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by Peter Henning
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 27. April 2011 (copyright)
On the impossibility of happiness: With his novel The Lady in
the Valley, the Norwegian [author] Ketil Bjørnstad concludes
his impressive trilogy about Aksel Vinding, a young pianist from
Oslo.
When he first hears of the country doctor Sigrun, who lives in
remote Finnmark, her name only brings forth a vague impression;
no more than a fleeting flicker. Because when the famous
psychiatrist Ida Marie Liljerot tells him of her youngest
daughter Sigrun, Aksel Vinding, the nineteen year old
protagonist of Ketil Bjørnstad's extensive trilogy, only has
eyes and ears for Sigrun's sister Marianne Skoog, who's in
medical care after a suicide attempt that was foiled only at the
last minute. She is seventeen years older than him and the love
of his life.
Later, after death has visited the Skoogs' house in Elvefaret,
Oslo, one final time and, with the passing away of Marianne,
everything has settled down, Aksel will also have a history with
Sigrun; a short, erotic fling. But the road to Finnmark
and her and from Finnmark and back is long. Within the framework
of his grand-scale trilogy about Aksel Vinding, a young pianist
from Oslo, Ketil Bjørnstad, himself a pianist and writer born in
Oslo in 1952, tells the story of an artist's odyssey. A painful
inner journey marked by the limits of love, death and the
presumed impossible force needed to make a fresh start. The
story is told over more than eleven hundred pages in sentences
and images of great poetry and, sometimes, of icy beauty. They
show that not even love has the power to save the individual
from himself and his demons.
As a roller coaster ride through the emotions of his [Bjørnstads]
juvenile alter ego, The Lady of the Valley follows up on
the dramatic revelations of the previous volumes, To Music
and The River: Aksel futilely attempts to resist the
gravity of the relationships. Initially, in his youthful
enthusiasm, he believed that to free his girlfriend, Anja Skoog,
who at the end fell victim to anorexia, from her inner captivity
and thereby saving her, he only has to love her enough. Less
than four hundred pages later, at what appears to be the peak of
his happiness, Marianne Skoog, Anja's mother, whom he has
impregnated, takes her own life in the basement of her house.
Once more he must painfully realise that one cannot escape one's
fate. And so Aksel falls into a deep depression, numb with pain
from Marianne's death. Until he eventually sees no other way out
than to follow her. He jumps into the river – the river where
his mother died in a swimming accident – in the hope of
"colliding with the rock that had been lying there for so many
years, waiting for me ... My only thought was to make it, I had
to succeed, like Marianne had succeeded, like Anja had
succeeded, even though Marianne never admitted that Anja had
committed suicide." But fate has other plans for him: Aksel gets
caught on an angler's hook – and with this narrative wink of the
eye, Bjørnstads world-weary protagonist is brought painfully
back to life. "I felt an unexpected, stabbing pain. Something
sharp had pierced my mouth. It hurt terribly ... Suddenly I felt
the line. Only then I realised that someone had caught me, that
some idiot was there to drag me out of the water."
The Lady of the Valley
effortlessly picks up where The River (2009) ended: the
summer of 1971, when the sounds from Joni Michell's album
Clouds filled the air and
Aksel and Marianne slowly got to know each other in the kitchen
of the house in Elvefaret. When Aksel may finally leave the
clinic he was brought to after his suicide attempt, he does not
go on a grand tour through Europe as planned, the tour on which
he should have excelled as the youngest interpreter of Brahms
Concert in B Major. Instead he retreats to the far north, to the
Russian border. He wants to rehearse Rachmaninoff's second piano
concert on the Arctic Coast. The concert will have a
groundbreaking impact on him. When Rachmaninoff in 1900 began
work on the composition, he too had recently been dealing with a
creative crisis: In October 1897 his first symphony in D minor
had been a flop with the public as well as the critics. With the
failure of his symphony, the twenty-four year old [composer],
accustomed to success, saw [his talent] called into question for
the first time. He started doubting himself, before ultimately
falling into a depression. A fate in which Aksel now clearly
sees his own reflected. Like Rachmaninoff’s piano concert,
Bjørnstads novel alternates between delicate and song-like, and
enthusiastic, hymn-like moments; particularly when Sigrun,
Marianne's younger sister, enters the picture. She lives at the
Russian border with her husband, far from Oslo's occurrences.
She is the lady of the valley who annoyingly reminds Aksel of
her deceased sister Marianne. Though is she really his
salvation, sent to him by fate?
Aksel becomes more and more lost in his conflicting emotions for
Sigrun, until he one day starts believing that by conquering
her, he may feel close to Marianne for one last time. And in
fact, Sigrun embarks on a short, erotic dalliance with the
visitor from Oslo – attracted by his sensitivity and the
unconditional nature of his feelings. But when he goes skiing
with Sigrun's husband Eirik and dramatic incident occurs, Aksel
flees back to Oslo, compelled by the painful realisation that no
road will lead him back to the time before Marianne's suicide.
With The Lady of the Valley, Bjørnstad's extensive
self-portrait is completed as a great narrative of a utopia that
remains unfulfilled. The author shows us a small, private world
without redemption, described with icy control. It is the story
of a feverish search for one's real identity. It portrays man as
a creature condemned to freedom, in the sense of Camus. But also
his desire to be spared this burden for a couple of seconds.
"But is not the main object of art to tell a horrible story
without forgetting its beauty?" Aksel ponders after he has left
the lady of the valley by the Arctic Coast. He has now returned
to the house of the Skoog's in Elvefaret, where once upon a time
everything started with his love for Anja. Here he can find back
to his true and probably only reliable purpose in life: music.
With this trilogy, Ketil Bjørnstad, whose works include more
than fifty CDs and more than twenty novels, succeeds with a
grand undertaking: portraying the futility of trying to hold on
to happiness. He lets us take part in the painful process of
growing up that the protagonist must endure, a process
characterised by death and loss. And he lets us take part in the
difficulties and fears, the disappointments and vulnerabilities
of the artist who sees his irresolvable loneliness exposed. That
Aksel has survived does not imply that he has escaped. Perhaps
even the opposite. Life goes on for the young pianist from Oslo,
whose development one would much have liked to follow.
PETER HENNING
Ketil Bjørnstad: "Die Frau im
Tal". Roman.
Aus dem Norwegischen von Lothar
Schneider. Insel Verlag, Berlin 2010. 335
S., geb., 22,90
[Euro].
Text: F.A.Z.,
27.04.2011, Nr. 97 / Seite 30
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