“Day from Night” is a novel about grief. The barely hundred-page long story reveals how the coldness of grief numbs a father and causes him to freeze in a darkness where no one else is allowed to enter. Not until he wakes up, after 30 years, through an encounter with art. Only then can it look like it is brightening. On overgrown paths A nameless man comes to an empty, cold house somewhere in Telemark. This is the childhood home. The mother has just died. The husband has hardly visited her in recent years, it is the sister who has been present while the mother died slowly, as it says. Why he hasn’t been here, we will find out little by little. It is an effective move. A table edge on a dining table would prove fatal. A wall of photographs of children and grandchildren is missing a picture. It is the son of the protagonist who is missing. He died aged just two, straining his legs against the edge of the heavy table and falling backwards so his head hit the floor with a dismal thud. VETERAN: Vidar Sundstøl made his debut in 2005 with the novel “Command Lines”. Four years later, he won the Riverton Prize for the crime novel “Dreamland”, the first of his brilliant Minnesota trilogy. The author from Drangedal has published a total of fourteen books. Photo: Gorm Kallestad / NTB Sorrowful depictions Vidar Sundstøl draws the horror, the hope and the insurmountable pain in the few hours the parents think the boy will manage with few, painful lines. Sundstøl holds time firmly in an unbearable now; the father would very much like to give his son a few last words on the way, send him some kind of lunch package, but dare not, for fear of opening up the possibility of the very worst. It is poignantly depicted. By stretching out the event, the author also keeps the reader’s hope alive. But the father goes into an emotional hibernation. He publishes three novels, which no one reads. There he writes about the cool light of the stars and the distance from people. Only now does he realize that this was what he was supposed to write about: the house, the son and the light that disappeared when the son disappeared. Comfort through time and space What causes the father to wake up? On the wall in his mother’s weaving room, he discovers a completely unknown weaving, a large carpet with scenes from Dreamtime. Draumkvedet is Norway’s most famous visionary poem. Olav Åsteson sits on the church steps and tells about his journey into the underworld. According to the medieval ballad, he fell asleep on Christmas Eve itself and did not wake up until the thirteenth day. Then he had visited heaven and hell and seen Christ and the Devil himself fighting for the souls of men. It is his own night she has woven, thinks the man who has been in his own cold sleep for so long. As he sees it, the mother has woven the blanket as a comfort, perhaps both for herself and for her son, who she knew would come to the house one day and find the necklace. VISION POEM: Draumkvedet originates from writer Vidar Sundstøl’s home county of Telemark. Hear quinces Kim Rysstad and KORK perform some verses from the medieval ballad. Writing out the meaning of art Vidar Sundstøl has used historical cultural expressions in the past, in novels such as “Oseberg” or “I sank”. These too were minimalist novels that insist on the lines of connection between past and present. In “Day from night” – the title itself should probably indicate an awakening and a movement from darkness to light – Sundstøl allows Olav Åsteson’s experiences from the underworld to give the haunted protagonist an insight into belonging. One could object that a hundred pages is hardly enough for a story that contains so much. It can be objected that the telephone conversations between brother and sister, in which Dagny explains about her mother’s work, become a poorly integrated way of telling the readers about how tapestry is made. Some of us will also think that Sundstøl lets the warp appear too well in this year’s text, in contrast to last year’s novel “Nattsang”, which also thematized a difficult father-son relationship. On the other hand, I like how Vidar Sundstøl constantly makes historical leaps of thought. It is like when the main character comments on his mother’s carpet, which shows this world and the spirit world from Draumkvedet, not as two separate worlds, but as a double exposure, as you can see in old photographs. That formulation reminds me of Rune Christiansen’s essayistic novel “The Absence of Music”, which opens with Sir Lancelot from the story of the Knights of the Round Table moving up from the mythological beach to the road, where a car is parked, in one and the same sentence . Another writer who describes the dead through art is, of course, our newly minted Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse. Swollen or sympathetic? Vidar Sundstøl ends the novel with a thank you to the many faceless folk musicians who have kept Draumkvedet alive, and who have breathed life into traditions and memories of the dead. I have vacillated between reading the ending as bloated, or as a universal, valuable realization. I guess I fall for the latter: news reviews Photo: Tiden Title: “Day from night” Author: Vidar Sundstøl Publisher: Tiden Genre: Novel Number of pages: 100
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“Day from night” by Vidar Sundstøl – news Culture and entertainment
