CBR17 Book 11: "Et dukkehjem (A Doll's House)" by Henrik Ibsen

Page count: 100 pages

Rating: 5 stars

I don't know if a spoiler warning for a nearly 150-year-old play is necessary - but I will be revealing significant plot points when writing about this historical drama, so if you want to remain unspoiled, go read the play (it's only three acts, it's a relatively quick read) or watch a dramatisation, and come back when you're done. 

Nora and Torvald Helmer are a middle-class couple living in Christiania (what Oslo was named for a few centuries in the before times) in the late 1800s. They have three children, and some servants (a nanny and a parlour maid). The play takes place around Christmas and in the days following. This was a time when women didn't have any legal rights and the central conflict of this play comes about because Nora, in the past, took out a loan (forging her father's name on the contract to do so). She did it to save her husband's health but has always had to keep her illegal act a secret. Now her past is coming back to haunt her, with the man she borrowed money from, Krogstad, blackmailing her to keep his job. Nora needs to ensure Krogstad isn't fired, or he will tell her husband the truth, and the ensuing scandal could mean Torvald loses his new advantageous job as a bank manager. 

I honestly don't remember how many times I've read this play by now. I first read it in high school, with a Norwegian teacher who showed absolutely zero enthusiasm about the work, and as a result, I wasn't exactly impressed by it and remembered it as boring and pointless. Et dukkehjem/A Doll's House is now part of the curriculum in Norwegian for our tenth-graders at the school where I work and I myself have taught the play at least four times now. Unlike my high school teacher, who really just assigned us all the play to read with some accompanying work tasks (if I recall correctly), my colleagues and I read through the play act by act with the students, who take turns reading out the various parts, and we watch different dramatisations for the kids to compare and contrast. The last time I taught tenth grade, and again this time, we also showed them the first season of the Norwegian web series Skam as another comparison point, which they seemed to really like. I have no illusions that I'm instilling a great love of 19th Century realist literature in my pupils, but I'm hoping that some of them find their introduction and work with this play less off-putting than I did in school.

Suffice it to say, my opinion on this play has changed massively from my first reading of it (probably because I didn't really pay attention to it when it was one of many assigned texts). Ibsen himself claimed not to have set out to write a feminist rallying cry, but the drama remains relevant and extremely popular to this day (Ibsen remains one of the most dramatized playwrights worldwide, after Shakespeare). Nora's change from a sheltered, rather naive housewife to a woman determined to put herself first, sacrificing everything to discover who she really is, even knowing how difficult it will be is really impressive, especially given the time it was written. Torvald really is an absolutely insufferable misogynist (he's utterly odious and I had forgotten that not only does he speak to Nora appallingly, but he also mansplains why knitting is unfeminine to her friend Mrs Linde, as well), who is given several chances to redeem himself, and consistently fails at it. He sees Nora as a decorative object, a sweet plaything and constantly belittles and rebukes her if she tries to talk about anything non-frivolous. The only one who sees at least some parts of the true Nora is Doctor Rank, her husband's best friend, who would probably have made her a much better husband, had she met him first. Part of the tragedy of this play is that it's quite clear that Nora loves her idiot of a husband until his true character is finally revealed and it becomes impossible for her to lie to herself any longer. 

By the end of the play, having had it proven without a shadow of a doubt that her husband will never see her as anything but an air-headed object, Nora makes the choice to leave her family behind (it's not like she'd ever be granted custody of her children, anyway), because she cannot live the lie that she has discovered her marriage is. This was a hugely shocking finale at the time of the play's release, so much so that in Germany, Ibsen was forced to write an alternate ending, where Nora changes her mind and stays with Torvald, after all. It is rumoured that he originally considered this for the play in the first place until his wife exclaimed "Either Nora leaves, or I do." 

I cannot in good conscience rate this play any lower than 5 stars. It's a classic for a reason. I used to prefer Hedda Gabler, but the protagonist of that play is just so mean. Re-reading it yet again, I was also struck by what a massive undertaking it must be for any actress portraying Nora. In the three-act play, there is literally one short scene in the third act where Nora isn't present on stage and has most of the lines. No wonder it must be a gift of a part for an actress to play. 

Judging a book by its cover: My thin paperback copy of the play is a pleasing shade of purple, with a grumpy-looking cartoon Ibsen glowering from one side.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR17 Book 5: "Stargate - en julefortelling" (Brightly Shining) by Ingvild H. Rishøi

Page count: 144 pages

Audiobook length: 2 hrs 38 mins

Rating: 3 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo 25: Local author (the story takes place about 15 minutes from where I work)

It is impossible for me to review this book without spoiling parts of it, so if you don't want to know how it ends, and why I can't rate this book higher, skip the paragraphs I've highlighted. 

Ten-year-old Ronja and her sixteen-year-old sister Melissa are used to disappointments, living alone with a father who only occasionally sobers up long enough to hold down a job for a month or two. They're used to pretending they've forgotten their food at home and taking care of themselves. Close to Christmas, it looks like this year, their luck may change when their dad gets a job selling Christmas trees. Sadly, it doesn't take long before he returns to the local pubs and Melissa takes the job instead (at much less pay, of course). Since Ronja ends up spending her afternoons near her sister, she's soon recruited to look pitiful and round up customers for Christmas wreaths and decorative pine branches, for an added share of the profits. While the owner of the stand seems ok with turning a blind eye to Melissa's being barely old enough to work, he's not going to risk his business by outright using child labour, so every time he comes around for an inspection, Ronja has to make herself scarce.

SPOILERS START HERE:

Ingvild H. Rishøi wrote this Christmas novella back in 2021, and while it sold well, it didn't become an instant sell-out until it was translated into English. After singer Dua Lipa raved about it in her Instagram stories and said she'd be buying it as a Christmas present for several loved ones, and then Oprah Winfrey included it among her best books of 2024. Since the Norwegian press wrote enthusiastically about this (as they do about any Norwegian thing that becomes popular internationally), suddenly bookshops all over Norway kept selling out their copies, and the book needed to be reprinted more than once. Having now listened to the audiobook, narrated by the author herself, I can see why it's become very popular. I was mentally bracing myself for the book because I have a hard time reading about alcoholic parents (my own father having been one until I was ten - now he hasn't drunk a drop for 35 years), and if I'd been paying attention more closely, the multiple mentions of H.C. Andersen's The Little Match Girl throughout should have given me an idea of what to expect. I read for escapism, and to feel good, and am in no way a fan of books with sad and tear-jerking endings. I keep seeing the plot of this book described as poignant and heart-warming, and I don't see what's heart-warming about dead kids. 

Yes, it's lovely when for a brief while, the girls appear to be making enough money to possibly have a proper Christmas (even though Melissa has to work something like 10 hours a day, pretty much every second she's not in school). It's nice that their elderly neighbour comes to support Ronja during her school's Christmas concert and pretends to be her grandfather so the mean girls can't snipe at her. But just before Christmas, everything starts going horribly wrong. Their almost constantly drunk dad has dragged his drinking buddies home with him, Ronja is badly sick with a fever, the supportive neighbour is away, and the owner of the Christmas tree stand has discovered that Melissa and the other employee have been making money on the side, so fires them without paying them a dime. The writer doesn't straight-out say that the girls die while curled up under a Christmas tree in a massive winter storm, but them waking up in a magical forest just a short, idyllic walk from the cabin they've kept dreaming about throughout the story certainly seems like some "reunited with grandmother" bullshit while the little Match Girl freezes to death on a Danish street corner.

SPOILERS END HERE

I'm very glad that something from Norway that isn't dark and grisly crime fiction is becoming a publishing success and wish the author nothing but good luck, but this story was not for me. They've apparently turned it into a movie, being released at the end of October this year (just in time for people to be depressed while going to the cinema too), so I have no doubt the book will keep selling. 

Judging a book by its cover: The cover of the edition my co-worker lent me was just a plain red book with title and author name in gold, accompanied by a Christmas tree topped by a star. The English version seems to feature a snow-covered tree in a winter landscape, which doesn't exactly convey the tone of the story. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

CBR17 Book 4: "Kvit Norsk Mann" (White Norwegian Man) by Brynjulf Jung Tjønn

Page count: 93 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Nowhere Bingo 2025: A poetry collection

The author of this poetry collection was adopted from South Korea by a childless Norwegian couple when he was three years old. Throughout this rather short, but very impactful poetry collection, he writes about his constant feeling of exclusion and lack of belonging. As a child of Asian descent in a small western Norwegian village surrounded by white people, he obviously stood out among the other children. Adopted by farmers to take over their farm when they grew old, he turned out to be entirely unfit for the task, with his grass allergy, lactose intolerance and breaking out into a rash every time he touched the wool of the sheep on the farm. Many of the poems deal with his feelings of inadequacy because he was brought to Norway from the other side of the world, named for his grandfather and unable to continue the long family tradition of farming. 

Even as an adult, he never really feels like he fits in, as despite him growing up in Norway, people keep asking him "Where are you really from?", confusing his identity with other Asian people, side-eyeing his relationship with his white girlfriend (then wife). He writes absolutely heart-breaking poems referencing three young Norwegians with a non-white background (two of them adopted like him) who died in racially motivated killings. He doesn't feel like he properly fits in in Norway, but has no actual connection to Korea either. 

Back in 2021, I read a short essay collection by a woman whose mother is Norwegian and whose father is Gambian. While reading these poems, I kept being reminded of the short and brutally honest ways in which Lundestad Joof shared the difficulties she keeps facing as a biracial woman in Norway. Both authors explore the difficulties of being non-white in an almost overwhelmingly white country, which for all its progressive views, excellent social benefits and efforts towards inclusivity, still has a long way to go before the majority of the population gets over its often very unintentional racism. 

Since I'm currently teaching 10th graders, I am absolutely going to have them compare and contrast some of these texts, hopefully giving them more perspectives on contemporary life for a lot of minorities in Norway. If I'm lucky, some of them might even come up with some clever stuff to impress whomever is grading their final exams in a few months. 

Judging a book by its cover: The cover is very stark and simple, with a black background and only the title of the book and the name of the author featured. In class, the students had to discuss the colour choices here: the title "Kvit Norsk Mann" is in yellow - the colour the author describes himself as in several of the poems, while the name of the author is in white - the colour the author claims he always aspired to be growing up. I doubt these colour choices are coincidental. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR16 Book 40: "Da vi var yngre" (When we were younger) by Oliver Lovrenski

Page count: 242 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Nowhere Books Bingo: A book by a local author

Ivor and his three friends Marco, Arjan and Jonas are a tight-knit gang, their own found family. According to Ivor, school used to be easy, until he and his friends lost interest and started making money and names for themselves on the streets. Ignoring the admonition from parents, teachers, social workers and others, they live hard and fast, not really caring who they have to hurt as long as they have each other. Their way of life isn't one that leads to happy endings, however, and it's only a matter of time before tragedy strikes.

This semi-autobiographical novel, written by a 19-year-old on his phone, has been a huge success since its publication in 2023. It's won several awards, and been nominated for several more. It's a fast and relatively easy read, despite being written in a vernacular used mainly by the youths in the bigger cities, with a non-standard sentence syntax and vocabulary from a number of languages and cultures (there's a dictionary of sorts on the end papers of the book, which came in handy more than once, as I'm not as experienced with all the slang terms used here). The author writes in exactly the way a lot of people his age speak, and there is very little punctution or capitalisation in any of his many brief chapters. 

The author has in interviews confessed that by the time he was 15, he's seen several of his friends overdose, and for a while, he was honestly unsure that he would survive to see his 17th birthday, considering his drug-fueled and violent existence. In Oslo, violent crime among teenagers is on the rise, and the author says he was motivated to write his book to give more nuance to the discussion about youth gangs and crime. Basing his protagonist and other characters on himself, friends and other people in the environment in which he grew up, Lovrenski wanted to show the tightness of the bonds between these boys and the affection and loyalty between them, even as they are disappointing their family members or trying to escape foster care. 

Lovrenski has said in interviews that hopes that some of the young readers who pick up his book might recognise themselves or friends, and see that there is a way out if you work for it, and that teachers, social workers and others who work with teens might get more perspective on what it's like. Now, having turned 20, the only way he was able to get clean and stay away from his former lifestyle is by entirely cutting contact with his previous environment. He had no idea that the story he started by writing short anecdotes to himself on his phone would be picked up by a publisher in less than 24 hours, after a bidding war from several interested publishing houses, and that the book would become a huge publishing success. 

I read this in June because my co-workers and I were wondering about assigning it as a text to our 10th graders next year. Having finished it, my conclusion is that while the book is very engaging, it doesn't exactly help our pupils (many of whom struggle with reading longer texts or expressing themselves in writing) improve their own writing and it also very much glorifies drug use, violence and youth crime. While it's obvious by the end of the book that the author lived a very hard life and lost friends to overdoses and suicide, it's also not the sort of thing we necessarily need to hightlight, just in case some of the more impressionable souls decide to take inspiration from the earlier sections. It's an interesting book, though, and while I don't think we'll use the whole novel as assigned reading, it's a great example of a narrative written in a particular sociolect, and can be used to compare and contrast several other works written in the same style in the last few years.

 

Judging a book by its cover: I don't know why the publishers chose this cover design, it seems messy and a bit haphazard to me. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR15 Post 27: "De kaller meg ulven" (They Call Me the Wolf) by Zeshan Shakar

Page count: 240 pages

Rating: 2 stars

#CBR15 Passport Challenge: Books from different countries (Norway)

CBR15 Bingo: You are Here (It's set in Norway, where I am)

15-word-review: A son constantly yearning for more social mobility tries to understand his elderly father, unsuccessfully.

Official book description (translated from Norwegian by me):

"Why didn't they have more? I remember thinking after my grandmother died. They were from here, Norwegian, shouldn't they have had more things? Those things other Norwegian parents and grandparents have, at least a simple cabin, the kind without power or water, somewhere no one else wanted a cabin, in the middle of the woods? But no, nothing. I asked my mother once why it was like that. - It was just the way things turned out, she replied."

They Call Me the Wolf is a story about growing up with the knowledge that not everyone is dealt as fair a hand as others. The parents of the protagonists have worked their entire lives, so hard that their health has suffered. Nevertheless, they don't have a lot to show for it. There is nothing to inherit except memories and some family stories, from his father's early life in Pakistan, his mother's life in Finnmark in the north of Norway, and from their life together in Oslo.

Now that home has been dissolved, the father wants to leave Norway to grow old in Pakistan, leaving behind the protagonist, with his unquenchable hunger to own and acquire that which everyone else has more of. 

Back in 2017, Zeshan Shakar became a publishing phenomenon in Norway with his debut novel, Tante Ulrikkes vei. It has gone on to sell over a million copies, which is impressive when you consider that Norway only has a population of about 5.7 million people. This is Shakar's third novel and I think that each new book he writes is less interesting than the last. His previous novel, Gul bok (yellow book) was underwhelming and I didn't really think there was any real character development or progression in it. This book basically just has a protagonist who is always dissatisfied with his life, constantly wishing for a bigger and better house, all the while bemoaning any real closeness to either of his parents, despite the fact that they have had no meaningful contact since the protagonist grew up and left the home he seems mostly ashamed of.

While our protagonist clearly has a big house, a successful job, and a picture-perfect family, he keeps striving for more. He's also unhappy about the fact that his father, elderly and rather alone, having been evicted from his council estate flat because the city council is planning to upgrade his building, would rather move back home to Pakistan than let his son buy him somewhere to live in Norway. The son is frustrated because his father doesn't really seem interested in packing his remaining belongings to have them shipped to Pakistan, and keeps reminiscing about events in his childhood and adolescence that shows his disconnect both with his two very different parents, and his sense of alienation with the people he grew up with. 

As seems to be the case with me a bit too often when I read contemporary Norwegian literature, I kept reading in the hopes of finding out what the book reviewers had found so impressive, because like Shakar's other novels, this book was fairly universally well-reviewed. I suspect this may be because there are so few authors with a multicultural and immigrant background writing in our country today, so anything written about the multicultural experience must therefore be encouraged and lauded, so it doesn't become obvious just how narrow-minded and secretly prejudiced a lot of middle-class Norwegians really are. I really don't this that if this book was about a white, middle-class Norwegian dude with divorced parents who just couldn't seem to talk properly to his dad, written by a white, middle-class Norwegian dude - so many people would be raving about it. Then again, maybe it's just me who's a bit racist? I'm willing to live with that if it allows me to say that this book felt like a waste of my time. 

Judging a book by its cover: With this cover, the publisher has moved away from the design choices of the past two books, where they had a single-coloured background with some simple line drawings, choosing instead to just use the same ugly living-room decor from the early 80s twice on the cover instead. Not a fan. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR14 Book 29: "Ti kniver i hjertet" (Ten knives in the heart) av Nora Dåsnes

Page count: 250 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

Tuva is about to start seventh grade (age 11-12 here in Norway) and is very much looking forward to seeing her best friends Linnea and Bao and catching up after a long summer apart. She shares all of her hopes and fears writing and drawing in her diary. 

When she gets back to school, however, nothing is as she was expecting. Linnea has a boyfriend now, and doesn't really want to hang out, playing in their secret treehouse in the woods. She just wants to talk about boys, and lipgloss and tries to make Tuva figure out who her type is. Bao wants nothing to do with all the talk about boys and girly stuff, and soon Tuva is torn between her two best friends.

Tuva isn't all that interested in boys or makeup, she still likes listening to music and playing in the woods and spending time with Bao. But she's also rather dazzled by Linnea's pretty older sister, who has an Instagram account and wants to be an influencer. In the really rather difficult phase between being a child and a young adult, Tuva is easily swayed by ideas of how a girl should behave, who and what she should like. She doesn't want to have to pick sides when her two friends seem to have diametrically opposite viewpoints. Then a new girl starts in her class, and Tuva begins to feel some of the stuff Linnea has been going on about - but can a girl really be "her type"?

While there is a hint of queer romance in this story, the main themes are the difficult friendships between girls and the very confusing process of coming of age, when you're no longer exactly a carefree child, when hormones make you confused and you're not quite old enough to be a teenager either. This is Nora Dåsnes' debut graphic novel, aimed at at a younger audience than her YA graphic novel Ubesvart Anrop. The themes here are less heavy than the collective grief of a nation, survivor guilt and depression, but they are still important for young readers to face head-on. 

As a teacher in secondary school, I teach kids in 8th to 10th grade. They come to our school when they are 12 or 13 years old, and many are still very immature and rather childish. By the time they graduate at the end of 10th grade, they are 15 or 16 and have gone through massive changes, both physically and emotionally. It's both a fascinating and deeply frustrating age to be responsible for their learning. While these girls are a year younger than the kids I teach, it's really not just a myth that a lot of girls mature faster than boys (by no means all, but in many cases). So it seems realistic that this sort of identity crisis between who one is and who one is going to become might happen earlier for a lot of girls. 

I thought this was a stand-alone story, but it turns out that Dåsnes had been working on a sequel for a while now, showing the further adventures of the three girls. In the new book, which was released only a few weeks ago, Bao gets involved in school politics to save the river and woods behind the school, so it sounds like one of the major themes is environmentalism. It's nice to know that someone is making engaging and well-told stories for middle graders. I hope that Dåsnes has a long and successful career ahead of her.

Judging a book by its cover: I like Dåsnes' art and the cover gives a good idea of what it looks like. It's a cute cover with inviting colours. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR14 Book 28: "Svarte-Mathilda" (Black Mathilda) by Tor Arve Røssland

Page count: 154 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

Twenty years after a teenage girl was brutally murdered in a small town near Bergen, Elizabeth moves into the long-empty flat with her mother. Elizabeth's parents are going through a divorce, and in a tragic accident a while back, Elizabeth's older brother died in a fire. She hates that they had to move away from her old home and her friends in Bergen, that her mother doesn't seem to want to talk to her at all, and she certainly doesn't like their new home. The flat never seems to get warm, even if they keep a fire on in the fireplace and turn the heating up to high. In addition, Elizabeth's phone doesn't seem to be holding its charge and has very spotty reception, so she can't call or message her friends.

In the first few days there, Elizabeth also experiences some really scary things. She's convinced the sees blood all over the bathroom floor at one point and gets locked in there while she feels long clawed fingers reaching for her. She also hears voices whispering and is getting very freaked out. Meanwhile, her mother hasn't noticed anything out of the ordinary, except the unusually cold temperature in the flat, and she thinks Elizabeth may have a delayed grief reaction and considers getting the girl a therapist.

When Elizabeth starts her new school, the teacher seems shocked when she announces where she lives, and one of the boys, Philip, claims that her flat is known as the "murder place". He recounts how twenty years earlier, Marie van Vleet was found locked in the bathroom, stabbed multiple times, with her face all scratched up. Philip's dad is a policeman and this was his first murder case, so it made an impression on him. Elizabeth is a bit skeptical, but at the same time, her new home being the location of an unsolved murder might explain some of the strange paranormal stuff she's been experiencing. When she gets home, after spending several hours at the local burger joint listening to Philip recounting grisly murder details, her mother is upset that she's late, but also happy she seems to be making a friend. Later, Elizabeth once again finds herself locked into a room, this time, it's her own bedroom and a voice seems to be whispering warnings to her. She feels something shoved into her hand and discovers that it's the library card of Marie van Vleet. 

Elizabeth convinces Philip to accompany her to the local library the next day, where they make up a story about Philip's bedridden aunt who really wants to find a book she borrowed over twenty years ago. The junior librarian, Viggo, helps them but is reprimanded once the senior librarian discovers what he has done, and whose book records he's shown the two nosy teenagers. She explains that Marie van Vleet is long dead, and the teenagers should stop lying and leave the library. Viggo, however, is quite intrigued and offers to help the kids do research. Marie was clearly doing some research of her own, having read a lot about local history and a lot about folklore and the supernatural. They find a picture of a dark-haired and dark-eyed young girl called Mathilda from the 1880s and Viggo remembers an urban legend of a "Bloody Mary" style ghost called Black Mathilda. Supposedly, if you go into a dark room with a mirror, holding a lit candle or a flashlight, and call her name seven times, she will appear. He claims it's all coincidence and superstition, but Elizabeth is not so sure. Viggo has also found what seems to be Marie's diary among the library archives, and gives it to Elizabeth, as it's not really library property.

When reading the diary, Elizabeth discovers that the ornate and creepy mirror in their bathroom, which seems very old and not at all in the style of the other bathroom fittings, was in fact put there by Marie, who found it in the attic along with some old paintings. She, like Elizabeth, was living with her mother after her parents split and seemed determined to do as much as possible to aggravate her Mum. Putting in an ancient mirror seems to have done the trick. Further reading of the diary seems to suggest that there might be a link between the 19th Century Mathilda and the mirror, and the urban legend might not be so fictional after all. When Philip suggests they test the theory by locking themselves in the bathroom with a flashlight and calling for Mathilda, Elizabeth reluctantly agrees, and unsurprisingly, some really creepy and very much supernatural stuff goes down.

Parallel with the story of Elizabeth, Philip, and their investigation of Marie's murder, the readers get the story of a young happy couple in the 1880s settling on a large, prosperous farm in the west of Norway, a few hours away from the town where Elizabeth now lives. The wife has a baby, whom they name Mathilda, but she dies while Mathilda is very young, and a persuasive and slightly scary governess is hired, who brings her own daughter with her to the farm. Mathilda befriends the girl, who is disabled and seems to be feared by the other local children. As the years go by, the governess comes to wield a lot of power in the household and keeps persuading the father, who is also the local magistrate, to spend more time away from the farm. Then one by one, the local children start disappearing and are found dead and mutilated in the woods. How does this sinister tale intersect with that of Elizabeth and Marie?

Svarte-Mathilda is the first book in a trilogy about Elizabeth and her scary experiences with Black Mathilda. In the first book, Elizabeth's friend Philip disappears without a trace after they foolishly perform the ritual. Elizabeth is left stabbed in the stomach with her mother convinced Philip attacked her and ran away. Elizabeth needs to figure out the connection between the scary mirror in her flat, her friend's disappearance, and the historical events she has read about, or the curse of Black Mathilda will end up with her dead. 

This is a really rather creepy ghost story, with the suspense gradually building and some really nice touches throughout. All three books in the series have apparently been bestsellers and very popular among teens, and nominated for "Uprisen", a national book award voted for by teenage readers throughout Norway. My colleagues and I who teach Norwegian are currently all reading a little bit of the book out loud to our Norwegian class each lesson, and I obviously had to read the book myself before teaching it in class. Since our second theme of the year (very suitably for autumn) is going to be Scary things, reading a horror mystery seemed fitting. Some of the kids have already read the book, but are very good about not spoiling things for the rest of the class. 

I can see why this book has remained popular among teens since it was released in 2010. At under 200 pages long, it's a quick read and it mixes historical fiction with a contemporary murder mystery and a ghost story really well. Some of the contemporary mystery stuff could easily have been the plot of a 'monster of the week' episode of Supernatural. 

While my TBR list for the coming months is pretty packed, I'm absolutely going to find the time to read the two sequels as well. I need to find out more about how Mathilda became a vengeful ghost and whether Elizabeth is successful in locating and saving her friend Philip.

Judging a book by its cover: While maybe a bit simple, the cover strikes a nice tone for a mystery, with the font being very old-fashioned, in keeping with the historical side of the story. The fancy frame of the mirror, complete with a creepy child and blood-red background seems like a very obvious choice. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR13 Book 51: "Ubesvart anrop" (Unanswered call) by Nora Dåsnes

Page count: 283 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

Official book description (translated by me):

Oslo, late summer 2011

Barely a month after the terror attacks on the 22nd of July, Rebekka and Fariba are starting high school. Rebekka doesn't know any of the people who died, and thinks she should be one of the ones who are ready to claim back their peace of mind. So when Fariba signs up for the Labour Party Youth Movement, Rebekka tries to get involved with drama club, with Daniel with the curly hair, with parties and school and friends. 

The only problem is that Rebekka thinks about it (the 22nd of July) all the time. 

Unanswered call is a graphic novel about being a teenager in the time after the 22nd of July. It's a story about looking for reason in the face of the unreasonable, about being an outsider, about grief and anxiety. About how hard it is to reach out to one another, and how important it is when we manage it. 

It's been ten years since one very determined and angry Norwegian man planted a car bomb in the very heart of the capital, right outside the building where the prime minister's office is located. At 3:25 pm on the 22nd of July 2011, the bomb went off and caused tremendous amounts of damages. The sound of the explosion and the shock wave resulting from it could be felt all over greater Oslo, and even in some neighbouring counties. A total of eight people are killed, nine people were critically injured and more than two hundred sustained physical injuries in some way. Pretty much every window in the buildings nearby is shattered. Police and emergency services work quickly to try to evacuate as much of the area as possible and the police start working on figuring out the culprit and motive for the attack.

As it turns out, the bomb was just a distraction, if a frightfully effective one, at that. The terrorist, 32- year-old Anders Behring Breivik (he has since changed his name) was already on his way out of Oslo when the bomb went off and by 5:20 pm, he had made his way to Utøya, a small island about an hour's drive from the capital, where the Labour Party Youth Movement held their annual summer camp. He was dressed as a police officer and told the driver of the boat that took people out to the island (it is still only accessible by boat) that he was there to help secure the island after the attack in the capital. He was finally arrested at 6:35 pm, having wandered the idyllic little island shooting, killing or injuring as many people as possible. After his rampage, 69 of the 564 people on the tiny island were dead. The youngest victim was only 14. 32 of the dead were under 18. As well as the people who died, about 32 people were critically injured and there are hundreds of people, direct victims or their loved ones, who even now live with the physical and psychological trauma that the event caused.

I was also 32 years old when it happened, and while I didn't know anyone directly involved in any of the attacks, it's one of those events that has left scars. I still get affected talking about it or reading about the event. In about a week's time, the 10th graders in my school are all going to visit Utøya, where there is now a visitor's centre, and we're in the process of teaching them more about the attacks and their aftermaths. The kids I teach were only 5 at the time it happened, so for most of them, it's not in any way as affecting or upsetting for them as it is for me and several of my colleagues. Let's just say I'm probably going ugly cry when we have to watch the Norwegian film version of what happened later this week, and I suspect I'm going to be very shaken by the visit to the island as well.

This graphic novel came out earlier this year, and the author/artist was herself about to start high school about a month after the attacks took place. The entire country was still reeling, and the feelings of collective grief and trauma were strong. The book features three different teenagers, and the ways in which they try to go about their lives, trying to process the shocking events and pretending to be unaffected, despite being everything but. Rebekka, our androgynous protagonist, suffers occasional panic attacks and spends a lot of time online doing research to try to figure out why one young man got angry enough to perpetrate something so horrific. Fariba, her best friend, gets involved with youth politics and joins the youth organisation that was so cruelly targeted on the island. She wants to ensure that the world is a better place going forward. Daniel, the slightly older student Rebekka meets as part of drama club is more of a supporting character, but he, like so many others, is having trouble just moving on. 

This proved to be an excellent book to introduce the students to, as the art is very clear and easy to follow and a lot of the story is told by wordless panels and the body language and facial expression of the characters. While most of the panels are done in a bluish grey and white, all the flashbacks that characters have to the 22nd of July, thinking about where they were during the attack, are in a vivid red and white. Even the students who really struggle with reading managed to read and comprehend the story perfectly well, and we had some really good discussions as a result. 

Myself, I read the whole book in less than an hour. I borrowed it at our school library, planning to check it out a week or two before we were going to talk about it in class, and after looking at a few pages, I was sucked in and read the whole thing in one sitting. I think my only complaint about the book is that the ending feels rushed, and a lot of the story threads wrap up a little bit too quickly and neatly for my taste. I wish the author would have added ten-twenty more pages to make the ending a bit less sudden, but otherwise, this was an excellent read and I may buy myself a copy once it's released in paperback. 

Judging a book by its cover: The cover shows the book's protagonist, Rebekka, as well as her best friend Fariba and Daniel, the boy that Rebekka fancies. The cover gives a good impression of the art style the author uses throughout the book. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR13 Book 25: "Hør Her'a!" (Listen here) by Gulraiz Sharif

Page count: 178 pages

Rating: 4 stars

CBR13 Bingo: Free (borrowed at the library)

Official book description:

It is summer vacation and fifteen-year-old Mahmoud is imagining long days on the bench outside his building with his friend, one-eyed Arif. This summer will be different, however, because the family is getting a visit from Uncle-ji from Pakistan and Mahmoud's job will be to show his uncle around. Uncle-ji is very surprised at what he sees in Norway, and what is going on with Ali, Mahmoud's little brother, who is not behaving the way boys should? Over the course of the summer vacation, Mahmoud will be tested both as a brother and son in a Pakistani family. 

Mahmoud lives in a large high rise in the east of Oslo (from his descriptions, I'm going to guess it's very near where I myself live), where the majority of the population are first, second and third-generation immigrants. He describes the strict, overworked fathers, the worried, loudly gossiping mothers, and his wishes to just take it easy over the summer until school starts again. No such luck. His father's elder brother is coming to visit them from Pakistan, leading his mother into a cleaning, cooking, and baking frenzy to prove that she is a worthy wife (something her in-laws don't seem to believe). Mahmoud's father is a taxi driver and since he doesn't have the time to show his brother the sights of Norway's capital, Mahmoud is given the job, very much against his wishes.

Mahmoud's uncle clearly comes from a very traditional Pakistani background, and initially seems very taken aback by the liberal views and attitudes of Norwegians, even those of foreign descent. As the weeks pass, he seems rather seduced by the country, though, and keeps asking Mahmoud what it would take for him to be able to move there (as Mahmoud says, with the current rather strict immigration policies towards brown people, it's not likely to happen). While Mahmoud resents his given task, to begin with, he comes to enjoy the various outings he can drag his uncle along to. He also discovers that Uncle-ji may not be as strict and conservative as he appeared at first.

Which is a good thing, because it's becoming more and more clear that Mahmoud's little brother Ali isn't like all of the other boys his age. He mostly wants to play dress-up with his mother's clothes and experiment with make-up, and could there be a different reason he loves his Disney Princess dolls than the fact that he sort of fancies the way they look? Mahmoud's father will not tolerate anything but traditional masculine behaviours from his two sons, so a worried Mahmoud, aided by his mother, tries to cover up Ali's actions as much as possible. But it's proving to be more challenging than Mahmoud was prepared for and his little brother is clearly miserable. What's a guy to do?

I really don't read a lot of Norwegian (which is absurd, as I teach it every year), and when I do, it's usually a book that is relevant to my teaching in some way. This book, which has become a bestselling publishing sensation had me laughing out loud so hard I nearly fell off the sofa within its first few pages, because Mahmoud, our narrator is a very funny guy and has a very honest view of what he feels about Norwegian society, the way he is treated as compared to those born in Norway with white skin and a Scandinavian-sounding name. He also keeps speaking directly to conservative politicians like our current prime minister, Erna Solberg, to offer his opinions about her politics (he's not a huge fan). 

I didn't actually know all that much about the novel before picking it up at the library. I thought it was just going to be a rather humorous tale about a minority background youth growing up in the east of Oslo, and by all means, it is that. I was not prepared for the fairy serious LGBTQIA-heavy subplot that emerges and is dealt with in such a sensitive and insightful (as it appears to me, certainly) way. There is a high chance that we will be using this book as part of our curriculum in 10th grade next year, and if so, I'm really looking forward to teaching it. 

Judging a book by its cover: Considering that this is a YA novel written by a minority background Norwegian immigrant, which seems to be targeting teenage boys as part of its core audience, I'm surprised at how unassuming and neutral the book cover they've chosen for this is. I suspect the rather plain mono-coloured background with a picture of a high rise is in part inspired by the most successful "immigrant narrative" in Norway in the last decade, Tante Ulrikkes vei. There are a lot of similarities, but as someone who teaches teenagers, the majority of whom happen to be of the boy variety at the moment, I'm pretty sure none of them would voluntarily pick this book up because of the cover. This seems like a missed opportunity by the publishers, really. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read 

#CBR13 Books 22-23: "Eg snakkar om det heile tida" by Camara Lundestad Joof and "Ikkje ver redd sånne som meg" by Sumaya Jirde Ali

Eg snakkar om det heile tida (I talk about it all the time)

Page count: 94 pages

Rating: 5 stars

Official book description:

I call a friend. 

Did the man in the bar call me a black b*tch when I didn't want to give him my number? That time we had arranged to drink beer, but we drank tequila instead?

She goes quiet.

No. He called you the n-word.

Thank you, I say. Thank you for remembering.

I talk about it all the time is a witness statement, an appeal and a personal examination. Camara Lundestad Joof is born in Norway, with a Norwegian mother and Gambian father. This book describes how the racism she constantly experiences infects her everyday life and controls her thoughts. She searches her memories. What if she remembers something incorrectly, how will anyone believe her? How many details do you have to remember to seem credible? Does she believe in herself? And can she ever be free of the question of skin colour?

Ms. Joof is a stage performer and dramatist who works with documentary stage shows and deals with intersectionality, de-colonialism, and the criticism of common societal norms. While she is born and raised in Norway, and her mother is Norwegian, she has faced absolutely staggering acts of racism for much of her life. This short work of non-fiction is a series of short vignettes, some only a paragraph or two long, some covering a few pages, where she gives the reader insight into only a selection of all the 

insults, slurs, prejudice and micro-aggressions she faces on a daily basis.

I read this essay collection as part of my job, as we Norwegian teachers were looking for short and engaging texts in "nynorsk", a written variant of Norwegian that secondary and high school kids here are required to learn. For those students who don't live in one of the geographical areas where the language variant is the majority written language, there tends to be a lot of complaints and grumbling, and getting the pupils motivated to learn and write gets harder with each passing year, as English becomes more and more dominant in society. Nevertheless, the excerpts we used from this collection certainly sparked a lot of discussions, and also gave a lot of our minority background kids a chance to talk about difficult and unpleasant experiences they, friends or family members have faced over the course of their young lives. 

While I was able to borrow this book for free through the school, I bought my own copy, as I was deeply affected by Ms. Joof's words and her understandable anger, sense of despair and just disappointment that despite not ever wanting to, she keeps having to "talk about" new racist and prejudical experiences all the time. While Norway is a wonderful place to live in many ways, we have a long way to go when it comes to dealing with racism.

Ikkje ver redd sånne som meg (Don't be afraid of people like me)

Page count: 92 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

Official book description: 

"It's only now, as a twenty-year-old, that I understand how crushing the 22nd of July was to me. To my identity. I was thirteen years old, and I did not escape the political. I carried it with my entire being"

Sumaya Jirde Ali came to Bodø (in the North of Norway) as a child and was treated like everyone else, she felt that she belonged. In this book she recounts the carefree days of her childhood. She tells about the schock when she heard about the terrorist attack in Oslo on the 22nd of July 2011 and what it did to change her self image and beliefs about belonging. She describes the feelings of shame and self contempt, of becoming dehumanised, and the need to belong. We also get insights into what she does to counteract hate, keep her spirits up and stand up for what she believes. 

I read this back in April (yup, that's how far behind I am on my reviews right now) and it feels very strange to review only a few days after the tenth anniversary of the terrible tragedy that features so prominently in this little book. As a teenager, Ms. Ali, whether she wanted to or not, was forced to face up to the knowledge that Anders Bering Breivik, the white supremacist who ended up killing a total of 77 (8 with a bomb in the centre of the Oslo government district, 69 at Utøya, a small island where the Labour Party Youth Association were having their annual summer camp) did it because he believed it was wrong for Norway to accept immigrants like her and others like her. While this horrific terrorist attack was so shocking and devastating to the Norwegian public, this book highlights how much worse it must have been for people with an immigrant background. Ms. Ali came to Norway as a young child, her family were refugees, she didn't ask to move here. However, after the events in July 2011, despite a relatively idyllic childhood in the North of Norway, she very much did not want to stay here. She had terrible guilt, just because of her immigrant status and the colour of her skin. 

 

As someone not directly affected by the terrorist attack, it's staggering to me how many people had their lives irrevocably changed by it, and still deal with the aftermath. Ms. Ali eventually accepted that her family were not going to listen to her pleas about moving back to Somalia, and got involved in public debates and tried to make a difference with her life - which sadly has led to her facing a lot of harassment in public and online. Like Ms. Joof, she's had to have police protection on occasion, and she admits to now having several mental health issues, anxiety among them, because of all the verbal persecution she has faced. 

Both of these books are short essay collections as part of a series called Norsk Røyndom, which translates as Norwegian secrets. The series asked a number of prominent members of society from a number of minority and discriminated groups to write and tell their stories. As well as these books about racism and racial harassment, there are books covering disability, LGBT+ issues, religion in modern society and other kinds of otherness in Norway today. It's a very informative and interesting project and I suspect I will seek out more after seeing the high quality of these two books. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

#CBR13 Book 11: "Full spredning: en legeroman" (Natural Causes) by Nina Lykke

Page count: 282 pages

Rating: 2 stars

Elin has worked as a GP in the centre of Oslo for more than two decades. She's married to Aksel, an orthopedist who seems obsessed with either cross country skiing in the winter and roller skis in the summer. They met during med school, and have lived in the same house long enough to see the little residential area that used to be full of idealistic and progressive residents become distinctly upper-middle class (as have they). They are now empty nesters after their two daughters (also medical students) moved away. 

However, at the moment, Elin is literally living in her office  She's sleeping in a chair or on her examination table, sneaking out in the mornings and evenings to wash in the employee bathroom. She's refusing to answer texts or calls from her irate husband, her concerned neighbour and sometime drinking buddy, or her lover, having moved out after her husband discovered that she's been having a year-long affair with Bjørn, her ex-boyfriend from before she met Aksel. Since Bjørn seemed rather freaked out about the revelations that their affair was out in the open, he seems to have decided to just stay with his wife, so Elin is feeling abandoned and even more disillusioned with life and people than she did before she stumbled into her affair. 

A bit over a year ago, Elin added Bjørn as a Facebook as a drunken impulse one evening. Back then, she would go through the motions with her patients in the office all day, then go buy a box of white wine on the way home, and spend her evenings and weekends drinking heavily and binge-watching television, while her husband focused on his skiing. Once she and Bjørn actually met up again, after decades apart, and she discovered just how much chemistry there still was between them, she replaced the heavy drinking with another obsession, her secret love affair with her ex. 

Literally translated, the title for this book means "Complete (or total) spread" and the subtitle is a "doctor novel". Traditionally, 'doctor novels' are a subsection of romance novels in Norway, starring handsome doctors and nurses who find love while saving the lives of their poor patients. 'Total spread' is also the term used to cancer patients when the disease has taken over and spread throughout the body, making the disease inevitably terminal. So the author uses a common term associated with a devastating cancer diagnosis, coupled with an ironic subtitle - this book is pretty much the opposite of brave, selfless, and altruistic doctors finding love while caring for the less fortunate. Instead, our protagonist is a fifty-something pessimist whose internal monologue (so much of this novel is told in internal monologue or flashbacks) constantly makes her indifference, if not her outright disdain for her patients and vocation very obvious. Going through a kind of midlife crisis, experiencing the consequences of being caught in an affair - the title very much gives a lie to the contents of the book.

Considering my rather impressive reading slump and how difficult it is for me to pick up a book and read it (even listening to an audiobook feels like far too much effort than I'm able to give, most of the time), the fact that I not only read the whole book, despite low-key resenting our protagonist throughout is certainly some testament to the author's ability to keep me curious. This novel has generally received rave reviews from not only Norwegian book reviewers, but the book has been translated into multiple languages and won both Norwegian and international book awards.

Pretty much every time I try to read an acclaimed literary novel, it just proves to me that I'm much happier reading speculative fiction, be it romance, fantasy, or science fiction. I'm sure this book was a satirical masterpiece, showing us the petty complaints of most patients nowadays, not to mention how incredibly first world the so-called problems of well-to-do doctors are. It was a well-written book, I suppose, but it was just so bitter and the tone throughout was generally nasty, I'd much rather read a romance (and will, as a palate changer). The fact that this book was due back at the library is one of the reasons I actually motivated me to read and finish the book, and it's certainly much easier reviewing something I didn't much like than something I love. 

I don't really feel that I can recommend this book, but if the sales numbers I found are correct, the author doesn't need my recommendation anyway. I'm sure she's laughing all the way to the bank, no matter what I thought of her book or not.

Judging a book by its cover: There isn't exactly a lot to make a reader interested or curious about the contents of this book. On the library copy I had, there were also various review quotes and a reminder that this won the Brage prize (the Norwegian book award) for 2019. I'm assuming the publishing company went with a "Less is more" approach and figured people might pick up the book based on word of mouth. Because there really is nothing here to make a reader interested.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.  

#CBR12 Book 86: "Gul bok" (Yellow book) by Zeshan Shakar

Page count: 288 pages

Rating: 3 stars

Official book description (any errors in translation are mine):

Mani is a newly graduated economist and has just secured a job at the Ministry of Education and Research. He is a young man who lives with his father in a flat at Haugenstua, in the east of Oslo, and has a girlfriend he thinks he's going to marry someday. Preferably, he'd like to use his abilities in the private sector, where the prestige and the money lies, because he's painfully aware that both his girlfriend and the environment around him only look with disdain at the public sector. It doesn't pay very well, either.

His new employment situation means adjusting to entirely new cultural values, where an old flat in Gamlebyenis more desirable than Mani's new, and expensive, flat at Skillebekk and where Mani's regular kebab shop is seen as more "genuine" and ranked higher than the Theatre Café. Mani also becomes a proud contributor to the big communal project known as the State.

Yellow Book is a novel about class and belonging, about the lives we live and the framework that surrounds us. It's also a story about where you're coming from and where you are going. It's far from the east of Oslo to the corridors of the ministry. 

Back in 2017, Pakistani Norwegian author Zeshan Shakar published his remarkable debut Tante Ulrikkes vei. It went on to be one of the most bestselling books in Norway for several years, and his follow up novel was greatly anticipated. While not quite so universally loved and lauded by all kinds of media that reviewed it, this novel, Yellow Book, nevertheless received a lot of praise and sold out its first few printings instantly (that everyone had to stay home during lock-down and had more time for reading, probably didn't hurt sales either). Reluctant to pay what a new release hardback book costs here in Norway, I requested it through my local library (I was #397 on the waiting list). The book was released in August, I was able to pick up my copy in mid-November. 

Having now finished the book, I'm very glad I didn't pay for it in a book store. I waited until Shakar's debut novel was available on sale, having now read this one, I doubt I'll ever want to own it. I got my expectations raised by the author's first book and the positive reviews for this novel and was disappointed to discover that this book was just so unremarkable and while stuff happened during the novel (parts of it are set during and in the aftermath of the 22nd of July 2011 terror attack), with the building Mani and his colleagues work at completely destroyed in the bomb blast that day), Mani, the protagonist seems to end up in exactly the same place he started the novel, albeit with a slightly more secure and stable income. 

One of the things I tell my students when they are to write a story is that they need to make something happen - there needs to be a change of some sort, either internally in one of the characters or externally in the plot. And while things do change for Mani, by the end, it all feels meaningless and pointless, because he more or less seems to be back at square one. Based on the reviews I'd read, I expected more. 

Judging a book by its cover: Like the book of the title (which is the informal name of the draft of the national budget), the cover for this novel is almost entirely yellow. We see a curving, empty corridor, a bunch of closed doors, and one that is just a little bit ajar. The cover design is very simple, much like on Zhakar's debut novel. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

#CBR11 Book 76: "Sangen om en brukket nese (The Ballad of a Broken Nose)" by Arne Svingen

Page count: 207 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars

Bart is about to turn thirteen. He's named after Bart Simpson, because it seems his mother wanted him to be tough and clever and able to handle himself. This is also why she's signed him up for boxing lessons. He dutifully  goes to practise several times a week, and one of these days, he may actually start hitting. His boxing coach suggests he may want to try out for some other sport, which Bart can understand, as except for having a pretty good guard, Bart is pretty dreadful at boxing. He refuses to give up, however.

What Bart is actually rather excellent at is opera singing. The downside is that he can only sing well without an audience. This means he mostly sings locked in his tiny bathroom, since Bart lives alone with his morbidly obese, mostly unemployed mother (who is clearly an alcoholic) in a tiny one-room flat, where privacy isn't easy to come by. Bart and his mother live in an old building where the hallway floors are covered in old rubbish, broken syringes and other unpleasant things that make it very clear that Bart can never actually make any close friends, because God forbid one of them ever wanted to come round to his after school one day. He's not exactly a bullying victim, but pretty firmly on one of the lower rungs of the social ladder.

Bart's life takes a turn for the more dramatic when Ada, the pretty, popular and persistent girl he sits next to at school (it's not that she likes Bart THAT way, she has a boyfriend in another town, besides, she's so well-liked and popular their differing social statuses pretty much span a galaxy) figures out that not only does Bart enjoy listening to opera, but he sings it as well. Since he's unable to sing in front of others, he makes her a recording, but forgets to make her promise not to share it with anyone else. It turns out that Ada is pretty bad at keeping secrets. First, she shares the recording with the entire class, and Bart's enthusiastic teacher won't stop nagging until he agrees to perform at the end of year school performance. Then, she unexpectedly shows up on his doorstep and stays for dinner. Sadly, the next day, most of the school knows that Bart lives in a terrible wreck of a building and his mother is an overweight shut-in.

Then, on the very day he turns thirteen, Bart wakes to find his grandmother bearing sad news. His mother, who went out the evening before, has been hospitalised and needs an operation to get better. His grandmother will have to stay with him until his mother recovers. It's at this point Bart break down and tells his grandmother the truth (which she's been pretty aware of for a long time) about his rather dismal living situation, and having unburdened himself, immediately feels like things might actually start looking up. Ada keeps wanting to spend time with him, trying to figure out ways to help him overcome his stage fright (including managing to sneak him into the hotel room of his music idol, Bryn Terfel, when the opera singer is in Oslo about to perform). Bart may even have managed to track down the man who might be his father, after all these years.

This is a book my colleagues and I decided to read out loud to our eighth graders this term. I have read other books by Arne Svingen, a hugely popular YA and middle grade Norwegian author before, but this book is by far my favourite. It's impossible not to love Bart fiercely, because he stays so achingly optimistic despite all the sad and horrible things in life. His mother is dangerously obese, clearly partially disabled, barely works and comes home drunk several nights a week. They live in a tiny, crowded one-room flat in a building full of junkies and society low lifes. He makes very sure to keep everyone at school at a safe distance, desperate to hide his dismal home situation.

Bart and his mother constantly lie to his grandmother about the true state of affairs, claiming his mother has a steady job and healthy finances. His mother refuses to take any handouts from the grandmother. Opera singing is his secret escape, but after just a few weeks of getting closer to Ada, all his secrets are out in the open and unless he overcomes his stage fright and puts on the performance of a life time at the school performance, he'll go from anonymous nobody on the fringes of the school yard to favoured bullying victim for the whole school.

Bart spends much of his free time searching the web for the father he never met. Unfortunately, all his mother would tell him is that the man is called John Jones, and that he's an American. It's obvious that his parents didn't spend long together, and naturally, there are a LOT of search results for such a common name. However, Bart steadfastly keeps searching, occasionally sending off e-mail enquiries in the hopes that THIS time, he's found the right man, the John Jones who is missing his Norwegian teenage son.

As someone who grew up with an alcoholic father (who thankfully gave up drinking more than 30 years ago now), parts of this book hit very close to home for me, and I had to actually read the last few pages of the book to assure myself that everything was going to turn out well in the end. Very perceptively, one of my students observed yesterday, when I was asking them how they thought the story would continue and end (we're now about halfway through), that the book has to end on a happy note, because what we've read so far, has been really rather sad and bittersweet and the story won't work unless things turn around and get better for Bart in the second half of the story. While I have read the whole book, my class as of yet have not, and I thought that was a very mature (and entirely correct) observation, which shows this kid has a very good grasp of how narratives are structured. I'm honestly not sure I was as insightful a reader (or in his case, listener) when I was in my early teens.

All the way throughout reading this book, I kept comparing it to About a Boy by Nick Hornby. I remember being surprised at how much darker and more serious the book was to the delightful movie adaptation. Bart, unlike the Marcus of the book (and film) doesn't befriend someone as cool as Will (Hugh Grant's character), although he does strike up a friendship with one of the heroin addicts who live in his building, and who mobilises many of the fellow residents to show up and take part in a day of volunteering to clean up the hallways and back yard of the building in honour of Bart's birthday. They even get him a bike (with the serial number neatly filed away) and a brand new bike lock they actually paid money for(!). It's not exactly the same as the expensive trainers Will gifts Marcus, but in many ways, a lot more touching.

I'm so glad we decided to read this to the students this term, and I'm also happy that my class seems to mostly be enjoying the book as much as I do. This book has now been translated into a number of different languages and has been nominated for multiple awards, both in Norway and internationally. So if you're looking for a quirky, bittersweet and very heartwarming read, I can very much recommend this one.

Judging a book by its cover: This book comes with several different covers, but this is the one we use on one of the editions we're reading to the pupils in y school, and thus seemed appropriate. The boxing gloves and the microphone are both very relevant to the plot, and nothing on the cover gives too much away about the story.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR10 Book 99: "Tante Ulrikkes vei" by Zeshan Shakar

Page count: 432 pages
Rating: 4 stars

#CBR10Bingo: Home, Something, Home (this book is set at Stovner in Oslo, three stops away from where I live on the metro. It also concerns exactly the sort of pupils that I teach.)

Two youths, both living in the same tower block in a suburb on the east side of Oslo, in Stovner (where the large majority of inhabitants are immigrants or the children of immigrants). They start out going to the same high school. Starting in the year 2000, the framing device consists of these two teenagers, later young men, being asked to take part in a social studies survey, to map out the formative conditions for children and teens in these eastern suburbs, where the social divide between the white inhabitants of Norwegian descent and the poorer residents (mostly from minority language backgrounds, either first or second generation immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia and/or African countries) keeps getting bigger and more pronounced.

Mohammed ("It is tradition to name the first born Mohammed, and the Prophet is revered by all Muslims, but really, if they are so concerned with me going out and getting a good job and everything, I'm not entirely sure why they would give me that name"), who goes by Mo, writes his answers to the survey as e-mails. He is articulate, intelligent, rather shy and does very well in school. His parents have extremely high expectations of him, and early on, at least, they seem well on course to being fulfilled. Mo does well enough at high school that he wins a special scholarship, established for academically gifted children of immigrants, enabling him to go to University. He even gets to shake the prime minister's hand during the scholarship ceremony.

Our second protagonist, Jamal, doesn't really like to write, so he records his answers on tapes that are sent to the researcher in pre-paid envelopes. His answers are informal, irreverent, full of vernacular slang - a sociolect. His father is out of the picture, after a history of domestic violence. There's just him, his increasingly depressed and ineffectual mother and his much younger little brother, whom Jamal has to step up and help raise. He has to take him to nursery every day and pick him up in the afternoons. He does most of the shopping, and even occasionally attends meetings at the nursery, and later his little brother's school, because his mother isn't really up to the job. While he complains in his reports, he doesn't do it too loudly and swears the researcher to secrecy - no one wants the state to come and take his brother away from the family. After years of struggling through primary and secondary school and getting nowhere, only to find things harder and even more frustrating in high school, one day he has enough and just quits. He gets a job washing cars at a local garage, and is initially, at least, happy to be earning money.

The book follows these two young men over a period of about six years. We see how they view the world, and how they feel about the attitudes towards immigrants prevalent in society. We learn about their hopes, their dreams, their fears and how they feel about their families. Mo studies statistics and economics at the University of Oslo and loves it (at least to begin with). Jamal works at the car wash, gets stoned with his friends, listens to rap music and wants to be a gangster. At the same time, however, he's doing his best to make sure his little brother is fed and that the staff at nursery and later, school, doesn't report that the boy has problems speaking and occasionally wets himself when he's nervous. Jamal gets frustrated at his mother's refusal to be a proper parent.

In addition to winning a prestigious literary award for debutant writers, Tante Ulrikkes vei (the address of the tower block that both the protagonists live in) has sold a phenomenal amount of copies in Norway. A crowd funding effort has ensured that every member of Parliament receives their own copy (which is good, because far too many politicians have no idea what the day to day life of some of the poorer kids in the "wrong part of town" is actually like). It has garnered rave reviews in pretty much everywhere, and once I started reading, I could easily see why. Not only is it a very engaging and well-written book, it's so incredibly important, because the politicians in Parliament are not the only ones who could use an insight in what growing up as the child of immigrants, especially in a both socially and economically disadvantaged families.

Mo's family are not exactly poor, but various circumstances mean they need to rely on support from the government to get by. Tuition fees at Norwegian colleges and universities are less than what it costs to buy a 30-day travel ticket on Oslo public transport, but the scholarship Mo receives allows him to focus entirely on his studies, without needing to work part-time on the side (something he initially suggests doing, but his father is vehemently against. Nothing should take the focus away from his studies, the rest of the family will get by with less, if it means making sure Mo has what he needs at Uni.

Jamal's family, on the other hand, sometimes barely have the money to pay rent and/or get groceries. While he's still in high school, he gets a small stipend to help him, but once he drops out, Jamal has to get a job to help supplement his mother's increasingly meagre benefits. Due to the stigma surrounding mental illness and the fear of child protective services, Jamal and his mother work very hard to hide just how dismal the family's home life actually is, and due to the very poor communication between school, social services and others who could get clued in and intervene (probably making the lives of both Jamal and his brother much better), nothing really changes. For a brief while, Jamal is promised help from a discretionary fund at the local mosque, but after some negative press articles, the mosque loses its additional funding, and it all comes to naught.

Both youths struggle with their families' and society's expectations of them. They are children of immigrants, growing up in Norway, bombarded with two very different and often disparate cultures. Representation is hugely important in fiction, and the two protagonists in this novel could not feel more real to me. In my ten years as a teacher in the Oslo educational system, teaching kids mainly from the east side of the city, I have met several examples of both of these boys. I have seen these kids graduate our secondary school several times.

Some are academically gifted and do well, fulfilling their families' hopes and expectations. Some are gifted and can't take the pressure, dropping out and struggling. Some are like Jamal, functionally illiterate, abrasive, taught to feel inferior and like losers from an early age, because they cannot keep up with the increasingly harder demands both of what they're to learn and how they're to behave in school. They are naturally fed up, and many (especially the boys) drop out of school. Yet others, who get sufficient support, either at school or from other places, manage to find the motivation and eventually mature enough to apply themselves, and end up doing well. I'm never happier than when I meet a former student of mine, often the ones who were very challenging and seen as "trouble", very much like Jamal in this book, and can catch up with them about how they are doing - which tends to be very well indeed.

As of yet, this book is not available in English, but I've read several articles telling me that it will be. There will be an area (or areas) like Stovner, and kids like Mo and Jamal in most cities in most countries around the world. While this book is set in Oslo, the themes it covers are universal.

Judging a book by its cover: The cover is a sort of a pinkish beige, almost the colour of a pale brick. It's very simplistic, with a cover drawing that looks pretty much like something a child would draw if asked what their house looked like. We see a tower block and a small swing set. The rest is blank, except for the title of the novel, which is printed on what looks to be a street sign. This is a novel that has sold on word of mouth, not exactly because of the flashy cover design.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR8 Book 125: "Greven av Monte Christo (The Count of Monte Cristo)" by Alexandre Dumas

Page count: 945 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars

Young sailor Edmond Dantés is well-meaning, kind and really rather naive, wanting nothing more than to make enough money to take care of his elderly father and marry his beloved Mercedes. There are other, less well-meaning people in his life who want what he has and are prepared to frame Dantés for treason to get these things. While celebrating his engagement to Mercedes, Dantés is arrested, charged with aiding in a plot to restore the exiled Napoleon to the throne. The anonymous scheming may have come to nought, except a letter in Dantés' possession frames the father of the judge who hears his case, and said man decides that the best thing to do is burn the letter, and lock Dantés away, before the precious judge is implicated in the scandal. So thanks to a drunken, malicious prank and an unscrupulous judge, Dantés is locked up away in a dark dungeon for fourteen years, where he nearly goes mad, while his father dies alone and destitute and his Mercedes marries another.

Dantés probably would have lost his mind if not for the friendship with another prisoner, the Abbot Feria, who, when trying to dig an escape tunnel, instead ends up in Dantés' cell. The two strike up a friendship and Feria, a very learned man, teaches the fairly inexperienced sailor everything he knows. He listens patiently to Dantés' story of how he ended up being imprisoned, and explains exactly how he will have ended up being framed, turning Dantés' thoughts immediately to escape and revenge. Initially, the two are planning to escape the prison together. But the Abbott is old and sick and dies before they have a chance to get out. He tells Dantés of a great treasure, hidden away on the island of Monte Cristo. Once Dantés escapes, he goes there, and discovers riches beyond his wildest dreams. After fourteen years, with everyone who ever knew him believing him long dead, Dantés can start truly plotting his revenge.

Ten years after the escape, the mysterious and brooding Count of Monte Cristo appears in Paris and soon the lives of three prosperous and successful gentlemen start falling apart completely.

I'm convinced that it is more than twenty years since I first read this book, when I was still young and patient and felt that the longer the book, the better, frankly (this was back when I also happily read my mother's three volume edition of Les Misérables in about four days while stuck at my gran's in the west of Norway, a book I only got about a third of the way through once I tried re-reading it a few years back. To be fair, this was a time long before wifi and smart phones, the only thing to do when in the west of Norway was to read. What else was I going to do, hang out with my douchy cousins, or worse yet, my little brother?) When the Cannonball Book Club poll for Classics ended up picking the LONGEST book of all of the ones nominated (I want to point out that I picked The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton - at a neat 350 pages), it wasn't like I had a choice but to read the book, and I certainly wasn't going to opt for some abridged version. That would be cheating. This is also why this book will now forever be known to me as the book that ate November.

I actually started it in mid-October, but it became really obvious that as long as I was allowing myself to read other books as well, I was just never going to get through the nearly thousand pages of 19th Century French adventure fiction. Hence the only books I finished in November except this, were the ones I listened to in audio. In the end, I completed the book on November 30th, the day before our book club discussion. The Norwegian translation I read was done in the 1950s, but was thankfully not too difficult to get into, once I got used to some of the more old-fashioned terms. The first third or so, until Dantés finally escapes prison and goes to the island to find the treasure, moves along at a fair clip and is quite exciting. The problem came when he returns after ten years, and Dumas spends a lot of time re-establishing all the characters (who obviously no longer go by the same names they did at the beginning of the book, that would be far too easy) and setting the stage for Dantés' truly masterful revenge scenario. Once the book really gets going on that, it's all pretty thrilling, right up until the end.

It's not for nothing that this is known as one of the great revenge stories of all time. It was also, obviously written in a time when books like this, sold in instalments, were the big network entertainments of their day. Over the course of eighteen months, people would only get sixty pages at a time. That's a long time to wait to see how Dantés deals out righteous vengeance on the guys who did him wrong and made themselves rich and successful thanks in part to his misfortune. I wish I could say that I read it, considering where the instalment breaks would have been and fully aware of how the entertainments of our day have changed (all points covered in our excellent book club discussion), but I totally didn't. I mainly just forced myself through it, in between correcting a LOT of essays and audio book listening, wanting to get through the early Paris sections, where I had to use Wikipedia to help me keep track of the names of all the various parties, their many family members and how exactly they were soap operaishly connected to one another through double dealing, scheming and adultery, so I could understand everything fully once the Count's plan really kicked into gear.

While I don't love it as much as I did when I was a teenager, it's still a great book and for a book written in the mid-19th Century, it has an interestingly varied portrayal of both male and female characters. I was especially excited to see that Dumas apparently thought nothing of having Eugénie Danglars, the daughter of one of the men who wronged Dantés, escape the whole sorry revenge plot by running off with her companion on what I'm assuming will be one heck of a lesbian bohemian adventure. Valentine Villefort, one of the other prominent ladies, is so good and kind and true she makes your teeth hurt, but a lot of the other ladies, not least Mercedes, Dantés' lost love, are very impressive in their own right, this is not just a book about dudes.

While I was initially despairing, as it felt like that my November was pretty much this and correction work, I'm very glad that the Book Club pick did end up being this book, so that I got a chance to finally re-read it. I'd kept telling myself I was going to, and then never getting round to it, because it's sooo long. I also have plans to watch the TV adaptation starring Richard Chamberlain (clearly the go-to actor for Dumas adaptations in the 1970s - as well as playing Dantés, he was Aramis in the Musketeers movies directed by Richard Lester and he also starred in the dual role in The Man with the Iron Mask), but as New Year's is rapidly approaching, I needed to get these reviews completed - no time to watch movies before I blog. I honestly don't know what the abridged versions of the novel leave out, it seemed to me that once you with hindsight can see what is being set up, even the parts of the novel that dragged while reading them were really quite important. I would therefore recommend that you allow yourself the time to read the full version if you try the book. It's worth the effort, I promise.

Judging a book by its cover: For years and years and years, I've been a member of what is called the Norwegian Book Club, which is more of a subscription service for books than an actual club where people get together to read the same book every month and discuss it. It should also be noted that because a) Norwegian hardback books are terribly expensive and b) I barely ever read Norwegian books, I automatically cancel the books of the month every single time. I get the e-mail, I go to the website, I cancel the books. Very occasionally, i use the accompanying website to buy presents for people. All of this is to explain that my two volume edition of Greven av Monte Christo (which is the Norwegian name for the book) is one that I got when I became a member many many years ago, and the cover is nothing very exciting. A silhouette of a man. The background on volume one is dark blue, the background on volume two is golden yellow. Apart from that, they are identical.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.