A Hundred Thousand Hours / Hundre Tusen Timer

by Gro Dahle, Rebecca Wadlinger (Translator)

Poetry. Translated from the Norwegian by Rebecca Wadlinger. The book-length poem A HUNDRED THOUSAND HOURS is both one of the most celebrated and controversial volumes published in Norway in the past couple decades. A HUNDRED THOUSAND HOURS revolves around a mother-daughter relationship that exists between alternating forces of harmony and hysteria. Dahle's stanzas showcase multiple voices and surprise readers as a home becomes a museum, a cemetery, and a place where furniture comes to life. Dahle's work is fragmentary and eerie--an illustrious example of Scandinavian surrealism.

Genres: Poetry

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Gro Dahle (born 15 May 1962) is a Norwegian poet and writer.

She was born in Oslo, and is a daughter of Øystein Dahle. She made her literary début in 1987 with Audiens (Audience), a collection of poetry. Since then Dahle has written over 30 books in different genres, among them a series of picture books for children in collaboration with her husband, Norwegian illustrator Svein Nyhus.

Gro Dahle has received several national awards for her work. In 1999 she was the official festival poet at the Bergen International Festival. In 2002 she won the Brage Prize for literature for Snill (Nice), a picture book for children, and in 2003 the Best Children’s Book Prize from the Norwegian Ministry of Culture for Sinna Mann (Angry Man), a book about a boy witnessing domestic violence.
Dahle is a stylistically naïve, imaginative and burlesque writer often focusing on psychological problems and relations. She lives and works on the island Tjøme. Dahle also gives lectures in creative writing in Norway and Sweden.

Reviews

[Nate D]

Bursts of emotion and hallucination from the cataclysmic mundane spaces of the home.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty cool cycle of poems, translated from the Norwegian and full of objects squirming to life and a twisted mother-daughter relationship. Sample:
"I think twenty thousand thoughts a day. And only two hundred are about you. You mean so little...I shake the pears out of the pear tree and hear them celebrate."

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rebecca Wadlinger debut collections of poetry was one of my favorite releases of 2022. Prior to that book (released through Octopus Books), she was working on translating Norwegian poet (and acclaimed children’s writer) Gro Dahle’s book-length sequence A Hundred Thousand Hours (released through Ugly Duckling Presse). An inspiration for Zachary Schomburg’s 2014 collection The Book of Joshua, this sweeping and surrealist sequence of a mother/daughter relationship redefines itself with each new page. Worth multiple reads, I’d place this wonder in the same family as CAConrad’s The Book of Frank.

[Quentin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book of Modern Norwegian Poetry. A woman and her relationships to people, to her mind, to her body. This is a bilingual book! For second year students of Norwegian, this should be required reading! The English translation is faithful to the original Norwegian text!

[Chet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. The translation is excellent; the poetry and the ideas all flow beautifully.

[Presley Darnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful weird read, long poem about a mother-daughter relationship.

[Forrest Gander · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I dream that I stand facing a deep hole in the ground. I'm holding a baby carriage." Deeply unsettling, but restrained and wonderfully underdetermined, this book, in two streams of voices, depicts a disturbing relationship between mother and daughter. Both feel cannibalized by the other. There are intimations of sexual predation, power plays, paranoia. For all the drama, there is an aptness and succinct precision to the language. It's never over the top. The human relationships find their metaphors in descriptions of furniture. I couldn't help but think of Hiromi Ito's more sensational book of poems about a perverse mother-daughter relationship, Killing Kanoko. They'd make a good pair, like Faulkner's Light in August and McCarthy's The Outer Dark.

[Sofie Strömvall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever without being difficult. Funny. Well written as usual when it comes to Gro Dahle. Even though I think I like her childrens books better, it was great to read and try out her adult poetry as well. Favorite: the childbirth! Great with an analysis from another reader in the end, that added even more depth to it.

[Marybeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the strange inventiveness of theses mother-daughter poems. The poem is book-length, but each segment is under 10 lines, written in a naive voice where the furniture comes alive. Borders on surrealist, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed this. I know I will go back to it for inspiration.

[Erin Lyndal Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review forthcoming in American Microreviews and Reviews.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote a review of this for Kenyon Review Online.

http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online...