“In Bjerkebæk, Sigrid Undset had doorknobs shaped like baby birds and cellar mice.” This information about how Sigrid Undset furnished her property in Lillehammer can be read in Kristin Valla’s sixth book. Valla himself made his debut with a bang with the novel “Muskat” in 2000. It became the main book in Bokklubben Nye Bøker, which is rare for a debutant, and was translated into several languages. BRAKE DEBUT: Kristin Valla photographed in connection with the launch of the romance novel “Muskat” in 2000. Photo: Veronica Karlsen / NTB Borrowed money Since then, Valla, like many other writers, has also had other jobs. She has been a culture journalist and fashion editor. She has been in many places, and written in many places, but a place of her own is absolutely necessary if she is to speed up her writing. Her solution is to buy an old house in the village of Roquebrun in the south of France. She buys it herself, but is no more independent than her husband having to provide security for her to get a loan. Clinging to Woolf Kristin Valla picks up the thread from Virginia Woolf’s ground-breaking essay “A room of one’s own” from 1928. Virginia Woolf Photo: AP Born in 1882, died in 1941. English author, literary critic and feminist thinker. Was part of the Bloomsbury circle in London in the interwar period. Preoccupied with showing that different people can have different opinions. of a single event, and of themes such as life and death. Uses inner dialogue as a tool, with flashbacks and breaks in chronology. “A Room of One’s Own” was written in response to an invitation from Girton College, Cambridge, where she was asked to speak on “women and literature”. Published in Norwegian under the title “Et eget rom” in 2018 in Merete Alfsen’s translation. The Norwegian edition also contains the essay “Three Guineas”, originally published in 1938. It is the title in particular that appeals to her: “For five years I had traveled with this book in my purse. Often with the feeling that my entire house project found its justification in this nearly hundred-year-old text. I had put my trust in it, at times I had directly clung to it, when the stays in the house were so difficult and full of obstacles that I could hardly bear to be there.” Along the way, she reads other female writers who have also fought for their own places in both a physical and metaphysical sense. She gets a lot out of this. Entering this borderland between author biography, economics and literature is simply a very good idea. She tells about Haldis Moren Vesaas, who only after twenty years of marriage with her author husband Tarjei got her own writing room on the farm Midtbø in Telemark Bought Mårbacka “The last few days I amused myself by buying a small piece of Mårbacka.” This is what Selma Lagerlöf wrote to her lover Valborg Olander in 1907 when she set about buying back the family farm bit by bit – eventually with the money she received when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature two years later. And there are several examples: Karen Blixen worked hard to restore the Rungstedlund property to its original condition with old tiled stoves. Suzanne Brøgger renovated an old school building together with hippie friends in West Zealand. American Annie Proulx built a log cabin with her own hands in Vermont. British Agatha Christie invested her millionaire earnings in apartments in London. All of them had taken Virginia Woolf’s realization that a writer needed two things to be able to write: money and a room of his own. Fighter with craftsmen Kristin Valla, for her part, is betting that the house in France will be the room that will give her the necessary peace of mind to work. We follow her ups and downs in renovating this house in a recognizable battle with craftsmen who have as much need to define how the rooms should look as she herself. This personal part of the story she doesn’t quite get around to. It will be too pretty and decorative when she has to describe how she will renovate her writing with the help of the house in France. With inhibitions There is a lack of willingness to take risks, self-reflection and perhaps also desperation. She opens up too little, so that it paradoxically feels like too much. Purely in terms of genre, she joins the club that engages in essayistic, autobiographical writing in Norwegian contemporary literature. Think Knausgård. Think Tomas Espedal. Think Hanne Ørstavik. Only when you throw yourself into it without inhibitions, wring your soul in and out, can literature arise. Or: You don’t necessarily have to tell everything, but you have to take the reader into a reflection room that is so intelligently furnished that you don’t want to go out again. Building the foundation I get the feeling that Valla is only using a small part of his literary register – as if we are in a not yet fully furnished room. But perhaps it is only the foundation wall that Valla is showing us here, a first foundation in the literary edifice that this French house purchase was to give rise to. news reviewer Photo: Kagge Title: “Own places” Author: Kristin Valla Genre: novel/biographical literature Publisher: Kagge Number of pages: 229 Date: 12 April 2023 Hi! I read and review literature in news. Please also read my review of “Kairos” by Jenny Erpenbeck, “Details” by Ia Genberg, or Franz Kafka’s “The Process” translated by Jon Fosse.
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“Own places” by Kristin Valla – Reviews and recommendations
