First Comes Summer
A Novel
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- ¥1,800
発行者による作品情報
The spellbinding story of a young woman’s dangerous passion as it plays out over the course of an eerie summer
In their remote Viking settlement, Folkví and her brother, Áslakr, have always been close—unnaturally close. They’ve grown more intimate still as Folkví learns her shaman mother’s craft, as men regard her with newly devouring eyes. Then illness carries off their parents, and the nest of home is shattered. Áslakr sets off on his first expedition, abandoning Folkví to the dark of an endless winter. When he returns, he’s done the unthinkable: He’s found someone else to love.
Sick with grief, Folkví rages to the gods where they sit at the foot of an ancient tree, contemplating the twisted passions of humans that play out in the face of an ever-approaching end of days. Will none of them save her now? Very well, Folkví will save herself. The wedding date is set. But first comes a fateful summer. . .
Deeply unsettling and brilliantly imagined, First Comes Summer captures the terror of losing the world you’ve always known—and the uncanny extremes to which you might go to hold on to it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hesselager's underwhelming debut centers on the incestuous relationship between a Viking brother and sister. Things start off with Folkví seemingly poisoning Gerd, the fiancée of her brother, Áslakr, though the scene is not fleshed out until the conclusion. In the interim, Folkví attempts to learn her mother's trade as a midwife. While her brother is away on an expedition, she meets a suitor named Od, though that doesn't stop her from being despondent when Áslakr returns and announces that he, too, has met someone. Folkví stumbles in her mother's shadow and battles with her incestuous desire to hold onto her brother "at whatever cost" and to make him "want to possess me." Áslakr, following a brief interlude with the Norns, who prophesy the impending end of the world, reflects on many of the same events covered in the novel's first half while raising a child alone and anticipating the wedding of his daughter. The concluding revelation doesn't compensate for the listless and florid narration that precedes it (Folkví, steeling herself for Áslakr's departure, "will remain at home with her combative desires," where "restlessness quivers in her body"). There's a provocative premise, but not enough emerges from it.
