne’s leaving and discover our protagonist is nursing not only an unhealed broken heart but an unresolved grievance. The tension rises as he hatches a plan to resolve it.

The Year is book that, by virtue of its internalized poetic narrative, moves swiftly, swirling around a core set of ideas or, shall we say, obsessions, but shifting and changing shape along the way. In the early pages I took a little time out to glance sideways into Petrarch’s life and writing, but as the narrator’s short pilgrimage draws to a close one soon comes to understand that although he can be meditative and thoughtful, he can also be neurotic, edgy, and a man with a tendency to drink too much. Through this year, spring to autumn, Petrarch continues to surface, as does the initial reflective tone and, amid the ongoing questioning of life, love and death, profound, wide-reaching observations are raised, anchoring Espedal’s work, as ever, in the world in which we all exist.

The Year by Tomas Espedal 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.