The novel, and to that extent also the poem, well also the drama, is underestimated as a container for various disciplines. Authors are often invited to conferences with doctors, architects, psychologists, engineers and politicians, who want to discuss professional issues with a literary starting point. Dane Charlotte Weitze’s sixth novel, her first in Norwegian, turns us all into botanists. I will think about my ex-boyfriend in Bergen. She was mostly in the science building at UiB, where she, and many with her, followed the lectures of the prominent botanist Knut Fægri with attentive interest. Vegan menu “Rosarium” starts in a very real primeval forest on the border between Poland and Belarus. A family flees into the forest with the Russian Tsar’s bullets squealing around their ears. The children, a brother and a sister, are separated from their parents. The children spend the winter in a hollowed-out, old oak tree. The brother continues the hunt for the animals in the area. The sister prefers what we would today call a more vegan menu. It goes so far that she herself becomes almost one with nature, more than that, she begins to take root, and her body grows, yes, what is it, green buds? It remains this way until the rose-loving tsar’s son walks by and looks into the hollow in the tree. Sucking nourishment in alleys A primeval forest is not just a primeval forest in Charlotte Weitze’s story. Here, all the peculiarities of a forest that has been left untouched since the ice age are discussed. The trees also sing and live here the secret life that we have also seen exposed in non-fiction authors such as Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson and German Peter Wohlleben. A hollowed-out oak isn’t just an oak either: The ephemerality of human life is pitted against seeds that germinate after two thousand years. 400-year-old oaks make us appear like daytime flies. On tour in women’s clothes But it is only in part two of this three-part novel that “Rosarium” really gains wind in its sails. A young man who really wants to be a woman travels into the Białowieska Forest in search of a rose that is supposed to have human characteristics. Johannes, who has crossed out the s in his name, manages to travel into the Polish forests in women’s clothes in 1939 – i.e. at the same time as Hitler’s troops are about to occupy the country, and everyone with their wits about them is heading in the opposite direction . Sun-worshiping nuns When she also seeks refuge with some sun-worshiping nuns and a horny abbess who thinks it is sufficient to subsist on a little water and sunlight, this novel has become a rosy dream from which I do not want to wake up. But we don’t quite reach the goal. Somewhere in the second part, the novel gets stuck in a German-occupied Copenhagen. A nature child from the Belarusian forest does not fit in well in a shed in the botanical garden in the Danish capital. When an aging Johanne(s) then travels across the pond with a composting corpse in her luggage, it all starts to taste like pure kitsch. We shall become compost A greenish tinge in the great-grandchild’s skin reminds us that we are dealing with a family tree in the truest sense of the word. From earth we came, and to compost we shall remain. It began as a gospel of nature, grows wildly in all directions and in the end resembles more of a hodgepodge. It was fun for a while on the way. Before Charlotte Weitze moved a little too far into this sprawling literary primeval forest, I came to think of my children’s great-grandmother’s cuttings, which suddenly appeared at home in the apartment (they survived the great-grandmother). That maybe I should pay a little more attention to them. news reviewer Photo: Aschehoug Title: “Rosarium” Author: Charlotte Weitze Genre: Novel Publisher: Aschehoug Translator: Hilde Rød-Larsen Number of pages: 393 Date: 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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