თეთრი პერანგი

by Tarjei Vesaas, დათო აკრიანი (Translator)

English, Norwegian (translation)

Genres: Scandinavian Literature, Fiction

172 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1946

About the author

Tarjei Vesaas was a Norwegian poet and novelist. Written in Nynorsk, his work is characterized by simple, terse, and symbolic prose. His stories often cover simple rural people that undergo a severe psychological drama and who according to critics are described with immense psychological insight. Commonly dealing with themes such as death, guilt, angst, and other deep and intractable human emotions, the Norwegian natural landscape is a prevalent feature in his works. His debut was in 1923 with Children of Humans (Menneskebonn), but he had his breakthrough in 1934 with The Great Cycle (Det store spelet). His mastery of the nynorsk language, landsmål (see Norwegian language), has contributed to its acceptance as a medium of world class literature.

Reviews

[BJ Lillis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The overarching theme of Tarjei Vesaas's novels is not man's relationship to nature—which is more symbol than theme; a vast, multifaceted sign for the overwhelming alienness of the human heart—but rather the inability, or refusal, to communicate. In his later novels—The Ice Palace, The Birds—this failure of communication is subtle, embedded in being. Meaning breaks through again and again, and yet unknowability remains, intransigent, inescapable. In Vesaas's earlier novels, as in The Bleaching Yard, failure to communicate is more often willful, frustrating.

The Bleaching Yard was written in Norway under German occupation. Like Vesaas’s other novels of the war years—The Seed, The House in the Dark—it represents an attempt to grapple, in symbolic terms, with the sources of human violence. For Vesaas, evil is not a quality inherent to any human being, but rather a kind of madness that preys on human foibles, taking root above all as a failure to hear, a deafness.

The Bleaching Yard is a nightmarish book. It is not flawless. Too often, we see the marionette strings. Too often, the characters bleed into ciphers, mute symbols, like the washing hanging in the yard of the laundry—itself an undeniably heavy-handed metaphor. And yet, there is great power in Vesaas's imagination. With a few deft lines, he sketches vast possibilities. A gestural expressionist painting, charcoal lines of the underdrawing plainly visible, and yet all the more arresting for having been executed in a hurry, as if there were barely enough time to say what had to be said before it were too late. The novel itself is a desperate attempt to communicate, to avoid the fate of its characters.

[Nate D · Rating 2 out of 5]

A tragedy of suffocating failures of interpersonal understanding and communication. As a nearly-forgotten Vesaas, it deserves a deeper discussion, certainly, and his usual empathetic understanding of his characrers and humanity in general is in full effect, but this was also published elsewhere as a play and it shows in the form: mostly dialogue with much less of Vesaas' intensely clear and expressive description. When he does indulge in scenery and characters fading into such, it glimmers, though. And some nice ambiguous images in the titular bleached-out laundry lines as well.

Later: docked a star because it's okayl but honestly I wouldn't really be very interested if it weren't Vesaas. The characters aren't so compelling, and the tragedy is of a forced sort that is meant to seem inevitable, but for me it comes off as manpilulated melodrama.

[Filip · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clean and simple story from nodic environment, which shows how lack of communication in the community can escalate a lot of small issues into a great disaster.