If you were to unfold Bruce Springsteen’s beautiful song “The River” over 400 pages of text, the classic could become something like this: “Not people I can count on” is a love song, a ditty, a modern depiction of rural life. With Springsteen, the working-class affiliation is even clearer, although it is also thick in Andreassen’s book. In both of them I find a sore resignation that life turned out the way it did. “Not people I can count on” is also a fighting piece of defense, an endless stream of thoughts from our narrator Linda Hansen. Fingertip feeling In several novels, Kyrre Andreassen has seen the world through a person who has been abused. A man. It was not least clear in “For the rest, I believe that Carthage should be destroyed”, which came out eight years ago. Now he has really perfected his form – and surely he doesn’t know a thing or two about women either. Too rarely have I come to that degree on the inside of a literary figure. And rarely has the village been described with greater insight. Here there is enmity, enmity and friendship. Envy, admiration and gossip. It’s something everyone knows, for better or for worse. The person who is in the most pain is Linda Hansen. Deceived by those closest to her, Linda is smart, energetic. When Svein lay down on the sofa with depression, she was the one who took care of the children. She did the shopping, cooked, looked after the garden. Was he now really that ill, or was laziness affecting him? thinks Linda, when it turns out that Svein has been keeping things going with the village’s most naughty lady behind her back for a long time. Rumors about what she herself is supposed to have done earlier in her life, she flatly rejects. Linda is not necessarily a reliable narrator. The fact that she herself reproduces the gossip and reluctance that has followed her since childhood gives the image of her greater complexity. She is a victim, but by no means the only one. The dream that went bust She would have gone to Bergen, Linda, and studied law. She had the grades, had already acquired a dormitory at Fantoft. Then it became too difficult to say that she should go to her new boyfriend Svein, who had just lost his mother. So it became the basement apartment of my father-in-law instead, in the small settlement north of Kongsberg. Svein got a job at Autopartner, Linda became a secretary in the Alderman’s office – conveniently helped in by her father-in-law, who in turn benefited from Linda’s insight into all the documents a developer with the village’s largest machinery could need. Kyrre Andreassen was born in 1971 and lives in Drammen. He made his debut in 1997 with the short story collection “Det er here du har venna dine”. He is educated at the University of Oslo with the subjects history of ideas, literary studies and Nordic studies. He has written several books and been nominated for the Brage prize and awarded the Språklig samling literature prize. In 2007 he received the Hunger Prize for his writing. Photo: Eivind Mo Andreassen Memory method How does Kyrre Andreassen manage to create such a nuanced story based on a furious woman who feels deceived? How does he manage to make the flow of words interesting enough for me to follow along? Yes, he allows associations to emerge from concrete memories. If a memory is associated with a strong emotion, such as anger or fear, it sets off other memories, which are triggered by the emotion. It can also be a smell that sets it all in motion. Marcel Proust famously had the famous madeleine cake. In this sense, we take detours and detours and even on overgrown paths through Linda Hansen’s life. It is not at all inappropriate to refer to the great authors, even if Andreassen depicts ordinary life in rural Norway never so much. Like the American author Marilynne Robinson, who, admittedly, writes books with a completely different approach to philosophy and theology, Kyrre Andreassen manages to bring to life the fine communication and the lack of communication between people. Both possess great psychological insight. They see that a person who has felt exploited or humiliated at one point in their life can build up an anger that finds its outlet in a completely different setting much later. Norwegian writers who do something of the same are Trude Marstein and Carl Frode Tiller. Both write top-shelf literature. Superb sense of language Andreassen’s mastery of language testifies to the need for precision. Linda maintains a colloquial tone, and straight as it is – without it feeling pretentious on the part of the author – she uses local words and expressions. One guy squirms in the road, another has something sinister about him. And when did you read the word enkom last? I had to look it up. It means in one’s business. The language gives closeness, credibility, soul. If there is something Linda Hansen is, in her desperate attempt to understand why it happened, it is alive. Keeping the style all the way in You could argue that it becomes overbearing with such a flow of thought where both parents-in-law, neighbors or cousins of colleagues, for that matter, all get their quarter of fame. But the form gives way to the content; After all, Linda grinds round and round in her life – and shows with all possible clarity that a case has not just two, but preferably two hundred pages. “Not people I can count on” is a novel that was worth waiting for. With it, Kyrre Andreassen achieves the magic that literature at its best can do: It makes us readers think about our own lives. news reviewer Photo: Gyldendal Title: “Not people I can count on” Author: Kyrre Andreassen Publisher: Gyldendal Number of pages: 400 Publication: 16 August 2024 ISBN: 9788205606432 Hey!Hey! I am a literary critic for news and review books for both children and adults. Really good books I’ve read recently are Gjenferdet inn by Isabella Hammad, The Barefooted Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga and Lisa went to the forest by Kjersti Annesdatter Skolmsvold. Here you can read my story about how Emil in Lønneberget became the bully who was loved by everyone. Published 13.08.2024, at 14.13 Updated 14.08.2024, at 07.56
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“Not people I can count on” by Kyrre Andreassen – news Culture and entertainment
