The Birds
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3.2 • 12 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, The Birds— it is absolutely wonderful, the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages.” — Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Birds tells the story of Mattis, a deeply sensitive, intellectually disabled young man living in a small house in the Norwegian countryside with his sister Hege. Eking out a modest living knitting sweaters, Hege encourages her brother to find work to ease their financial burdens, but his attempts come to nothing.
When he finally sets himself up as a ferryman, the only passenger he manages to bring across the lake is a lumberjack, Jørgen. But when Jørgen and Hege become lovers, Mattis finds the safety of his familial life threatened and his jealousy quickly spirals.
In The Birds, Norway’s most celebrated writer of the twentieth century allows us to rediscover the world. By turns frightening, beautiful, confounding, and full of mystery, it is a world we come to see more vividly through Mattis’s eyes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With spare simplicity, Vesaas (The Ice Palace) tells the tale of Mattis, a mentally disabled man cared for by his lonely older sister, Hege. Their routine, isolated existence is interrupted when a lumberjack arrives at their lakeside cottage and falls in love with Hege, leaving Mattis fearful that he will lose his sister. The careful translation from the Norwegian underscores Vesaas's rare sensitivity in recording Mattis's often insightful view of his world. One episode at the grocer's illustrates his inside-out universe: After buying food, Mattis watches in horror as the grocer puts a packet of candy in his shopping bag: ``He was being given sweets like a child-although he knew about great things like shattered trees and lightning and omens of death.'' Mattis turns the situation around, telling the kindly shopkeeper, ``Well, I guess you can't really help it... being like you are, of course.'' It's a sardonic rejoinder to an earlier plaintive and unanswered query to a farmer's wife: ``Why are things the way they are?'' With only limited understanding of the unpredictable power of nature, Mattis nonetheless turns to the elements to discover the answer-with unsettling results. Vesaas's own secluded life in the Norwegian woods likely informed the novel's themes of isolation and natural forces. A literary gem.
