“She just stood there and saw his face merge into the darkness as he lowered his hand and threw the burning match.  The flames burst into life.  It was like an avalanche of fire.  At once everywhere around them was lit up. It was a restless yellow light that made all the shadows tremble.  He staggered backwards a couple of paces while she remained motionless.  The flames were already licking high up the wall.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JAN 29, 2014)

Gaute Heivoll has written both a compelling novel and a historical and fact-driven book that examines a series of fires that occurred during two months in 1978 Norway. It is told from the perspective of the author who was born during the year that the arson occurred, as well as from the perspective of the arsonist who was in his twenties when the author was born.

The character Heivoll has returned to his hometown of Finsland, Norway to research this book and try to become a writer. He interviews those who knew the arsonist and he also gleans information from newspaper clippings and his grandmother’s diaries.

The arsonist, Dag, is the son of the fire chief. He was a most wanted child, an only child and very much loved – good at everything he put effort into. During his early adulthood he goes into the military and returns home after some sort of rejection that is never made clear. He lolls around the house and follows his father on fire calls that, because Dag is setting the fires, become more frequent and horrific. At one point, there are eight fires set over a period of three days.

Between May 6, 1978 through early June, 1978, ten fires are set, mostly to abandoned buildings and out buildings in Finsland. Towards the end of the pyromaniac’s rampage, however, buildings are burned with people or pets in them. They come just a hair’s breadth from losing their lives.

The book goes into the lives of the people who live in Finsland, mostly farmers, who have known each other their whole lives. It is inconceivable to them that one of their own is starting these fires. How could this possibly be? They only know that the arsonist comes at night and they have been driven to ignore sleep and are forced to stand guard all night to protect their homes and belongings from the crazy person who is burning down the village home by home.

Gaute Heivoll remembers clearly a time in school when one of his teachers told him he’d be a writer. He had gone to Oslo to study law but when it came time to take his exams, he turned in empty papers. He is afraid to be a writer yet drawn to a writing life and compelled to write at the same time. He is drawn in completely by the subject matter of this book.

Mr. Heivoll is a child being Christened at the time that the fires start and he imagines what his life as an infant is like when those around him are so frightened and paranoid about the fires. The town is a quiet one and no one would ever suspects Dag, the perfect boy, of doing anything wrong. When his parents figure out it is Dag, the bottom falls out of their world.

The book is poetically written and highly charged. It brings to life Mr. Heivoll’s own development as an author while examining the life of an arsonist who can not stop himself from his heinous actions. This book will appeal to those who like true crime and memoirs, along with literary fiction. I recommend it to anyone who treasures good writing and poetic use of language. (Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (January 7, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Gaute Heivoll
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More from Norway: Child Wonder by Roy Jacobsen

Bibliography:

• Before I Burn (January 2014)

“It was time it happened, the determination that this should never be allowed to repeat itself, the hatred and the bitterness of not being able to decide whether to thrust a knife in her or start to weep so that she could console me like a second Linda, for I was no child any more and yet I was, and I wanted to be neither, but someone else, again.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (SEP 28, 2011)

Navigating that shaky bridge between childhood and adulthood is never easy, particularly in 1961 – a time when “men became boys and housewives women,” a year when Yuri Gargarin is poised to conquer space and when the world is on the cusp of change.

Into this moment of time, Norwegian author Roy Jacobsen shines a laser light on young Finn and his mother Gerd, who live in the projects of Oslo. Fate has not been kind to them: Gerd’s husband, a crane operator, divorced her and then died in an accident, leaving the family in a financially precarious position. To make ends meet, she works in a shoe store and runs an ad for a lodger for extra money.

To complicate the situation, Finn’s father’s second wife – a now-widowed drug addict – views the ad and unloads on the family Finn’s half-sister, Linda – a young girl who appears to have mysterious problems that are only gradually revealed. Figuratively, this “poor mite got off the Grorud bus one dark November day with an atomic bomb in a small light blue suitcase and turned our lives upside down.”

Linda becomes the mirror in which Gerd, Finn, and others (including the lodger Kristian) eventually define themselves. Gerd, who identifies strongly with Linda, is transported back to an abusive childhood and views herself in the little girl. Finn — who is the first-person narrator — battles jealousy, bewilderment, and eventually, stirrings of love as he defends Linda from the Norwegian educational system and the school bullies. He reminisces: “Linda was not of this world, one day I would come to understand this – she was a Martian come down to earth to speak in tongues to heathens, to speak French to Norwegians and Russian to Americans. She was destiny, beauty and a catastrophe. A bit of everything. Mother’s mirror and Mother’s childhood. All over again.”

Not unlike his regional compatriot, Per Petterson, Roy Jacobsen is (as one publication stated about the latter), “a master at writing the spaces between people.” He succinctly and beautifully captures the incomprehension of a young boy who is trying to make sense of the adult world and his place within it. The increasing bond between the boy and his accidental sister is explored painstakingly and is exquisitely poignant. The portrayal of Linda’s evolution to her new family is genuinely heartrendering.

A pedestrian and at times downright awkward translation does not serve the stream of consciousness sections well. In the best translations (such as the talented Ann Born’s translation of Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses), the reader loses sight that the book is a translation. It takes a little while to get into the cadence and the rhythm.

But the authenticity of Roy Jacobsen’s vision wins out with its universal themes: how others become gifts in our lives, unveiling us, and the lengths we go to preserve relationships with those we love. Or, in the words of the author, “Something happens to you when someone spots you – you see yourself from the outside, your own peculiar strangeness, that which is only you and moves in only you, but which nonetheless you have not known…” This quiet book is a hopeful testimony to transformative change.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Roy Jacobsen
EXTRAS:	Blog with all sorts of Roy Jacobsen info
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Out Stealing Horses by Per Pettersen

Partial Bibliography (translated):

• The New Water (1987; 1997 in English)
• The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles (2005; 2009 in English)
• Child Wonder (2009; September 2011 in English)

“We’re nearly ready, we’re always almost ready and it takes only a little time for the vessels to flush and fill with memory, and then we can open our eyes, lift our heads, sit up in our beds, and turn to meet your gaze. We’ll tell you what we remember.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (JUL 15, 2011)

Nestled in the pristine Finnish woods is a sanatorium for women. It’s the 1920s and medicine and its accompanying attitudes towards women’s health is moving from Victorian ideas to more modern methods of treatment, but those shifts have not yet reached the women’s hospital at Suvanto. This vast multistoried building is still part spa for the wealthy wives of the male employees for the local timber company, and part hospital for the poor. This is a building with sharp physical and mental divisions between staff and patients and also between the patients themselves. The poor patients–those who are considered “really” ill are kept on the bottom floors, while the convalescing wives of the timber employees, called the “up-patients” lodge on the 5th floor.

American nurse, Sunny Taylor, arrives at Suvanto hoping to leave the memories of her mother’s protracted illness behind. Upon arrival, she’s assigned to administer to the up-patients on the top floor. Most of these women are not seriously ill–although they may suffer from a number of hysterical illnesses, age-related problems or perhaps just ennui–the result of the delicate, protected and largely synthetic lives they lead. Into this stifling atmosphere of hospital pajamas, organized games and medications, arrives Julia Dey, a former tango teacher dumped on the hospital by her husband.
There are hints that Julia may suffer from some sort of venereal disease, but she also suffers–as many middle-aged women do at Suvanto–from a “woman’s ailment.” In Julia’s case, she suffers from a prolapsed uterus. Sunny begins to find that she identifies with the patients rather than the rest of the nursing staff, and she’s particularly sympathetic to Julia.

Unlike Julia, who had no say in the fact she was sent to Suvanto, some of the women have chosen to stay at Suvanto and welcome the time as a break from their husbands. Indeed, some of the wealthy wives are regulars who return each year. These wives lead protected, hothouse lives, so Julia is a totally different being. For one thing she’s worked for a living and she’s led an exotic life. She’s also not an easy patient, and Julia’s refusal to cooperate causes the latent cruelty of the nurses to surface. Pearl Weber, one of the more popular women, is considered by her frustrated husband to be suffering from neurosis and actively making herself ill. The perfumed, powdered and cosseted Pearl becomes Julia’s unlikely friend.

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto is an incredibly creepy, disturbing novel, and throughout the story there’s a sense of malevolence and gathering menace. The hospital’s stagnant atmosphere shifts with the arrival of a male doctor who’s experimenting with some new surgical techniques, and the building is detailed in such a way that it becomes a vivid part of this story. The hospital exudes a sterility in which death, depression and hopelessness linger. Its intricate architecture includes soundproofing, passages and locked rooms–all things that echo the ideas of secrecy, separation and impenetrability. Yet oddly, most of the up-patients look forward to their rest at Suvanto. What does that say about their everyday lives?

Author Chapman cleverly allows the narrative to shift from third-person to first person plural, and this technique underscores the idea that while the hospital operates on a bland day-to-day-level, there’s an underlying culture between the female patients that’s largely impenetrable by the staff:

“We cared only for ourselves. We had large windows, and we watched the sky thicken with snow. We pulled open the metal door to the roof and positioned ourselves along the curving promenade, scraping our lounge chairs over the concrete, turning to absorb the winter sunlight through fur-lined hats and soft, generous coats. From the promenade you can see the cornerstone; we discovered this by carefully leaning out over the railing, into the air, looking down to where the building meets the ground. Pictures were taken, and we’d like to see them now, because we were beautiful then. We’d like to be beautiful again, and in memory we will be, and then we’ll tell you all about that winter, including the early deaths, some say preventable, some say one, some say three, that happened at Suvanto. We’re nearly ready, we’re always almost ready and it takes only a little time for the vessels to flush and fill with memory, and then we can open our eyes, lift our heads, sit up in our beds, and turn to meet your gaze. We’ll tell you what we remember.”

There’s a quote at the beginning of the book from The Bacchae, and it’s a quote that fits both the novel’s action and the relationships between the up-patients–women who are largely kept like expensive pets by their husbands, and when these women begin to suffer mentally from the shallowness of their caged lives, they’re shipped off to Suvanto for repair. The women may appear to be docile dolls with expensive habits, but there’s a rage and violence lurking beneath the text that Chapman captures perfectly. The hospital is a strictly hierarchal institution, and yet the up-patients operate, eventually, outside of that hierarchy as they challenge and then destroy it. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto is primarily a women’s novel for its exploration of women’s health (real and imagined) and that includes a number of female-specific issues and its strong feminist subtext.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (May 24, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Maile Chapman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett

Bibliography:

• Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto (March 2010)

“…it showed the human Mao, someone I was drawn to, someone who had felt how time was battling his body, as I had felt it so often myself; how time without warning could catch up with me and run around beneath my skin like tiny electric shocks and I could not stop them, no matter how much I tried.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (AUG 4, 2010)

It’s difficult to compare Per Petterson with anyone except Per Petterson. His writing is always exquisite and precise and heartbreaking and spare. In Out Stealing Horses and To Siberia, each word is used as a brick, building one upon the other, and not one brick is out of place.

Per Petterson’s craftsmanship is on display here, as it has been in his prior novels. Alas, this one, which explores the relationship between a mother and a son, is more static and sluggish than his other works. Still, Petterson at his less-than-best is still better than most writers at the height of their powers.

Arvid Jansen is 37 and life hasn’t turned out exactly as it should. He has plundered the promise of a higher education to become part of the proletariat; he has embraced Communism and now the “party of the people” has unraveled and the Berlin wall is coming down. His wife of 15 years is filing for divorce. And his mother – his beautiful, aloof, and strong mother – has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Arvid follows his mother to Norway where he reflects on his childhood, his flirtation with Communism, his birth family, and the women who have flitted through his life. Of his mother, he reflects, “I became the Lone Ranger, looking for unsafe ground, and I clung to her did tricks for her, performed for her, pulled laughter out of her with my silly jokes whose punchlines were lost in linguistic confusion…”

Indeed, Arvid feels like he has disappointed his mother. In one of the more poignant scenes, his memory captures a time when his mother turned 50 and he prepared to give a toast. Drunk, out of his league, he bungles the moment and humiliates himself. He wants to say, “The good news, Mother, is the river had dried up…only a trickle remains so now it is easy to cross…so you see, nothing’s too late for us, we can walk right across or meet halfway.” What he DOES say is far different.

Much of this book deals with the chasms between us, the rivers of time that don’t let us cross and connect. The river-as-time metaphor captures how Arvid is caught in the flow of life, sometimes turbulent, that has upturned his life and now may do the same to his two daughters. And, much like a river, the narrative ebbs and flows, becomes bogged down, bursts free in spurts, and meanders to its destination.

Eventually, Arvid realizes that “…you suddenly realize that very chance of being the person you really wanted to be is gone forever, and the one you were is the one that those around you will remember.” In this, he is like everyman – sorting through regrets, trying to define who he really is, attempting to make peace (if only in his memories) with who he is and has been.

The novel’s title is taken from a poem by Chairman Mao whom Arvid idolized in his Communist days; maturity and eventual mortality are themes that run throughout the book. This novel of ideas requires concentration and total immersion in the mind of Arvid; much of the action is internal and distanced. It will appeal to some, but not all, of Per Petterson’s fans.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (August 3, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Per Petterson
EXTRAS:	Guardian interview with Per Petterson
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Out Stealing Horses

Bibliography:

• Ashes in My Mouth (1987; 2014 in US)
• It’s Fine By Me (1992; 2012 in US)
• To Siberia (1996; 2008 in US)
• In the Wake (2000; 2006 in US)
• Out Stealing Horses (2003; 2007 in US) 
• I Curse the River of Time (2008; 2010 in US)
• I Refuse (2012 in Norway)

“There should be some way…to tell [this girl] what [she] has discovered.  Which is what?  That friendships end?  That love dissipates?  That people die?  That there is nothing to trust in this uncertain life?  Happiness, love, friendship, even one’s own body—all the enduring bonds finally cannot endure.  Nothing is secure.  Nothing keeps.  What is the good of knowing that?”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Mary Whipple (MAY 17, 2009)

In this collection of stories about life’s uncertainties, Robert Boswell picks up his characters like mechanical toys and winds them up tight, and just when they are at maximum tension, he twists the key one more turn, guaranteeing that they will unwind noisily, out of control.  Virtually all his characters are losers.  A woman, having lost her disabled husband, now finds that she has also lost her best friend.  A housecleaner has been abandoned by her husband.  An attention-seeking motel manager demands that a patron strip search her.  A needy young man goes broke while in the thrall of a fortune teller.  A priest tries to help a pathetic family by offering a “story to have faith in, even if he cannot entirely believe it.”

The stories are sometimes bleak, but they are always haunting.  The characters are just one twist away from the normal, the safe, and the real, feeling instead to be “different,” irrational, sometimes dangerous, and even frightening.  They have been buffeted by fate, often inspired by their own misdeeds, and they are, as a group, naïve, thoughtless, and sometimes ignorant.   Most of them have memories from childhood which lurk to torment them, and they have done little to change their behavior and virtually nothing to improve their present situations.  Lacking values and commitment to the larger world, most are self-indulgent, living empty lives.

Startling stories grow from seemingly ordinary events.  In “Lacunae,” Paul Lann has driven two hundred miles across the desert from Tucson to pick up his father, who is being released from the hospital after his ninth stroke, and drive him to his family’s home nearby.  His father’s awareness of his surroundings comes and goes, “like a haunting,”  and he speaks in two voices, his normal voice and his “bad voice.”  Paul has had a miserable marriage, and the one constant in his life has been an old Mercury sedan.  Faced with his father’s precarious health and a final chance to reunite with his wife and her child, Paul must choose whether to stay or go.

In “A Walk in Winter,” a young man has returned to Chapman, North Dakota, in the middle of winter.  Riding with the sheriff, he is on his way to identify his mother’s frozen remains.  His mother had disappeared following an argument with her husband when the boy was ten, and he has been brought up by his aunt.  When he sees the detached jawbone, he remembers the last time he saw his parents, suddenly shocked into understanding all the missing pieces of his early life.  He remembers an accident he had five years earlier, with his girlfriend’s child in the car, wondering whether he, himself, has become “one of the stones on which [this small boy’s] character was built.”

In the title story, a novella, main character Keen begins his story:  “I was in that drifting age between the end of college (sophomore year) and the beginning of settling down (the penitentiary)…”  He and his friend Clete, both addicted to mushrooms and almost any other illegal substance they can get, move in with a friend who is house-sitting for the summer and watching a family’s two dogs.  Several other freeloaders, both male and female also move in, and to support their habits, they sell, one by one, the entire contents of the house.  Dividing the story into an ironic ten-step program, the novella begins with a “Happier Time,” and progresses through “Considering Others,” and “Accepting Responsibility,” to “Understanding Mistakes,” “Mental Health,” and “What I’ve Learned.”  The ironies of these titles become obvious as two members of the household die and two others get married.

Boswell makes every word count here, choosing his descriptors of people and objects so carefully that the reader can instantly see the pictures the author creates—“His [car] window held a cornea of ice,”  and on a cold day, “The oak limbs creaked their wooden misery.”  “Her husband…had about him the ordinariness often ascribed to serial killers.  Sort of a bland Regis Philbin…” and “The bus driver slumps behind the steering wheel, his head bulging beneath his city cap as if it were screwed on too tight.”  His characters, just one notch beyond normal and one notch more disturbed, are familiar and understandable, regardless of how strange they may be, and the intensity of the stories keep the reader’s interest at high pitch.

Ultimately, these unforgettable characters with their haunted and damaged lives, leave the reader uncomfortable with their ironies.  Damaged as many characters are, they are close enough to ourselves and those we know to feel familiar to us.  Here in this outstanding collection,  Boswell creates a variety of personalities in a variety of  tension-filled situations, speaking with a variety of voices about the dilemma of being alive.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (April 28, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards: Stories
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Robert Boswell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt (scroll down)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Like this, try: A Bit on the Side by William Trevor Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahari Six Kinds of Sky by Luis Alberto Urrea

Bibliography:

• Dancing in the Movies: Stories (1985)
• Virtual Death (1985)
• Crooked Hearts (1987)
• The Geography of Desire (1989)
• Living to Be 100: Stories (1994)
• Mystery Ride (1993)
• American Owned Love (1997)
• Century’s Son (2002)
• The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards: Stories (April 2009)

Nonfiction:

• Half Known World: On Writing Fiction (2008)
• What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak (2008) (written with David Schweidel)