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The
Immortals Cover
Ketil Bjørnstad has captured a disagreeable
part of Norwegian reality in an entertaining and penetrating
novel.
Ketil Bjørnstad’s new novel is about old
people who do not want to die and young people who do not want
to leave home. It is a novel that you don’t want to put down
despite the book’s relatively unpleasant subject matter.
Novel
Ketil Bjørnstad
“De udødelige”,
Aschehoug
Bjørnstad
gives us insight and wisdom, irony
and humour. It is possible that one could call his protagonist,
general practitioner Thomas Brenner, a typical Bjørnstad figure
– in other words, a man who is a natural caregiver and has an
overactive conscience. But he also has dark secrets,
shame-ridden frustrations and a fear of confrontation. His wife
Elisabeth is a more robust character, but she too suffers from a
surfeit of morality.
Brenner himself
has a troublesome heart condition, and is a martyr to the
inadequacy he feels when confronted with his old parents and
apathetic daughters. This novel draws an often gripping portrait
of people past their prime who are being pulled in two
directions.
The
family lives on Holmenkollåsen, a
prosperous district on a hill overlooking Oslo, and the role
played by this particular geographical setting in the country’s
capital is not insignificant. Bjørnstad is a keen observer of
social mores, and serves us a generous portion of both amusing
and mildly malicious features of life on the hill. Brenner is
approaching 60 years old, and his wife’s 60th
birthday celebration is one of the novel’s key events. Her
parents, in their 90s, live in the first storey of their large
house, and a little farther up the hill live his parents, who
are also greatly in need of care and help. Their daughters, in
their 20s, are still receiving financial support and a great
deal of solicitous care from their parents.
“De udødelige” could be described
as a broad-based literary study of Norwegian family life at the
beginning of the 21st century. Three generations are
living in close quarters here. This is not typical of most
Norwegian families, but it gives the author an opportunity to
portray the challenges and demands of a society in which many
people live well into their 90s while the members of the younger
generation, at the other end of the spectrum, are dependent on
their parents although they are approaching 30.
Ketil Bjørnstad addresses
and reflects on unpleasant subjects: the death that we try to
avoid, the children who never grow up. There is also the
silence, the lack of communication. Thomas Brenner does not dare
to talk about his problems, nor does he dare to mention the lump
he recently felt in his wife’s breast.
In his darkest
moments he can only observe with wonder that the older one gets,
the more desperately one clutches on to life. “My God, he
thought, there were patients who had been living in nursing
homes for over 15 years. They never died, because their lives
were always saved by anticoagulants and heart medications. Their
bodies could be disintegrating, but their hearts kept on
beating. Even if their memories had vanished, what did not
vanish was their agitation and anxiety, their restless wandering
from room to room in the hope of finding peace, finding a home,
finding a person, a Jesus or a God who could both comfort them
and explain everything to them.”
And what about modern-day
parents? “They had not only been ‘helicopter parents’, or
doormats, or whatever one would call parents delivering a
certain type of exaggerated caregiving, but they had inevitably
caught their children in their own net of anxiety, acted like
monsters in reverse, emotional brutes, who used their entire
sensory apparatus to clip the wings of their two magnificent
daughters.”
Bjørnstad writes lightly,
entertainingly and with insight. He is never sentimental or
pompous, but remains sober and manages to keep the story flowing
well and realistically. It is perhaps no coincidence that the
American author Saul Bellow has a clear presence in the novel.
He is Elisabeth’s favourite writer, and her 60th
birthday is spent in freezing-cold Chicago, where the entire
Brenner family walks in the Nobel laureate’s footsteps.
Elisabeth Brenner says that
Bellow “lifts reality up to eye level for the reader, and makes
it easier to enter into it, with all your senses wide open”, and
these words could also be applied to Ketil Bjørnstad’s novel. He
is no minimalist writer who focuses on between-the-lines
implications. The novel “De udødelige” nevertheless provides,
indirectly, a penetrating and well-defined picture of
comfortable Norwegian reality at the beginning of the 21st
century.
Copyright: Turid Larsen & Dagsavisen,
Saturday, 29 January 2011
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