A thought-provoking, existential novel—as Liv searches for meaning and identity in her own life, she must find the words to connect, comfort and lead others.
Liv, an intense and reticent theologian, moves to a bitterly cold fishing village to take up a post as the church's new pastor following the death of her friend, Kristiane. In the upper rooms of a large house overlooking the fjord, Liv plans her sermons and studies the violent interplay of Norway's Christian colonial past. She trails downstairs into the apartment below for dinners and breakfasts with a widow and her two children. As Liv becomes acquainted with the villagers and their own private tragedies, memories bloom in passages that urgently question the unpredictable bedrock of language, and the peculiar channels of imagined experience as it might have been, if only there had been a different set of words, or an outstretched hand.
The past mingles darkly with the present, cascading in chilling images: a dog lying dead in the snowy plains, Kristiane's teeth flashing as she laughs, a procession of singing, knife-carrying protesters curving along a river's edge. Martin Aitken's translation of this extraordinary novel rings with the brilliance and rigor of a master.
Release date:
October 19, 2021
Publisher:
Archipelago
Print pages:
280
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This is the blood of Christ. I stepped sideways again and poured wine into the next shiny little communion cup. I looked at the bowed heads in front of me, a row of heads, one after another. It was all just the way it was supposed to be, I thought to myself. To this place you may come, and be as one. Here you are chosen, special. You shall not be overlooked, but may dwell here. You, that was me too. We. The altar rail was a beginning. Its semicircle was a sign that said it was a part of something larger, a circle. And enclosing that circle was another circle, which in turn was enclosed by another, larger still, a great, gleaming space, vast and infinite. It said too that we could be together here, every one of us. Here. Here you may dwell. This place is for you. There was a silence. It seemed as if they were fanned out in front of me, as if a line went from each of their spines, stretching out into a landscape, out into the open expanse, out over the fells, out over the sea and onwards, into infinity. They had taken that landscape inside with them. Soon they would rise, would push open the doors and go out into it again, and disperse. These people, kneeling. As if to say: we tolerate you, despite everything. Perhaps they’d even forgotten. I could have gone somewhere else, somewhere other than here, only I knew something would have happend there too. Not the same thing again, but something else I couldn’t prevent. Something inevitable from which subsequently I would have been unable to hide. Something that could be seen in my face. It was last year, my first service here. I’d stood at the pulpit looking out upon them, the congregation waiting to hear what the new pastor had to say. My sermon was about the prodigal son: his returning home, his father who slaughtered the fatted calf in celebration, his brother’s envy, the festivities they held. I stood in my vestments, the soft-hued stole draped over my shoulders, the one Kristiane had made for me. I looked out upon them, willing them to listen, to really listen, to open themselves to what I was saying, and understand. It was how I wanted the church to be. A place in which a person returning home could be received with joy and festivity. I saw it as my task to ensure the church remained a place of welcome, so that anyone who wanted could come inside, to join not with me but with the community, and find quietude there. A place that would celebrate them. A place in which they would feel themselves accepted. That was what I talked about. On and on I went. I didn’t feel like I was saying things properly. I had to say them again, over and over again. Rambling on. In my soft vestments, holding forth. For nearly a whole hour I went on. It had been impressed upon us during the practicum that the sermon should not exceed a quarter of an hour. No longer, preferably not even as long as that. For it’s not the words they remember. Well, a few words perhaps, a turn of phrase they happen to find useful, something that seems meaningful to them at that particular moment in time. But on the whole, they won’t remember what you’ve said, only the experience of it. So give them an experience. Do it in fifteen minutes. And never more than twenty, because then their minds will wander. And it was true. I’d gone on far too long, and I knew it. But it was done, and there was nothing I could do to alter it. People got up and left. Even the woman from the parish office did, the woman who’d met me on my arrival and given me the key to the house, who’d shown me around on my first day and made me coffee in the office. She stuck it out for a while, but eventually even she had to get up and leave. And others who I didn’t know yet, they too got to their feet and walked quietly out through the door. Five or six in all. There weren’t very many to begin with either. I woke up thinking about it every now and then, which made me even more ashamed, to be thinking about that instead of something else that was more important. But I so much wanted to get through to them. I had come to them, with all my bags and boxes, my carful of belongings, had driven up only a week after Kristiane’s funeral. I’d found the vacancy on the internet, assistant to the parish priest, phoned and then faxed them my documents. The position had been advertised several times, only no one had applied. A few days later it was all agreed. I packed and set off. All the way from the south of Germany I came, all the way up here, to this place in the far north. It took a day and a night to drive through the pine forests of northern Finland before reaching the border. I followed the river, crossed over the fells and came to the fjord on the other side. And as I meandered through the curves of the road, the road that hugged the shore on its way towards the town, I had the feeling that I was coming home. Even though I’d never been here before. Here, in this landscape, the wide open landscape that I’d thought about and imagined, was my home. That was what I felt. I wanted it. And that was the reason for my sermon, the reason for all my many words about coming home. I so much wanted my story to be ours, to share my experience, to give something of myself, establish some common ground. I wanted, wanted it so very much. To come to a place and be able to say we, a place where that was even possible. But then I ruined it. Even before it started, I ruined it. Ruined what I wanted and wished for most of all. Time and again this was what happened. It seeped from inside me, whatever it was that made me ruin things, leaking out and messing everything up, consuming everyone as it went. When I got home from the church that day I hung Kristiane’s stole away at the back of the wardrobe. I never wore it again. And that night he was betrayed. I stood there looking down on them, hearing my voice in the echoing church. It didn’t sound like it belonged to me there. I spoke not for my own sake, but for mine and theirs together: for us. This is the body of Christ. This is the blood of Christ. Thy sins are forgiven. Go, and sin no more. I held out my hands. It felt like I was letting go of something, as if something departed from me as I opened my arms and held out my hands. As if by that gesture something escaped me and was gone. That was what the year had been like. Everything escaped me. Every time I held out my hands, something escaped me and was gone. Or rather, not everything. It was true that something did, but somewhere inside me it felt like there was still a place that could not be entirely depleted, a kind of subterranean spring that continued to bubble. Where does it come from? Trickling forth, percolating. There, persistent and enduring. I stood in front of the altar as we sang the hymn. And there was a peace in singing the words, a respite. Soon it would be Easter, a year since it happened. Yes, coming here had to do with Kristiane as well, it had been a reaction of sorts, an action in reverse. In a way, it had been inevitable, I could just as well have been a piece in some board game: there I was, at the bottom of the map, southern Germany, only then I had to be moved, all the way up here. Action and reaction. As if I’d been slung too close to something, too far down, too far in, and had to be propelled back again in the opposite direction. Towards what? Towards nothing?
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