The Hills Reply

by Tarjei Vesaas

Genres: Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

An intensely graceful novel recounting scenes of the Norwegian countryside from one of Norway's most beloved 20th-century writers.

Tarjei Vesaas's final work before his death, this episodic novel drifts between dream-like abstraction and vivid description of seemingly ordinary yet heightened scenes of the Norwegian countryside. The many overlapping, semi-autobiographical vignettes of The Hills Reply relate a deep appreciation for the complexity of the human condition, nature, and relationships.

Release date: December 10, 2019

Publisher: Archipelago

Print pages: 272

Sample

As It Stands in the Memory
THERE HE STANDS in sifting snow. In my thoughts in sifting snow. A father – and his winter-shaggy, brown horse, in snow.
His brown horse and his face. His sharp words. His blue eyes and his beard. The beard with a reddish tinge against the white. Sifting snow. Blind, boundless snow.
Far away, deep in the forest. Sunken roads in the drifts, gullies dug out of the drifts, logging roads walled in by snow.
Blind, boundless forest – because the horizons have disappeared today in the mild, misty snowfall. Here everything is silent, no sound is made on the logging-road in the loose snow as it piles higher and higher.
What is outside?
Nothing, it seems.
There is something outside, but it’s a boy’s secret, deeply concealed.
He shivers occasionally and glances at the wall of snow and mist. Of course he knows what ought to be there, but it is 
easy to imagine very different things when you are a child, or half-child, and too young to be with a sharp-tongued father, among heavy, soaking wet logs and a horse strong as iron.
Why think about what’s outside all the time?
Only more snow.
And hillsides that I know out and in, every hollow and cliff.
No use saying that.
I’m here to clear the snow. To make a logging-road.
No use saying that either.
It’s not so certain that there is anything outside. During the first hours you spend digging, before you’re too tired to think and imagine anything, life starts teeming outside the ring of mist and the wall of snow. Animals crowd round in a ring, their muzzles pointing towards me. Not ordinary animals. Animals I’ve never seen before. They’re as tall as two horses one on top of the other, and they lower red muzzles and strike at the wall of mist while they are thinking. They switch at the snowflakes with long tails, as if it were summer and there were flies. There are so many of them that they
can stand side by side in an unbroken ring – and they have small eyes that they almost close as they stand wondering and thinking.
Supposing the snow suddenly stopped falling – would they stand there exposed?
What would they do then?
What will they do anyway?
I want them there, that’s what it is.
So there they are. All day long.
Yes, they stand there thinking – while I clear the logging-road, digging and digging and thinking and thinking too. In the snowfall in a blind forest.
The shovel becomes idle in my hands.
Supposing it stopped snowing, supposing they were standing there.
What would they want?
They are so real that they have a slight smell that reaches me. It is probably much stronger close to them, and a little of it reaches me. Perhaps it is not a smell; it is not easy to decide what I sense it with. They stand side by side in a single ring
of flesh – but between them and myself there is the wall of mist and the falling snow.
Much too tempting to think about them. The snow collects on their muzzles, and their tails wave, raised as if in fight.
There is a sharp, “What is it?”
The boy starts.
What a question!
What is it? he asks, that one over there with his heavy shovelfuls of snow. An odd question when you can see that splendid ring of strange creatures. What is he thinking about over there? Must be thinking about something, he too. But you can’t ask him about it.
The question only meant that the shovel had been idle too long. He has a watchful eye for such things, and for many others, that one over there.
This is the toilsome daily round.
The man and the horse have hard tasks. The logs have to be taken the long way through the forest to the river. All the bad weather this winter makes such work endless drudgery.
The stern man gets no answer to his question. But the
shovel moves into action again, so all is well. It always goes as that one over there wishes. The gully in the snow has to be opened up farther, to fresh piles of logs lying deep in the snow. There was a road here, a gully, but now it is completely wiped out by the storm and the wind. The horse is sent ahead, and he wades through the snow and finds the road again with some delicate instinct of his, then the two of them follow him with their shovels and tramp about, widening the track the horse has made. So it goes, piece by piece.
Endless drudgery.
Don’t think about it.
Think about the solid ring of big animals close by in the twilight. Curious creatures that have not been seen in any book.
That’s not thinking, it’s resting.
Breath in what must be their smell. Here as everywhere else there is a smell of the hanging weight of fresh moisture. Wet snow, and snow melting on your face.
Restful to think about. Exciting to think about.