Exactly six years ago, I reviewed Niels Fredrik Dahl’s previous novel, “Mor om natten”, which was a portrait of a mother. Towards the end of that text I wrote “What will it take, how long do we have to be here, before we understand our own role as children of the parents we were given?”. Here and now, I think that the issue is relevant, also for Dahl’s new novel, “Father’s back”. In this book, however, it is the father who seeks answers, with the close help of our narrator. It is father who stands in wonder at the life and upbringing he received. In the shadow of his headstrong, literally distanced father. The judge. FICTION OF REALITY: “Father’s back” is a made-up story, but Dahl has drawn experiences from his own life. This picture from 1959 shows a little Niels Fredrik Dahl with his father skiing on the Hoff terrace. Photo: PRIVAT Waiting for father “Father’s back” opens on a veranda where the narrator, a man in his sixties, sits one morning looking down the street, hoping that his father will come walking. A rather unreasonable expectation, as father has been dead for fourteen years. Before he didn’t sit like that and hope; father might come by now and then, but the son did not wait. There is also something general in this. Some of us only recognize when a parent is gone that much was left unsaid, unresolved, not understood. The same here, on the veranda. While he was alive, father was an obvious entity in the narrator’s life, distant and close at the same time. But outside of his son’s presence, who was he then? This is how the story begins. Searching in memories The narrator does not have much to lean on in his attempt to write his father’s life. Papers, photos, father’s own drawings, letters. There must also have been some retold memories. A childhood and a life are slowly pieced together at the narrator’s keyboard, the reader intuitively understands that poetry is also needed. The narrative must be created. DETECTIVE DAHL: Niels Fredrik Dahl says that he has known himself as an investigator in the writing process of “Father’s back”, where he has looked through an archive of images. Photo: Trygve Heide / news Exported boy I have mentioned the Judge, the narrator’s grandfather. It was he who orchestrated my father’s childhood with a cool and self-willed hand: in Alexandria, from the age of five, with servants and home school with my mother. She, a woman who found her heavy heart already there. At the age of thirteen, the boy was exported to Stabekk in Bærum to go to a Norwegian school, later to a boarding school in Switzerland, as the war approached, while patches of the persecution of the Jews became visible. Pre-war times and the war at home, attempts to approach politics, the socialists and the resistance, fear, flight to Sweden. Alone. Inheritance and loneliness “Father’s back” is a novel about loneliness. A fundamental solitude, one that the lonely person also experiences surrounded by other people, a loneliness from which there is no escape. The narrator says: Loneliness as a legacy, that is, as it is now believed that trauma can also be passed down between generations, the victim and the victim’s children. Among the book’s moving tableaus is the image of the boy wading in the deep snow at Stabekk to study how the others ski – and then learn the art, by himself. He knows no one, not them him. He begins to walk, far and unstoppable, to endure that no one knows him. Hear Niels Fredrik Dahl tell about the relationship with his own father in “Summer in P2”: The illustrator Niels Fredrik Dahl’s prose in this novel is concrete and pointed, sometimes concise, with a strong closeness to his people. At the same time, the poet Dahl also demonstrates his ability with images in this book. Invisible – visible Much was both exotic and adventurous in the life that Niels Fredrik Dahl and his narrator describe in “Father’s back”. PHOTOS AND LETTERS: The Brage award-winning author presents photos and letters from his own life that inspired his writing. See features from Dagsrevyen. For the reader, the pain remains, but it also shines through – in the seriousness and the experienced. Like, late in the novel, where the narrator studies a drawing made by his father as a twelve-year-old in Alexandria. The boy paints everything he sees, except himself. I sat for a while with those sentences, while the sadness in them became close and concrete. As it turned and became clear when late in life father travels back to the Alexandria of his childhood, which of course no longer exists, everything is gone. He sums up for himself all the places he has not belonged to, not even in Alexandria. An enduring novel “Mor om natten” from 2017 was for me a defining reading experience that can still register in my memory, at the slightest reminder. “Father’s back” is unlikely to stand back, I think it will withstand much of the test of time. Maybe even more. news reviews Photo: October Title: “Father’s back”. Author: Niels Fredrik Dahl Genre: Novel Publisher: October Number of pages: 341 Date: 13 October 2023
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“Father’s back” by Niels Fredrik Dahl – Reviews and recommendations
