Warning: plot spoil

Doug suggested this prize-winning Norwegian book, first published in 2003. Set around the millennium, it's the first-person narration of Trond, a widower in his late sixties, who decides to retire to an isolated part of Norway, the kind of place he has always longed to be 'even when everything was going well, as it so often did', where 'there was only silence' and time could be 'something I live inside and fill with physical things ... and does not vanish when I am not looking.'

Unfortunately, the hoped-for mental peace is immediately shattered when he meets his nearest neighbour, an event that unexpectedly takes him back to a momentous summer three years after the second world war when, at the age of fifteen, he stayed with his father in his father's cabin near the woods in another rural area, away from his mother and sister in the city, and momentous events in his life occurred. From this point the novel then becomes a series of vivid and extended flashbacks to that summer, alternating with the snowy present as Trond settles himself into his cabin for the winter and tries to comes to terms with that past.

Doug said he really loved the book, and all of us agreed that it was beautifully written (and presumably beautifully translated, by Anne Born), moving and hauntingly atmospheric. John noted that the beginning of the novel is composed in very short sentences - and Mark agreed, commenting that the novel was Hemingwayesque - but in fact as the past takes over for Trond, this careful, measured prose gives way to a more fluid style, at times becoming stream-of-consciousness. My only problem with that, I said, was that it made me read quickly (and voraciously), and I felt at times I was reading too quickly and missing things, in particular clues, and John said he had the same experience.

There is indeed an air of mystery over the whole novel, which is partly a result of Trond's only slowly awakening realisations. In the present there are the difficulties of a past buried by psychological necessity and by time, and in that past Trond is an adolescent from whom important truths are being hidden. When the present-day Trond first meets his neighbour, who is out in the dark looking for his dog, Trond is strangely disturbed by him, in particular by his nervousness, especially when the neighbour says he may have to shoot the (disturbingly fearful-aggressive) dog and, seemingly compulsively, tells him about once having had to shoot another dog.
He had lost his confidence, it was clear ... I suddenly felt desperately sorry for him. The feeling welled up from I don't know where, from some place out in the dark, where something might have happened in a different time entirely, or from somewhere in my own life I had long since forgotten...
However, in spite of this vague feeling of recognition, and even though the neighbour has given his name, Lars Haug, Trond does not immediately realise that they are connected by that long-ago summer, and in fact, we will discover, much more. It is only as the first flashback unfolds that the reader can begin to make the connection.

That first flashback begins when, early one morning, the fifteen-year-old Trond is invited by a neighbouring lad, Jon, to go 'out stealing horses' - Jon's phrase - and is mystified by Jon's undergoing what seems to be a kind of nervous breakdown in which he becomes alien and potentially violent. Only the next day will Trond learn that the day before the 'horse-stealing' incident, Jon, who had been meant to be looking after his ten-year-old twin brothers, had left his gun unattended, and ten-year-old Lars had picked it up and accidentally shot dead his twin. And only slowly, over the course of that summer, will Trond realise what is going on between his father and Jon's mother, has in fact been going on for years, and how that phrase 'out stealing horses' connects the two. There are early indications in the novel that that summer of his fifteenth year was the last time Trond ever saw his father, but it will be fairly late in the novel that a major fact - a fact of which the present-day Trond would be acutely aware in the presence of Lars but clearly can't face broaching - will be confirmed for the reader: that Trond's father became stepfather to the ten-year-old Lars.

Jenny said that her one problem with the novel was that there were too many gaps - we never know about that life that Lars lived with Trond's father before Lars left, aged twenty, never to return (Jon, who had run away to sea immediately after the shooting, having returned to claim the farm that Lars had been working); we never know exactly what happened in the relationship between Trond's father and Lars's mother in the war years; we know little of Trond's past career and life with his wife and daughters. The rest of us felt on the contrary that it was these gaps that created the poignancy of the novel and were psychologically acceptable - both Trond and Lars are blanking painful pasts, and Trond's intervening life, which he makes clear was successful and happy, in psychological terms falls away in significance once the unresolved nature of the past comes to dominate.

Ann said little about this book, but did say that she found it oddly ambivalent, with which I agreed. It's a book about a man's relationship with his father, a father he had looked up to and who had schooled him in a tough physical masculinity but then abandoned him, and as such it seems to me strongly to examine and question the issue of masculinity. Trond's father encourages him in the toughest processes of haymaking, he instructs him in the felling of trees, he takes him on a rite-of-passage horseback trek; he tells him that 'you decide for yourself when it will hurt'. But his father's own masculinity fails: he chooses the wrong time of year to fell his trees and send logs down the river (in order, it will turn out, to earn money to send to the family he is planning to abandon), and there will turn out to be an ulterior (and real) motive for the horseback trek: to check on the progress of the logs, of which they will find too many stranded in the drying river, never to make it to Sweden where they would have been sold. There is too a suggestion that the cowardly way in which he abandoned his family is an ultimate failure of masculinity. Trond's retirement retreat to the 'outback' is perhaps a way of returning to that unresolved masculinity and there are poignant moments when he finds he knows how to do certain tasks because his father taught him, and others when he doesn't, because his father didn't. On skimming through the book to write this report, I came upon a moment when he watches Lars expertly cutting wood, which, having read the whole book I found particularly poignant, as Lars would of course have been taught by Trond's father. I have to say however that on my first reading that poignancy was lost on me, as it's not entirely clear at that stage in the book how things ended up between Trond's father and Lars's mother. In fact, I feel that the initial encounters between Lars and Trond would be more strongly charged if the reader had the information that is withheld.

I did find it all very moving, but couldn't help reflecting on finishing the book that there was nevertheless a certain fundamental ambivalence about masculinity on the parts of both narrator Trond and possibly the author. It struck me that the women in the novel get short shrift: they are either dead (Trond's wife and sister) or forgotten (Trond has difficulty at one moment in remembering his wife's face; he has gone away without even telling his daughters where he is, and makes no mention of them until one of them turns up looking for him; he refers to his other daughter as 'the other one' and we never learn her name), or they are sex objects (the milkmaid and Jon and Lars's mother). Trond remembers that when his father returned to Oslo after the war, his sister and mother ran down the road to greet and embrace him, but Trond's father looked over them at Trond with 'a secret smile', and Trond 'realised that from now on it was all about the two of us, we had a pact.' Trond says that he was fond of his sister, but she remains in the very background of this story. All of this may well be authorial comment on Trond's former training in masculinity, but for me the fact that there is no sense for the reader in the narration of the experience or inner life of these women makes the present-day Trond, and the book, ambivalent.

Doug agreed that the treatment of the women was the one weakness in the book, but Mark rigorously defended it from this criticism, finding its focus, as a book about a father-son bond, acceptable. He pointed also to the character of Jon's mother who is physically strong, working with the men at the haymaking and tree-felling and also heroically brave as a resistance activist during the war - although I would still contend that Trond views her, however inevitably, from the outside. Mark also, rightly, picked out the fact that when Trond's visiting daughter suggests that perhaps he wants her never to come back again, he realises that he doesn't want that at all, and that he should, as she suggests, get himself a phone - in other words, not completely bury himself away in his macho outback. Mark did conclude by saying that he accepted that it was a male book written for men. I didn't get a chance to say so at the time, but I profoundly disagree with this: speaking for myself, as a woman relating to men and with sons, I find masculinity, and the kind of questioning of its macho version that we encounter here, of huge interest and importance.

The ending, as we commented, is curious: the book concludes with an episode in which the fifteen-year-old Trond accompanies his abandoned mother to Karlstad to collect the money from the timber. It turns out to be a paltry amount, and can't be taken out of Sweden back to Norway. Trond's feelings towards his mother on this trip are indeed ambivalent. He looks at her sleeping on the train as they travel there, and is clearly repulsed:
Her eyes were closed, and the heavy lids rested on the round cheeks as if everything save sleeping was unnatural to this face, and I thought: for Christ's sake, he just disappeared and left me with her.
Oh, I did love my mother, I'm not saying that I didn't, but what future I could read in the face before me was not what I had imagined. Merely to look at that face for longer than three minutes made the world push at my shoulders from both sides. It made me short of breath.

Here he is replicating the presumed attitude of his father, and as they wander the streets of Karlstad looking for the bank he becomes unreasonably aggressive to a stranger who is unable to tell them the way, on the point of hitting him, and it is clear that he sees this as connected with the training he has received from his father that summer:
I was as tall as he was and in good shape after that summer, for I had used my body for all kinds of things. I had bent it and stretched it in all directions and lifted and pushed just about everything and hauled and tugged at stone and wood and rowed the boat both up and down the river... Now I felt strong and invincible, and this man did not exactly look like an athlete ... [I] felt one hand clenching automatically. It felt warm and good and tight in all its joints...

But then:
...It dawned on me that from that small patch of cobbles I stood on there were lines going out in several directions ... the different roads I could take, and having chosen one of them, the portcullis would come crashing down, and someone would hoist the drawbridge up...
He chooses not to take that destructive macho step.

He remains 'sullen and ungiving' towards his mother, but when she comes out of the bank with the news about the money, there is a shift. 'She laughed out loud ... all of a sudden she was wide awake.' She decides to spend what little there is on a new suit for him:
It was a perfect fit. I stood there looking at myself in the mirror ... I did not look like a boy at all ... I could swear my mother blushed when she saw me... my mother put her arm in mine, and we went on like that, arm in arm like a real couple... It was like dancing, I thought.

This is extremely moving, and the implication I take from it is that this time with his mother has turned Trond into a different kind of man from the one his time with his father could have turned him into. The ambivalence does return:
We were never to walk like that again. When we came home to Oslo, she fell back into her own weight and remained that way for the rest of her life.
Even so, the novel ends by returning to the memory of that moment of lightness, and, reporting that his hand had felt 'swollen and sore where the nails had pierced the skin when I clenched it so hard', the adult Trond makes the final comment, 'we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt' with, I take it, a new meaning for the phrase, referring to the choices to be made between different kinds of masculinity.

This is perhaps linked to the twinning theme of the novel that Mark pointed out: not only are there twins in the Haug household, one of whom dies and the other of whom lives, Trond's mother had twin brothers, one of whom was shot by the Gestapo, another of whom survived. In both cases the surviving twin's life is shadowed by the loss, as Trond is perhaps shadowed by the alternatives for how to live as a man.

There were a few other, more random comments. Near the start of the meeting John had said that he hadn't much liked the long passages describing haymaking and woodcutting. He called them 'long-winded' and said they were boring and obvious if you'd actually done those things yourself, but I think he also meant that their length and detail were a rather macho aspect of the novel itself. (Personally, however, I was fascinated by the description of the now-disappeared traditional Norwegian method of haymaking, having experienced our very different British and now also discontinued traditional method.)

Some people said that they found it too much of a stretch that Trond's present-day neighbour turns out to be Lars - as Ann said, Norway is a huge country. Trond does in fact comment on the fact that this is the kind of coincidence you'd find hard to accept in modern-day fiction: 'if this had been something in a novel it would have been irritating'. I really liked that - the truism that some things that do happen in life would seem just too strange for fiction, but others found it simply an excuse that they didn't buy.

I said that one thing I found utterly admirable was Petterson's ability to describe emotions and the shifts in the adolescent Trond's alignment with the world, as in the section above describing his reaction to his mother, and in the following passage in which Trond finds himself sexually attracted to Jon's mother:
Jon's mother ... smelled of sun and resin as I no doubt did myself, but also of something more that made me dizzy and on the verge of tears, and I did not want her to be the mother of anyone, living or dead.

And that ability is surely anything but macho.

March 2021
Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Maria Semple

April 2021
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison

A long time ago now, we read Beloved by Toni Morrison, considered by many to be her greatest novel, and all of us loved it. This time Jenny suggested her first novel, The Bluest Eye. Although we were agreed that it doesn't have the stature of Beloved, we all also really liked it, and Mark, who couldn't make the meeting, sent word that he had loved it.

Set in post-Depression 1940s Ohio, it concerns the tragic figure of Pecola, a young girl from a poor black family who is so degraded and effaced by the racist white gaze that she longs for blue eyes like Shirley Temple - for, in other words, the only concept she has of beauty, whiteness. With a narrative frame that is the voice of a less downtrodden schoolfriend, now adult, the novel also includes the voices and histories of other characters, in particular Pecola's parents whose stories have led them to the degradation, including at one point homelessness, in which they end up. Morrison explains in an Afterword written many years later that her aim with this structure was to avoid leading readers into 'the comfort of pitying Pecola rather than into an interrogation of themselves for [her] smashing.' The idea was to 'break the narrative into parts that had to be reassembled by the reader', and thus, presumably, engage the reader's complicity and intimacy with the story and therefore Pecola's fate. Another laudable aim, provided later in the Afterword, is that she 'didn't want to dehumanize the characters who trashed Pecola' and be thus complicit in 'the demonization process Pecola was subjected to.' However, she expresses dissatisfaction with this stratagem, saying that it didn't work: it doesn't 'handle effectively the silence at its centre: the void that is Pecola's "unbeing" ' and readers 'remained touched but not moved'.

We discussed this matter. In spite of our general admiration for the novel, some people expressed agreement with Morrison about the structure, noting that Pecola is out of focus whenever the narrative gives voice and pays attention to the stories of other characters, which it does a good deal of the time. This was the case at the crucial start of the novel, which made most of us of think for some good while that the novel was going to be about the narrator Claudia and her sister Frieda. Some wondered however if it would be impossible to make more concrete or focal a character who is such a 'void', inarticulate and silenced and overlooked by the gaze of just about everyone, including other black people (apart from Claudia and Frieda), someone who has no sense whatever of self.

I said however that I didn't think it was quite true that she had no sense of self. While the novel's first incursion into Pecola's point of view has her wishing she could disappear (from the brutality of her home situation and, more crucially from the ugliness she believes she suffers), even forcing herself, psychologically, to become invisible, this scene segues into another in which is she walking down the street to buy candy. Still sharing her point of view, we share her sensations and thoughts. She is carrying her pennies in her shoe:
A sweet, endurable, even cherished irritation, full of promise and delicate security... She moves down the avenue gently buffeted by the familiar and therefore loved images. The dandelions at the base of the telephone pole... She thought they were pretty... Skates would go well over this sidewalk.
There is a personality here, a concrete self with which we are allowed to identify. Therefore when it all goes wrong, when the white shop owner fails to meet her gaze, looking everywhere but at her as if she is non-human or invisible, we have an already concrete sense of the self that is being negated and denied, and a visceral knowledge of the fact that that negation comes from outside.

Immediately after this scene another follows in which Pecola makes one of her regular visits to the women who live in the apartment above her family, three jolly sex workers. As someone in our group pointed out, unlike the general population, the three women treat her with affection and respect, and she is reflected in their eyes for both Pecola and us - and portrayed through the dramatic mode of dialogue - as a curious, chatty and normal little girl. And after all, I said, doesn't the fact that Pecola has a dream - even if it is a self-negating dream to be physically different - imply a certain dynamism? At which Jenny, I think, pointed out that Pecola is in fact proactive in trying to get blue eyes, taking charge of her own fate, however misguidedly and tragically.

Towards the end there is a scene composed entirely of dialogue between two voices of Pecola: that of the Pecola who now believes she has blue eyes, and that of a rational no-nonsense Pecola who questions what she has done, indeed calls her 'silly'. In her Afterword Morrison refers to this scene as Pecola 'hallucinating a self', which implies that the no-nonsense Pecola is not the 'real' one, and her speeches are presented in italics, as though somehow parenthesised. However, to me at any rate, it doesn't actually read like that; it reads more like the very real psychological split or double vision of oneself that can occur when one is presented by the outside world with a warped image of oneself. Morrison comments critically of this scene that it is 'a kind of outside-the-book conversation', which is perhaps true, since scenes located in Pecola's viewpoint are vastly outnumbered by those from others' viewpoints: Pecola's first menstruation, for instance, is seen from the viewpoint of Claudia and Frieda, as is the searing scene in which the three girls witness Pecola's mother being more attentive and caring with the little white girl whose family she works for than she ever is with Pecola, while Pecola's rape by her father is portrayed from his point of view (the last being the reason, I assume, that the book was at one time banned in the USA).

However, we all really liked the book and appreciated its political message and the impact it must have had on publication in 1970. In particular Jenny and Ann were impressed by the way the novel shows that the contempt of the white gaze can poison the black gaze in turn, making lighter-skinned black people despise those who are darker, and those who are darker despise themselves. Doug had one quibble, which concerned the language of the book. In her Afterword, Morrison writes in detail about its language. She wanted a language for the book that was 'undeniably black', she says, but wanted to draw a wide constituency of readers into identification. She was trying therefore for a 'race-specific yet race-free prose. Prose free of racial hierarchy and triumphalism'. For this reason, she says, she began with a colloquial phrase, 'Quiet as it's kept', implying a secret about to be revealed, and thus drawing the reader into gossipy confidence. I'm afraid I don't know what Doug's precise doubt was, whether he wondered if it was too colloquial or not colloquial enough. He did make a reference to its possibly greater suitability at the time of first publication, but I'm afraid Zoom, with its tendency to foreground and highlight interruptions, zoomed us on to other matters.