Maybe that’s exactly what he wants, Gaute Heivoll: To give the reader a story where we don’t quite know where we’re going, don’t know who the main character is or what we’re supposed to think. In the enigmatic lies the stories, he writes, that is in any case what the poet in the novel thinks: What the blind sees Once upon a time there was a man who could not get the one he loved. What meaning could life have then? he thought, putting the gun to his temple and pulling away. The man did not die, but from that day he was blind. This is the backdrop to Gaute Heivoll’s new novel “Dine ord”. The loss of sight gave the man the ability to see in a different way. He became a poet. “Dine ord” is a novel about writing, a story about how darkness is a prerequisite for light, where the middle-aged man lives a rich life by retelling an external world he conjures up in his interior. It is also a story about closeness and distance. The eventually well-known author has written twelve books. All are written down by his wife, the beautiful Terese, whom he has never seen. To her he has told and she has written down every word. Together they ironed and straightened until he was satisfied. But then: Now he sits alone in an old farmhouse he has rented. Old Ågot in the neighboring house helps him with firewood and food. A young girl comes every day on the bus – she has been hired to write down the new story. Who is she? And where has beautiful Terese gone? Lovely about the close Gaute Heivoll has found his form after 20 productive years as a writer, where he has both children’s books, poems, short stories and novels on his conscience. He has often been inspired by an actual story from his childhood in Southern Norway, such as when he wrote the novel “Before I burn down” in 2010. It was built on dramatic events from the 1970s when a pyromaniac made life unsafe in Indre Agder. Heivoll always gets close. He enters people’s hearts – and brains. He describes small, everyday events with beautiful precision. For example, he can write that someone opened a barn door, which made a tight, little angel’s wing in the snow. Or he can depict a sheet of paper in the wood-burning stove as if the flames were bursting out of the paper itself – where the discarded text had been meticulously written down – before it shriveled and twisted until it resembled a fully sprung ash-white rose with rushing lines of fire along the petals. Flowers, blood, fire – these are keywords in Heivoll’s writing. The fire takes hold of more than written words in this book, where the narrative waves back and forth between the sadness in the poet’s life, the sadness and hope for the future in the young girl’s life – because the poet’s stories also make her feel lighter – and wistful retrospects in the old neighbor’s life. Missing an overall goal For me, the overall look, where the narrator soon follows the girl, soon follows Ågot, is a bit too jarring. I can sense the author’s reluctance to deliver an (over)clear narrative, but he is miles away from falling into such a tabloid ditch. I like that Heivoll doesn’t reveal everything, that something is hidden. In this sense, he is reminiscent of another master of the subject, the Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, who also allows the fog to lift little by little in the literary universes he builds up. Rune Christiansen is a Norwegian writer who does not allow himself to be controlled by a stated plot, but who writes wonderful sensations of life itself. Still: The best part of this novel remains the minute descriptions of the sweet taste of an apple, of the silence of the snow as it slowly descends, or the warm breath of the horse in front of the hay. If I am forced to summarize, I can also, a little pathos-filled, read the book as an acknowledgment that even poetry, creating something, becomes meaningless if love disappears. Perhaps it shouldn’t be so easy to say what this story is about. Perhaps the images the book creates of the blind author in the chair in front of the stove are more than enough. And then a reader can move on in life with fabulous considerations like this under his skin: news reviewer Photo: Tiden Norsk Forlag Title: Your words Author: Gaute Heivoll Genre: Novel Publisher: Tiden Norsk Forlag Number of pages: 183 Date: September 2022
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“Your words” by Gaute Heivoll – Reviews and recommendations
