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The Pastor
A major work of contemporary fiction from Norway by a National Book Award-nominated author, translated by a PEN Translation Prize-winner.
Liv is fascinated by words and their edges and echoes. As a student of theology in Germany, she researches how the language of the Bible was wielded against the indigenous Sami people of northern Scandinavia during the 1800s. Liv excavates their past and her own, searching for meaning in a scene of Sami children gathering cloudberries and figs, from the memory of the magical weaver woman from an Astrid Lindgren fairytale she read as a child, or in how misstep and misunderstandings can lead to isolation and pain.
After the death of a dear friend - a puppeteer with bright eyes hiding her inner turbulence - Liv leaves Germany to become a pastor in a small town in the far north of Norway. Driving through the pine forests of Finland, Liv arrives at the village of her new parish. An introvert, Liv struggles with her many roles: counselor, leader, confidant, friend. Searching for the right words to describe home, she delivers a meandering sermon that sends many of her congregation to sleep (or to the door).
Soon she is drawn into the lives of the villagers: She must find a way to comfort the parents of an adolescent who takes her own life. With each new experience and confrontation, fresh questions about scripture and empathy and who she is arise. She wonders how language, in all its plasticity, became so stiff and unbending, and slowly, she bends it back toward her, building her own vocabulary of healing.
Liv is fascinated by words and their edges and echoes. As a student of theology in Germany, she researches how the language of the Bible was wielded against the indigenous Sami people of northern Scandinavia during the 1800s. Liv excavates their past and her own, searching for meaning in a scene of Sami children gathering cloudberries and figs, from the memory of the magical weaver woman from an Astrid Lindgren fairytale she read as a child, or in how misstep and misunderstandings can lead to isolation and pain.
After the death of a dear friend - a puppeteer with bright eyes hiding her inner turbulence - Liv leaves Germany to become a pastor in a small town in the far north of Norway. Driving through the pine forests of Finland, Liv arrives at the village of her new parish. An introvert, Liv struggles with her many roles: counselor, leader, confidant, friend. Searching for the right words to describe home, she delivers a meandering sermon that sends many of her congregation to sleep (or to the door).
Soon she is drawn into the lives of the villagers: She must find a way to comfort the parents of an adolescent who takes her own life. With each new experience and confrontation, fresh questions about scripture and empathy and who she is arise. She wonders how language, in all its plasticity, became so stiff and unbending, and slowly, she bends it back toward her, building her own vocabulary of healing.
280 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
24 people are currently reading
611 people want to read
About the author
Hanne Ørstavik
36 books192 followersHanne Ørstavik (born 28 November 1969) is a Norwegian writer. She was born in Tana in Finnmark province in the far north of Norway, and moved to Oslo at the age of 16. Her parents are Wenche Ørstavik and Gunnar Ørstavik. She has two brothers, Paul Ørstavik and Sakse Ørstavik.She has one daughter, Mari Ørstavik. She has two nieces, Maisie and Helena, and two nephews, Murphy and Thomas. With the publication of the novel Hakk (Cut) in 1994, Ørstavik embarked on a career that would make her one of the most remarkable and admired authors in Norwegian contemporary literature. Her literary breakthrough came three years later with the publication of Kjærlighet (Love<?i>), which in 2006 was voted the 6th best Norwegian book of the last 25 years in a prestigious contest in Dagbladet. Since then she has written several acclaimed and much discussed novels and received a host of literary prizes.
In 2002, she was awarded the Dobloug Prize for her literary works, and in 2004, the Brage Prize for the novel Presten.
Ørstavik’s books have been translated into 15 languages.
(from Wikipedia)
In 2002, she was awarded the Dobloug Prize for her literary works, and in 2004, the Brage Prize for the novel Presten.
Ørstavik’s books have been translated into 15 languages.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews
February 18, 2022
There is an aimlessness here, I think, as if the narrator is literally swimming through time. She’s lost her faith in words, and in her ability to apply those words as a salve. Being a pastor this cuts to the quick of her identity. So she feels ambivalence toward her calling and her belief. And there are people who need comfort around her—parishioners who’ve lost one they love, a friend with a daughter in crisis, others radiating out from these. Yet the narrator is herself still working through the grief of losing her friend back in Germany, where she attended school. And so she swims in time, sluggishly back and forth between near-past and present. It is hard reading someone struggling like this. It saps one’s energy, especially when that energy—like the narrator’s—is also not always there to draw upon. Everything feels unforgiving here: the landscape, the hardscrabble life of the small town perched by the sea, the residents just getting by and largely entrenched in their ways. Ørstavik’s (translated) prose is often workmanlike—the observations of a grief excavator pushing through walls of mud—yet there are flashes of sublimity and even of humor, though these are scant, for sure. Perhaps a bit more of the latter would have helped me through this one. (3.5)
And abruptly it hurt to look at her again. It was as if a great void had opened up inside her, a wound into which I now found myself staring through the window of her eyes. For a moment, she seemed no longer to be attached to anything, as if she were plummeting backwards into her own emptiness. It lasted only a second or two, and then everything leveled out again, her gaze returned, the wound closed. Only I didn’t know if it was because she’d managed to put a lid on the void, and was now standing on top of it, or if the opposite was true, that she was underneath, falling and falling away, and had simply put the lid on so that no one could see.
October 29, 2023
Utterly devastating, a novel whose power accumulates gradually but never crests; a work of such control and grace that to speak of it is only to point to it: read this, know this. This is my 2nd Orstavik, both were tremendous but the fullness of her craft in this book is simply exceptional. A story of mourning and its costs, an account of the weight of things. One of the best modern novels I have read.
October 3, 2021
Studying the conflict was like circling tentatively around a sphere of densely compacted meaning. And in a way, exploring the impact the language of Christianity had on the Sami people then was no different from investigating its impact on us now, in our present day. Or its impact on me. How much can our language contain, and how much can it bear? What do our words carry inside them? How do they work? How is it that we communicate with each other using words? How come they couldn’t get through to each other?
The Pastor, translated by Martin Aitken, is the third of Hanne Ørstavik's novels to appear in English. The original Presten was published in 2004 and won both the Klassekampen's Literary Award and Brage Prize.
The first, translated by Deborah Dawkin, was The Blue Room, published by Peirene Press in 2014, from the original Like sant som jeg er virkelig (1999).
The second, Love, translated by Martin Aitken from the 1997 novel Kjærlighet, was published in the US by Archipelago Books in 2018 and in the UK by And Other Stories in 2019. The book was a Finalist (i.e. shortlisted) in the US National Book Awards for Translated Literature, and in the UK shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and Aitken won the 2019 PEN Translation Prize. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Aitken is an exceptional translator from both Danish and Norwegian. This is the sixth translation of his I've read, and all highly distinctive. Aside from the two Ørstavik novels, the others are Bjørn Rasmussen's The Skin Is the Elastic Covering That Encases the Entire Body, Kim Leine's The Prophets of Eternal Fjord, half of the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgård monumental My Struggle: Book 6 and Olga Ravn's The Employees. He has also translated, amongst others, Peter Høeg, Dorthe Nors and Pia Juul. He has described translation as like interpreting a piano piece on violin, requiring a creative space far beyond formal dictation ("som at tolke et klaverstykke på violin eller omvendt – det kreative råderum, det kræver, rækker så langt ud over det formelles diktat."
Liv, our first person narrator, is in her mid 30s as the novel opens. She is now a Pastor at a remote church in northern social economics but she had switched to systemic theology. Her attraction to social economics had been to understand the “the overarching systems, the logic of them” by which the capitalist economy worked, but she felt “there were too many cracks” in the explanations it purported to provide, whereas theology gave her a sense that there was something beyond our explanations.
Her doctoral research specifically focused on the 1852 Sami revolt (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kauto...) looking at the events from the, undocumented, perspective of the Sami people:
The story we had came from one side only. But there was another version, from the other side, that hadn’t been written down and remained undocumented. It was there somewhere, submerged in the accounts of the pastor and the bishop, and the only access I had to this other version was from reading into those accounts, making out a kind of impression existing only in its absence. In that way, reading the documents became a matter of reading different layers of the story at the same time, like strata in an archaeological cross-section. I had to read what the pastor had written, and at the same time peer through it, to read what he hadn’t written, the things he’d left out. I had to read his way of writing, his choice of words, the values they carried, the narrative they presupposed and entailed. The narrative that appeared on the surface, and the other narrative, that was concealed by the language, concealed by what he said and did not say, and how he did so.
Further while historians had looked at the revolt as a socio-economic event, Liv believed it was about the Bible, and in particularly that the Sami people, having been given bibles translated into their language, did not feel inclined to integrate with the Norwegian society, as the authorities had supposed, but rather to demand the justice that scripture promised them:
And not until a year later, on the night of November 8, 1852, did that same group of individuals leave their exile there, harnessing the reindeer to their sleds, the justice given to them in the words of the Bible, the language they had been accorded, being their swords and shields. For does it not say there that faith can move a mountain? Does it not say that the last shall be first? Does it not say that he who prays will be saved? That for he who knocks, the door will be opened? And wasn’t that what they wanted, that the door be opened for them? That what the Bible said should come true, and come true for them too. For it says there that everyone is equal before God.
If this makes the novel sound rather theological, it is actually one instead dominated by much personal tragedy. In Germany, Liv had formed a brief, but strong, bond with Kristiane, aged 41 years, a puppeteer, but after 4 months of their acquaintance the two had become estranged, and 2 weeks later Kristiane shot herself.
This event was behind Liv’s sudden decision to return to Norway for a pastoral role. There she ends up sharing a house with the church attendant, Nanna. The father of Nanna’s first child left her just before the birth of her daughter. She married and had a second daughter with a local fisherman, but he was killed, a few months before the novel begins, in an accident at the processing plant .
And, as the novel opens, news comes of another suicide, of a young girl, the novel set in the week leading up to the funera,l which Liv will conduct.
The scenery acts as another strong presence in the novel, one which fits Liv’s contemplative mood and desire to know what lies beyond:
There wasn’t much in the room. I’d put two armchairs in the corner over by the bookshelves, to the left of where I stood, and Kristiane’s doll hung from the wall next to the door. The best thing about the room was the view from the window, the light. It was as if it spoke to me, or with me, every time I walked in. At night, whenever I woke up, I’d come in here and stand by the window to look at the lights outside, all the lights that led down the gentle slope of the road to the fjord, the island out there, I could see the tip of it from the window, the bit where the bridge started. All the lights, the colors in them, I would think to myself. Threads of light, joined together in a web, each twinkling on its own, and yet they were connected in all manner of ways. I would sink into the thought of such a web, standing there in the living room in winter, looking at the lights winding their way down the road. And at the bottom was the fjord, and total darkness.
This was a novel I admired but ultimately didn’t really connect with. The sections on the Sami were fascinating and I'd have liked to see more of this. But the misery in the present day felt laid on a bit thick, and I struggled with the character of Liv. With so much obvious tragedy around her, it was less clear to me what was behind her own trauma and sense of displacement:
Why did it have to be that way? Why was everything so loose and disconnected? The ground on which I stood, that I believed in, had become displaced, its plates were shifting, and I fell through the gap in between.
And her despair was rather explained for me by her lack of religious belief. From what we can see she believes in the Bible, but not in the existence of God, or rather not in a living, present God with whom she can have a relationship.
For God? Well, if I had to use that word, then I suppose it was, yes. Though not in the form of some remote aesthetic, more as a commitment, a place to stand in life. A space I wanted to be open in my encounters with others, a space that would allow people in, and be open to all. God understood as a binding commitment to humanity. If there was something I was going to call God that would be it. But the word God didn’t enter my mind when I thought about it quietly on my own.
Overall, a novel I appreciated but which didn’t really draw me in.
Thanks to the publisher, Archipelago Books, for the ARC via Netgalley
The Pastor, translated by Martin Aitken, is the third of Hanne Ørstavik's novels to appear in English. The original Presten was published in 2004 and won both the Klassekampen's Literary Award and Brage Prize.
The first, translated by Deborah Dawkin, was The Blue Room, published by Peirene Press in 2014, from the original Like sant som jeg er virkelig (1999).
The second, Love, translated by Martin Aitken from the 1997 novel Kjærlighet, was published in the US by Archipelago Books in 2018 and in the UK by And Other Stories in 2019. The book was a Finalist (i.e. shortlisted) in the US National Book Awards for Translated Literature, and in the UK shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and Aitken won the 2019 PEN Translation Prize. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Aitken is an exceptional translator from both Danish and Norwegian. This is the sixth translation of his I've read, and all highly distinctive. Aside from the two Ørstavik novels, the others are Bjørn Rasmussen's The Skin Is the Elastic Covering That Encases the Entire Body, Kim Leine's The Prophets of Eternal Fjord, half of the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgård monumental My Struggle: Book 6 and Olga Ravn's The Employees. He has also translated, amongst others, Peter Høeg, Dorthe Nors and Pia Juul. He has described translation as like interpreting a piano piece on violin, requiring a creative space far beyond formal dictation ("som at tolke et klaverstykke på violin eller omvendt – det kreative råderum, det kræver, rækker så langt ud over det formelles diktat."
Liv, our first person narrator, is in her mid 30s as the novel opens. She is now a Pastor at a remote church in northern social economics but she had switched to systemic theology. Her attraction to social economics had been to understand the “the overarching systems, the logic of them” by which the capitalist economy worked, but she felt “there were too many cracks” in the explanations it purported to provide, whereas theology gave her a sense that there was something beyond our explanations.
Her doctoral research specifically focused on the 1852 Sami revolt (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kauto...) looking at the events from the, undocumented, perspective of the Sami people:
The story we had came from one side only. But there was another version, from the other side, that hadn’t been written down and remained undocumented. It was there somewhere, submerged in the accounts of the pastor and the bishop, and the only access I had to this other version was from reading into those accounts, making out a kind of impression existing only in its absence. In that way, reading the documents became a matter of reading different layers of the story at the same time, like strata in an archaeological cross-section. I had to read what the pastor had written, and at the same time peer through it, to read what he hadn’t written, the things he’d left out. I had to read his way of writing, his choice of words, the values they carried, the narrative they presupposed and entailed. The narrative that appeared on the surface, and the other narrative, that was concealed by the language, concealed by what he said and did not say, and how he did so.
Further while historians had looked at the revolt as a socio-economic event, Liv believed it was about the Bible, and in particularly that the Sami people, having been given bibles translated into their language, did not feel inclined to integrate with the Norwegian society, as the authorities had supposed, but rather to demand the justice that scripture promised them:
And not until a year later, on the night of November 8, 1852, did that same group of individuals leave their exile there, harnessing the reindeer to their sleds, the justice given to them in the words of the Bible, the language they had been accorded, being their swords and shields. For does it not say there that faith can move a mountain? Does it not say that the last shall be first? Does it not say that he who prays will be saved? That for he who knocks, the door will be opened? And wasn’t that what they wanted, that the door be opened for them? That what the Bible said should come true, and come true for them too. For it says there that everyone is equal before God.
If this makes the novel sound rather theological, it is actually one instead dominated by much personal tragedy. In Germany, Liv had formed a brief, but strong, bond with Kristiane, aged 41 years, a puppeteer, but after 4 months of their acquaintance the two had become estranged, and 2 weeks later Kristiane shot herself.
This event was behind Liv’s sudden decision to return to Norway for a pastoral role. There she ends up sharing a house with the church attendant, Nanna. The father of Nanna’s first child left her just before the birth of her daughter. She married and had a second daughter with a local fisherman, but he was killed, a few months before the novel begins, in an accident at the processing plant .
And, as the novel opens, news comes of another suicide, of a young girl, the novel set in the week leading up to the funera,l which Liv will conduct.
The scenery acts as another strong presence in the novel, one which fits Liv’s contemplative mood and desire to know what lies beyond:
There wasn’t much in the room. I’d put two armchairs in the corner over by the bookshelves, to the left of where I stood, and Kristiane’s doll hung from the wall next to the door. The best thing about the room was the view from the window, the light. It was as if it spoke to me, or with me, every time I walked in. At night, whenever I woke up, I’d come in here and stand by the window to look at the lights outside, all the lights that led down the gentle slope of the road to the fjord, the island out there, I could see the tip of it from the window, the bit where the bridge started. All the lights, the colors in them, I would think to myself. Threads of light, joined together in a web, each twinkling on its own, and yet they were connected in all manner of ways. I would sink into the thought of such a web, standing there in the living room in winter, looking at the lights winding their way down the road. And at the bottom was the fjord, and total darkness.
This was a novel I admired but ultimately didn’t really connect with. The sections on the Sami were fascinating and I'd have liked to see more of this. But the misery in the present day felt laid on a bit thick, and I struggled with the character of Liv. With so much obvious tragedy around her, it was less clear to me what was behind her own trauma and sense of displacement:
Why did it have to be that way? Why was everything so loose and disconnected? The ground on which I stood, that I believed in, had become displaced, its plates were shifting, and I fell through the gap in between.
And her despair was rather explained for me by her lack of religious belief. From what we can see she believes in the Bible, but not in the existence of God, or rather not in a living, present God with whom she can have a relationship.
For God? Well, if I had to use that word, then I suppose it was, yes. Though not in the form of some remote aesthetic, more as a commitment, a place to stand in life. A space I wanted to be open in my encounters with others, a space that would allow people in, and be open to all. God understood as a binding commitment to humanity. If there was something I was going to call God that would be it. But the word God didn’t enter my mind when I thought about it quietly on my own.
Overall, a novel I appreciated but which didn’t really draw me in.
Thanks to the publisher, Archipelago Books, for the ARC via Netgalley
January 27, 2022
It will take me time to organize my thoughts into a longer review, but I loved this book. I have not read her previously translated works which I believe are novella length so I cannot compare, but I found myself drawn immediately into this deeply internal first person narrative. Liv is a pastor who has left a PhD program in Germany after the death of a woman she knew briefly, but who had upended something inside her. She heads to the northern part of her native Norway to take up an assistant pastor position. She is aware that her ability to connect with others (and herself) in the "normal" emotional way she desires and this is the key struggle that frames her memories of her friend, her relationships to her community and congregation, and the family she lives with. A fascination with a violent uprising by the Indigenous Sami peoples 150 years earlier is a thread running through her account, yet another aspect of herself that she cannot quite define. And then there are the larger questions of the, in this region, still unconventional career of priest that she has chosen and her lack of confidence in faith.
An extended review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2022/01/27/i-...
An extended review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2022/01/27/i-...
March 5, 2021
Depresīvi. Iespējams, ja es būtu sevis meklējumos, tad grāmata uzrunātu daudz vairāk.
Ļoti patika pārdomas par sāmu dumpi (un viss, kas skar sāmu / norvēģu attiecības).
Ļoti patika pārdomas par sāmu dumpi (un viss, kas skar sāmu / norvēģu attiecības).
April 18, 2018
"La pasteure" which in 2004 won Norway's leading literary prize, the Brageprisen, is an excellent novel about how an intelligent, young woman finds her vocation as a Lutheran pastor. Although Orstavik gives a well-constructed plot and an intriguing heroine this novel will offer little pleasure to any reader who is not interested in the state of Lutheranism in contemporary society. Being a practicing Catholic and thus somewhat of a fellow traveler, I found the novel fascinating. As it has never been translated into English, the professionals in the publishing industry must feel the market for this book is too small in the Anglo-Saxon world.
Liv, the heroine is 35 years old as the novel begins. She has just abandoned a Doctoral thesis in Germany and has taken a Parish in Finnmark well north of the Arctic Circle in Norway. The local radio stations are in Russian and Finn. The community has a very large Sami (Lapp) population.
Liv makes no effort to resist her taste for whisky and without disliking sex has trouble stimulating her appetite for it. Liv had originally started studying political science switching to theology when she realized that that political theory could not explain the "Grand Tout". I would translate the "Grand Tout" as the "Big All" but Google suggests that "Great Spirit" would be a better translation. Given that Liv is highly attracted to Sami spiritualism, Google could well be right in his regard. As a Canadian, I find this aspect of Liv's personality very credible as all the priests that I have known who administer to native Canadians are highly impressed by their spirituality.
Liv's problems with conventional Christianity can be found in Matthew 10:34 in which Christ states : “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." Liv feels that the purpose of Christianity is to build a sense of community so that people will now live in solitude. Her main experience with choosing the way of the sword rather than of peace has been an unqualified disaster.
Liv spends a great deal of time reflecting on a revolt amongst the Finnmark Samis that occurred in 1852. The Samis believed that they had become part of the Christian elect. When a new Pastor arrives and refuses to administer sacraments to the Samis who have a weak knowledge of Lutheran doctrines. The Samis rebel, killing several people including the pastor and set fire to a building. In Liv's view the Pastor had chosen the way of the sword rather than the way of the peace. She resolves to continue in her profession. Her approach will be to promote social solidarity and inclusion.
Despite Liv's resolve to persist her vocation, the reader is unsure whether or not Liv actually believes in God. Neither Liv nor the author appear to think that is necessary.
Liv, the heroine is 35 years old as the novel begins. She has just abandoned a Doctoral thesis in Germany and has taken a Parish in Finnmark well north of the Arctic Circle in Norway. The local radio stations are in Russian and Finn. The community has a very large Sami (Lapp) population.
Liv makes no effort to resist her taste for whisky and without disliking sex has trouble stimulating her appetite for it. Liv had originally started studying political science switching to theology when she realized that that political theory could not explain the "Grand Tout". I would translate the "Grand Tout" as the "Big All" but Google suggests that "Great Spirit" would be a better translation. Given that Liv is highly attracted to Sami spiritualism, Google could well be right in his regard. As a Canadian, I find this aspect of Liv's personality very credible as all the priests that I have known who administer to native Canadians are highly impressed by their spirituality.
Liv's problems with conventional Christianity can be found in Matthew 10:34 in which Christ states : “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." Liv feels that the purpose of Christianity is to build a sense of community so that people will now live in solitude. Her main experience with choosing the way of the sword rather than of peace has been an unqualified disaster.
Liv spends a great deal of time reflecting on a revolt amongst the Finnmark Samis that occurred in 1852. The Samis believed that they had become part of the Christian elect. When a new Pastor arrives and refuses to administer sacraments to the Samis who have a weak knowledge of Lutheran doctrines. The Samis rebel, killing several people including the pastor and set fire to a building. In Liv's view the Pastor had chosen the way of the sword rather than the way of the peace. She resolves to continue in her profession. Her approach will be to promote social solidarity and inclusion.
Despite Liv's resolve to persist her vocation, the reader is unsure whether or not Liv actually believes in God. Neither Liv nor the author appear to think that is necessary.
September 7, 2025
My second Hanne Ørstavik. Read Love a few months ago. Returning to The Pastor. Bleak but beautiful. It is a novel about people, landscape (from Fjord to Fjell), religion, gender and words. Ørstavik looks at the power of words to connect and divide us, and how God's words, scripture, are difficult to take from the page to the people. Ironic to read this as a translated novel because a lot of this book deals with translating things. How do we find meaning in grief? How do we show love? How do we reach others? How do we understand ourselves? How do we find God?
October 29, 2022
“Who was I? Everywhere I went, something broke or became distorted. What had I thought? That by travelling to somewhere else on the map I would arrive at some new place in myself? A place in me that was good and warm and worthy of love?”
What an exquisite and eloquent jewel is Norwegian writer, Hanne Ørstavik’s The Pastor. Such an inwardly focused, insightful and melancholic meditation on the tumultuous internal contemplations of the human soul. As I read I found myself pausing, time and again, to internalise and reflect on the words, sentences, paragraphs that overflowed with pensive sadness and wonderings. The entire narrative is a poetic journey into the deeper aspects of our very humanness and give voice to the internal conflicts and thoughts that we rarely bring into awareness.
Set in the northern most parts of Norway, deep in the Arctic circle, the setting couldn’t be more perfect for the ensuing narrative. “The snow stayed on the ground. The air was so cold. The wind kept blowing. The darkness was so dark and went on for so long”. Liv, the pastor, trudging through her own journey or grief and doubt with more questions than answers, finds herself deep in Sámi territory, far flung and remote, matching her inward world while also matching the subject of her doctoral thesis around the so named Sámi rebellion of 1852. Ørstavik intersperses elements of this time period throughout the novel, poignantly and respectfully digging deeply into underpinning motivations and emotions. I found myself revisiting this time period in much the same way that I had when I read “To Cook a Bear” by Mikael Niemi a narrative exploring Laestadianism throughout the region at that time.
Liv sits in that space of deeply sensing the marginalisation of the Sámi and questioning those in the church and other institutionalised power structures, adding to her own conflicts. “He wasn’t even trying to see things from their side. In fact it didn’t seem like he ever had. Inflexible and bound by his own perspective, that was what he was, seeing only what he chose to see”.
Permeating throughout the narrative are the themes of loss and grief, questioning and wondering. This is powerfully seen through Liv’s relationship with her friend a Kristiane, whom she met in Germany. Kristiane seems to be the yin to Liv’s yang and the friendship is both intense and fragile, thrusting Liv on an even greater melcholic journey into the depths of her soul.
I love that meta-awareness of the concept of language throughout the novel. Ørstavik underscores the power of language to enlighten, bring knowledge, freedom, unite. It is an incredibly powerful theme... “I wanted to investigate the rhetoric from both sides, Sámi and Norwegian, the power structures, have a language actually works, not at the reasonably tangible level of semantics, but in the wider space of the text.” There is something powerful in between our words, the commas, full stops, capitalisation, emphases and intonation. Language brings life, community and freedom and outcomes that may not be foreseen based on the many meanings that language gives for each individual and collective. And language can imprison, restrict, reduce and confine.... “How could language, in all its plasticity, become so stiff and unbending, as hard as a wall? What part of us made it so? How did I come across in that respect? What walls held me captive, and what did they prevent me from seeing?”
And more importantly, the space in between everything is the space to notice. The pastor is a narrative in the in between space and that is the space where I want to explore more.
What an exquisite and eloquent jewel is Norwegian writer, Hanne Ørstavik’s The Pastor. Such an inwardly focused, insightful and melancholic meditation on the tumultuous internal contemplations of the human soul. As I read I found myself pausing, time and again, to internalise and reflect on the words, sentences, paragraphs that overflowed with pensive sadness and wonderings. The entire narrative is a poetic journey into the deeper aspects of our very humanness and give voice to the internal conflicts and thoughts that we rarely bring into awareness.
Set in the northern most parts of Norway, deep in the Arctic circle, the setting couldn’t be more perfect for the ensuing narrative. “The snow stayed on the ground. The air was so cold. The wind kept blowing. The darkness was so dark and went on for so long”. Liv, the pastor, trudging through her own journey or grief and doubt with more questions than answers, finds herself deep in Sámi territory, far flung and remote, matching her inward world while also matching the subject of her doctoral thesis around the so named Sámi rebellion of 1852. Ørstavik intersperses elements of this time period throughout the novel, poignantly and respectfully digging deeply into underpinning motivations and emotions. I found myself revisiting this time period in much the same way that I had when I read “To Cook a Bear” by Mikael Niemi a narrative exploring Laestadianism throughout the region at that time.
Liv sits in that space of deeply sensing the marginalisation of the Sámi and questioning those in the church and other institutionalised power structures, adding to her own conflicts. “He wasn’t even trying to see things from their side. In fact it didn’t seem like he ever had. Inflexible and bound by his own perspective, that was what he was, seeing only what he chose to see”.
Permeating throughout the narrative are the themes of loss and grief, questioning and wondering. This is powerfully seen through Liv’s relationship with her friend a Kristiane, whom she met in Germany. Kristiane seems to be the yin to Liv’s yang and the friendship is both intense and fragile, thrusting Liv on an even greater melcholic journey into the depths of her soul.
I love that meta-awareness of the concept of language throughout the novel. Ørstavik underscores the power of language to enlighten, bring knowledge, freedom, unite. It is an incredibly powerful theme... “I wanted to investigate the rhetoric from both sides, Sámi and Norwegian, the power structures, have a language actually works, not at the reasonably tangible level of semantics, but in the wider space of the text.” There is something powerful in between our words, the commas, full stops, capitalisation, emphases and intonation. Language brings life, community and freedom and outcomes that may not be foreseen based on the many meanings that language gives for each individual and collective. And language can imprison, restrict, reduce and confine.... “How could language, in all its plasticity, become so stiff and unbending, as hard as a wall? What part of us made it so? How did I come across in that respect? What walls held me captive, and what did they prevent me from seeing?”
And more importantly, the space in between everything is the space to notice. The pastor is a narrative in the in between space and that is the space where I want to explore more.
May 13, 2024
This novel was the October 2021 selection from Archipelago Books, to which I have a subscription. I had some troubles with it at first.
It is set in the very most northern spot in Norway, in a town right on the sea, not far from Russia. The story opens with the pastor, Liv, officiating at her first communion service in the small town’s church. She has replaced the previous pastor. She is full of the need to make herself known to her new congregation and her sermon goes on way too long. Afterwards she feels regret. This becomes one of the recurring motifs of the story and indeed of Liv’s life. “That was what the year had been like. Everything escaped me, every time I held out my hands, something escaped me.”
Then, in a pattern I struggled to notice at first, she tells of her journey from the south of Germany through Finland to this forsaken town in Norway. It seemed that every incident took her back in memory and she would muse on those memories. There are no chapters and these flashbacks come without warning. Map study was required because though I read more than I do anything else, I need to be able to visualize where the story takes me. Also, locations have specific land features as well as names for them. I learned words like fjord and fells and went to find pictures on the internet.
Liv is a young woman, daughter of a pastor, student of the colonial past of Norway and the conflicts between colonists and indigenous peoples called the Sami. Like most countries around the world, these conflicts involved violence and defrauding of the natives of their land and way of living. But Liv had become stumped on her thesis about this, so had enrolled in a seminary to become a pastor. She had also recently lost a friend to suicide.
I read the book as spring was reluctantly arriving in my California town. It seemed winter would never end. Well, in the most northern reaches of Norway, winter goes on almost literally forever, the snow, the cold and the wind practically characters in the tale. As Liv begins to know the people of her new area, more disasters occur. A suicide by the daughter of a church family, a terrible illness falls on another child. She must find it in herself to minister to these families whether she knows how or not.
Still, I saw that Liv is more like me than I thought. Reaching out for knowledge, for friendship, for connections but second guessing oneself while raking through memories of loss and change.
It is a powerful book, I would say especially for a woman, if one can get in sync with the structure, the character of Liv, the specifics of the location. It is also a realistic account of young womanhood in our times. The writing on a sentence level is amazing and I congratulate the translator on his good work.
It is set in the very most northern spot in Norway, in a town right on the sea, not far from Russia. The story opens with the pastor, Liv, officiating at her first communion service in the small town’s church. She has replaced the previous pastor. She is full of the need to make herself known to her new congregation and her sermon goes on way too long. Afterwards she feels regret. This becomes one of the recurring motifs of the story and indeed of Liv’s life. “That was what the year had been like. Everything escaped me, every time I held out my hands, something escaped me.”
Then, in a pattern I struggled to notice at first, she tells of her journey from the south of Germany through Finland to this forsaken town in Norway. It seemed that every incident took her back in memory and she would muse on those memories. There are no chapters and these flashbacks come without warning. Map study was required because though I read more than I do anything else, I need to be able to visualize where the story takes me. Also, locations have specific land features as well as names for them. I learned words like fjord and fells and went to find pictures on the internet.
Liv is a young woman, daughter of a pastor, student of the colonial past of Norway and the conflicts between colonists and indigenous peoples called the Sami. Like most countries around the world, these conflicts involved violence and defrauding of the natives of their land and way of living. But Liv had become stumped on her thesis about this, so had enrolled in a seminary to become a pastor. She had also recently lost a friend to suicide.
I read the book as spring was reluctantly arriving in my California town. It seemed winter would never end. Well, in the most northern reaches of Norway, winter goes on almost literally forever, the snow, the cold and the wind practically characters in the tale. As Liv begins to know the people of her new area, more disasters occur. A suicide by the daughter of a church family, a terrible illness falls on another child. She must find it in herself to minister to these families whether she knows how or not.
Still, I saw that Liv is more like me than I thought. Reaching out for knowledge, for friendship, for connections but second guessing oneself while raking through memories of loss and change.
It is a powerful book, I would say especially for a woman, if one can get in sync with the structure, the character of Liv, the specifics of the location. It is also a realistic account of young womanhood in our times. The writing on a sentence level is amazing and I congratulate the translator on his good work.
May 14, 2024
This novel was originally published in Norwegian in 2004, and I read in the English translation published in 2021.
The narrator Liv is a 35-year-old assistant paster assigned to a church located on a fjord in Norway, where she has been for nearly a year. I was about a third way into the book before I realized that Liv was female -- perhaps this was due to my unfamiliarity with the naming customs in Norwegian, or perhaps this was intentional on the part of the author. The story unfolds over just a week or so.
Liv was a doctoral student in theology in southern Germany and was working on her dissertation about the revolt in November 1852 by the indigenous Sami people at a community in Norway. While studying in Germany, she met a woman Kristiane, whom she knew for just 40 days before Kristiane's death. Shortly after, she took the assignment to Norway. During the present in which the story is told, one 19-year-old in the local parish commits suicide and another makes an attempt at suicide, and Liv also attends a church seminar held in the community of the Sami rebellion. All of these things haunt her, and the narration swirls among present reality to dream states to past memories to historical events, as Liv tries to sort out life's meanings.
The narrator Liv is a 35-year-old assistant paster assigned to a church located on a fjord in Norway, where she has been for nearly a year. I was about a third way into the book before I realized that Liv was female -- perhaps this was due to my unfamiliarity with the naming customs in Norwegian, or perhaps this was intentional on the part of the author. The story unfolds over just a week or so.
Liv was a doctoral student in theology in southern Germany and was working on her dissertation about the revolt in November 1852 by the indigenous Sami people at a community in Norway. While studying in Germany, she met a woman Kristiane, whom she knew for just 40 days before Kristiane's death. Shortly after, she took the assignment to Norway. During the present in which the story is told, one 19-year-old in the local parish commits suicide and another makes an attempt at suicide, and Liv also attends a church seminar held in the community of the Sami rebellion. All of these things haunt her, and the narration swirls among present reality to dream states to past memories to historical events, as Liv tries to sort out life's meanings.
January 1, 2022
CW suicide
I slipped this book in from my eARC backlog. I remember reading a previous novel by this author (Love) with the initial response of frustration with the characters for making bad decisions. Well they are back - not the same characters but new ones, pushing forward through bad times and sometimes pulling people down around them.
There is a somewhat strange combination of things going on here. Liv is the central character and she is a pastor. After the loss of her friend to suicide, she has taken a job in a small Norwegian community within eyesight of a fjord. She has frequent flashbacks to her time at a seminary in Germany as well.
Her new gig hasn't gone well - her introductory sermon went an hour and some people stood up and left, and she has already had to deal with too many men who don't think she should be allowed to be a minister. The community she serves is in the midst of a significant legal conflict over land rights with the Sami..her dissertation is about how language inside a religion effect its practice and understanding, and there is a lot going on about the history of forced conversion, Bible translation, and concepts of justice that she thinks about differently from everyone around her.
And her community is struggling too, including the family she lives with, with one daughter that reminds her of her deceased friend. There is a lot of guilt and distraction over those events that make her not an unreliable narrator but an unfocused one.
I slipped this book in from my eARC backlog. I remember reading a previous novel by this author (Love) with the initial response of frustration with the characters for making bad decisions. Well they are back - not the same characters but new ones, pushing forward through bad times and sometimes pulling people down around them.
There is a somewhat strange combination of things going on here. Liv is the central character and she is a pastor. After the loss of her friend to suicide, she has taken a job in a small Norwegian community within eyesight of a fjord. She has frequent flashbacks to her time at a seminary in Germany as well.
Her new gig hasn't gone well - her introductory sermon went an hour and some people stood up and left, and she has already had to deal with too many men who don't think she should be allowed to be a minister. The community she serves is in the midst of a significant legal conflict over land rights with the Sami..her dissertation is about how language inside a religion effect its practice and understanding, and there is a lot going on about the history of forced conversion, Bible translation, and concepts of justice that she thinks about differently from everyone around her.
And her community is struggling too, including the family she lives with, with one daughter that reminds her of her deceased friend. There is a lot of guilt and distraction over those events that make her not an unreliable narrator but an unfocused one.
February 1, 2023
“Yet they fought for something they believed in, something that mattered to them. They fought for something they had felt for so long. And they had been kept down for so long. Suddenly, in their own language, they had received the Word, and the Word said that Jesus was on the side of the weak. That God would set free the oppressed. They believed in it, and they wanted to be free. Not just spiritually, but individually. But tangibly, physically, as a people, socially and structurally.”
Lent 2022 and I am reading the pastor. I think of the colonized people who found justice and salvation in the biblical text but found cruel treatment at the hands of the white people ministering to them and later the white people who ruled over them. There is liberation promised in those words but here is none to be found in practice. Perfect read.
“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”
Matthew 10: 34
Lent 2022 and I am reading the pastor. I think of the colonized people who found justice and salvation in the biblical text but found cruel treatment at the hands of the white people ministering to them and later the white people who ruled over them. There is liberation promised in those words but here is none to be found in practice. Perfect read.
“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”
Matthew 10: 34
February 4, 2024
looked me straight in the eye and squashed me like a bug
Read
February 1, 2025Netiku tik tālu, lai saprastu, kas par vainu. Izlasīju 40 lpp - un to darīju ar lielu piespiešanos, bet lasu savam priekam un dzīve ir par īsu, lai sevi spiestu lasīt.
March 5, 2025
I need to stand in the sun.
December 6, 2021
Set in rural Norway in the dead of winter, the story reflects that odd formlessness that happens when everything is grey and indistinguishable, when you think you see something in the middle distance but then realize you're looking so hard you are bringing something in you out. A sad, liminal book about faith and the losing of it and the desperate desire to hold on it by building a community around yourself. But what if that doesn't work? What then? And is faith something that can be maintained in the face of institutions that insist that you, like the main character, Liv, are not an adequate vessel for carrying an embodiment of that faith? There are no chapters, and so the entire 250+ pages kind of drift, following the train of thought, as it dips in and out of the present, conflating memory with experience, through a landscape that doesn't provide enough contrast to demarcate boundaries or landmarks or stopping points, so you feel like you are floating--less in a summer pool kind of way and more like being carried away by an incomprehensibly huge blast.
October 24, 2021
A thoughtful, quiet and atmospheric novel about a woman pastor who moves to a remote village in the far north of Norway, where she has to confront not only the bleak landscape but her own doubts and uncertainties. As she becomes acquainted with the villagers she is faced with some devastating events which bring back the earlier loss of a friend, the main reason she fled to this fishing village in the first place. There’s much angst and troubled reflection here as we see everything through Liv’s thoughts and feelings, thoughts that she isn’t often articulate enough to express. The past mingles with the present as she tries to carry out her role, but it’s a role that seems to constantly elude her. There was much I enjoyed about the book. The style is elegiac, the story moving, and Liv herself is an intriguing character. But I never felt fully engaged with her, and so overall the book didn’t quite work for me and I found its constant introspection hard to relate to.
November 11, 2021
“I’m a pastor...I wanted to bind up a wound...But here I am with words instead...For it all to be vast...that was why I’d joined the clergy, that was why I’d gone over to theology that day in the rain, from social economics…What made theology important was that it addressed the idea that there was something more, something that wasn’t a system, something we couldn’t grasp. It pointed to this other, and offered a space in which it could be investigated...Because there was something greater than what they said, greater than their systems and theories and models. There was more...Hope. The hope of becoming heard, the hope of becoming understood. Is anything greater than that?”
Hanne Orstavik’s The Pastor braids a series of suicides, the Norwegianization of the Sami tribe, and the faith that has the potential to comfort or cleave. “The language of the Bible became the locus at which different cultures and language traditions, and imbalances of power, manifested themselves...The challenge consists in drawing as large a circle as possible while still remaining true to our beliefs...A binding commitment to humanity. If there was something I was going to call God that would be it...I came not to send peace, but a sword, the Bible said...I wondered what my sword might be. What had I come here to do?”
In the poetic prose of a palm-sized novel, The Pastor poses the same question to the reader. Sometimes the truest answers lie in the simplest acts: “Here, she said, turning towards me with a waffle skewered on a fork. Take and eat, in remembrance of me.” Grace turns the stones of our sin into balloons full of air that float away with a flick of His finger. “Accept what comes to you, but don’t expect more.”
Hanne Orstavik’s The Pastor braids a series of suicides, the Norwegianization of the Sami tribe, and the faith that has the potential to comfort or cleave. “The language of the Bible became the locus at which different cultures and language traditions, and imbalances of power, manifested themselves...The challenge consists in drawing as large a circle as possible while still remaining true to our beliefs...A binding commitment to humanity. If there was something I was going to call God that would be it...I came not to send peace, but a sword, the Bible said...I wondered what my sword might be. What had I come here to do?”
In the poetic prose of a palm-sized novel, The Pastor poses the same question to the reader. Sometimes the truest answers lie in the simplest acts: “Here, she said, turning towards me with a waffle skewered on a fork. Take and eat, in remembrance of me.” Grace turns the stones of our sin into balloons full of air that float away with a flick of His finger. “Accept what comes to you, but don’t expect more.”
January 26, 2020
Gdyby ta książka była elementem krajobrazu, byłaby zamglonym fiordem. W ciężkich butach przechodzimy przez wnętrze bohaterki, z lekkością prowadzącej narrację na conajmniej trzech poziomach: swojej obecnej funkcji pastora, czasu spędzonego w Niemczech naznaczonych przez relację z Kristiane oraz trawiących ją kwestii historycznych, w szczególe saamskiego buntu sprzed 150 laty. Liv w swej opowieści odrzuca zbędne wstępy i przydługie opisy, by przejść natychmiast do sedna swego odczuwania. Może wydawać się apatyczna, jednak wszystko w niej bez ustanku powstaje i odpada. Ukryta za jej plecami Hanne Ørstavik wyraża piękne refleksje zarówno na temat kościoła („Chciałam, by kościół był właśnie tym. Miejscem, w którym wydajemy ucztę, gdy ktoś powraca do domu”), Biblii („to, co w Biblii trudne, dziwne, niezwykłe, pełne sprzeczności, musi takie pozostać. Ma pozostać niezrozumiałe. Jeśli nie, to wszystko runie, pozatrzaskuje się dookoła nas i pozamyka”), jak i makijażu („Maja używała makijażu, by zaznaczać w sobie kontrasty, tak by były one wyraźniejsze, bardziej widoczne. […] Pomagał jej utrzymać w sobie napięcie”). Wielość.
November 1, 2021
I fear this didn't manage to pull me in. I felt rather indifferent towards the main character, despite the tragedies happening around her. Liv is in her mid-30s and has suddenly up and left Germany to work as a pastor in the remote north of Norway.
There are no chapters, there is a lot of moving back and forth in time and there is not really a central plot - all of which did not really help in keeping my attention. All the while we are in Liv's head, who is telling us how she ended up where she is and what is happening around her. The setting is special and the sections on the Sami are interesting, but as a novel to get immersed in it didn't work for me.
Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced reading copy.
There are no chapters, there is a lot of moving back and forth in time and there is not really a central plot - all of which did not really help in keeping my attention. All the while we are in Liv's head, who is telling us how she ended up where she is and what is happening around her. The setting is special and the sections on the Sami are interesting, but as a novel to get immersed in it didn't work for me.
Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced reading copy.
September 5, 2017
Jeg ble utrolig positivt overrasket da jeg leste denne romanen i forbindelse med en sending i Bokbaren. Ørstaviks roman er preget av et upåklagelig språk som har en unik evne til å sette ensom-i-Finnmark-i mars-stemningen. Hovedpersonens Liv funderinger rundt død og kristendom føles relevante og riktige, mens bygdesamfunnet i Finmark er et fantastisk bakteppe.
"Men det var ikke noe valg. Jeg hadde ikke ønsket det sånn, hadde ikke villet det. Likevel skjedde det.
Det var som om han merket det, han også. At noe plutselig var borte, som om vi hadde holdt noe mellom oss, båret noe sammen, og så var det bare ikke der mer. Han ble stille, vi gikk uten å si noe. Kunne vi snu og gå tilbake, spole tilbake, finne det igjen i snøen ved porten til prestegården? Og hvordor var det sånn, at det var der det forsvant?" s. 99
Jeg åpnet munnen og skulle til å si noe, men så hadde han sett en annen vei. Et lite øyeblikk så han bort, han så på hun andre ved bordet som kom tilbake for å sette seg, ikke lenge, bare et kort blikk bort. Men det var nok til at jeg lot være. Jeg sa ikke mer om det. Som om jeg trengte hans hjelp for å få det fram, for i det hele tatt å få tak i noe. Og blikket hans, øynene, var den hjelpen. Så lenge han så på meg, kunne jeg famle meg fram." s. 105
Trodd at bare jeg prøvde nok, så ville jeg slippes inn. Inn i det store rommet. Og at der inne, der var det mulig å være. Der gikk det an å finnes, der var det noe som holdt." s. 171
"Men det var ikke noe valg. Jeg hadde ikke ønsket det sånn, hadde ikke villet det. Likevel skjedde det.
Det var som om han merket det, han også. At noe plutselig var borte, som om vi hadde holdt noe mellom oss, båret noe sammen, og så var det bare ikke der mer. Han ble stille, vi gikk uten å si noe. Kunne vi snu og gå tilbake, spole tilbake, finne det igjen i snøen ved porten til prestegården? Og hvordor var det sånn, at det var der det forsvant?" s. 99
Jeg åpnet munnen og skulle til å si noe, men så hadde han sett en annen vei. Et lite øyeblikk så han bort, han så på hun andre ved bordet som kom tilbake for å sette seg, ikke lenge, bare et kort blikk bort. Men det var nok til at jeg lot være. Jeg sa ikke mer om det. Som om jeg trengte hans hjelp for å få det fram, for i det hele tatt å få tak i noe. Og blikket hans, øynene, var den hjelpen. Så lenge han så på meg, kunne jeg famle meg fram." s. 105
Trodd at bare jeg prøvde nok, så ville jeg slippes inn. Inn i det store rommet. Og at der inne, der var det mulig å være. Der gikk det an å finnes, der var det noe som holdt." s. 171
October 16, 2025
Ørstavik har veldig skarp prosa. Omtrent de første 40 sidene hadde hun meg trollbundet. Det er rart med det, men det er som om boka falt sammen og ble et mudder av handling og karakterer som fløt sammen i en suppe. Derfor ble lesningen både kjedelig og forvirrende. Dessuten følte jeg etter hvert at det ikke ledet til noe. Det er synd for det er mange interresante tematikker hun tar opp - men jeg følte vel strengt tatt at hun ikke gjorde noe med dem… må også innrømme at jeg ble utrolig utålmodig og hadde ikke godvilja med i lesningen fra og med omtrent side 60-100.
August 31, 2022
Liv is a German pastor who moves to northern Norway to lead a congregation. Her struggles include dealing with the remnants of a couple of suicides, sharing an apartment with a mother and her teen daughter, who seems to be an outsider in the small community. Then, there is a batch of conservatives at a religious retreat who have severe allergies to a female pastor in their midst. The main theme of the novel seems to be centered on belonging. Liv sounds like she's completely unfocused and searching for something coherent.
July 31, 2023
Disjointed and random but this excellent novel is an experience. The writing and narrative are superb as the plot unfolds across multiple timelines and places. The author has really done a good job with capturing some of the struggles of ministry and pastoral care. The main character is well rounded and with faults that drive the plot. I am not sure if everyone would like this book, but it definitely spoke to me. Well worth the read and time
October 22, 2024
Astounding work, one of the best books I have read in a long time. Searing honesty, such tenderness, rich in observation of human nature and the transience of it all - this one will stay with me for a long time.
March 4, 2024
Really liked the idea of this book rather than the execution. Lots of staring out into real and metaphorical dark fjords.
January 27, 2024
This was kind of upsetting! And a classic case of looking back afterward at the reviews that prompted me to read this, and realizing that they do in fact warn of a very depressing story in ways that I should have picked up on if I were paying proper attention, haha. Liked imagining the setting, some strong imagery, but not sure about the translation overall
March 1, 2022
Honestly I think 2 stars is generous. I see where the author was trying to go with this book and writing a story about a sad pastor who has lost her way as tragedies unfold around her, but what we get is a disjumbled narrative of a lonely sad individual who self sabotages every relationship around her. The flow of the book is interrupted to so many times to flashback to other moments or sensations that Liv remembers, but the readers are left totally clueless as to what's going on. The author has good prose and writing style, but that wasn't enough for me to really hook into the book. The main character herself, Liv, is very distant from the reader and disconnected with everyone. She seems to have no hobbies or interests or anything that she likes, so she makes for a boring main character to read from the perspective of. I was however invested in what was going to happen to Maja, my personal favorite character in the story, but alas that part is left out.
December 23, 2022
“What was it that I wanted that was too much for me? This abyss, this void in me that couldn’t be filled. What was it? What was I doing here? What would I have done somewhere else? Why wasn’t there anything to hold onto me?"
Swedish author, Hanne Ørstavik, paints an uncomfortably real picture of a pastor in this wandering slice of ecclesiastical life. Liv has self-conscious thoughts while delivering sermons ("I’d gone on far too long and I’d known it. These people, kneeling, as if to say 'we tolerate you' despite everything"), she tries to help families racked by grief while she drowns under her own, and she practically lives in fantasy, the majority of which is about a non-pastoral life. Since the church is so prone to putting pastors upon pedestals (even when we instinctively know they can't live up to such a status), most would shudder at the internal world of Liv. And yet, Liv's internal world is just as human as the next. Having spent some years in pastoral work, I can resonate with this portrayal of an average, broken, and well-intentioned leader.
All of that is a great concept, but unfortunately this book meanders down a million stream-of-consciousness, sub-plots. This isn't Woolf's masterful stream-of-consciousness which is always thematically resonant and cohesive as a whole. No, this is often just aimless internal dialogue for the sake of pretty prose. The themes are present and the prose is, in fact, pretty, but neither of those things can save this book from its lack of plot.
Swedish author, Hanne Ørstavik, paints an uncomfortably real picture of a pastor in this wandering slice of ecclesiastical life. Liv has self-conscious thoughts while delivering sermons ("I’d gone on far too long and I’d known it. These people, kneeling, as if to say 'we tolerate you' despite everything"), she tries to help families racked by grief while she drowns under her own, and she practically lives in fantasy, the majority of which is about a non-pastoral life. Since the church is so prone to putting pastors upon pedestals (even when we instinctively know they can't live up to such a status), most would shudder at the internal world of Liv. And yet, Liv's internal world is just as human as the next. Having spent some years in pastoral work, I can resonate with this portrayal of an average, broken, and well-intentioned leader.
All of that is a great concept, but unfortunately this book meanders down a million stream-of-consciousness, sub-plots. This isn't Woolf's masterful stream-of-consciousness which is always thematically resonant and cohesive as a whole. No, this is often just aimless internal dialogue for the sake of pretty prose. The themes are present and the prose is, in fact, pretty, but neither of those things can save this book from its lack of plot.
June 17, 2021
A brooding, introspective glimpse into the internal workings of a grieving theologian and pastor, the story focuses on Liv's difficulties with intimacy and her struggle to connect with others through language. Liv's PhD topic, which examined a historic struggle between the Sami people and the church, is woven into the text and highlights the dynamics of power present within language.
The novel moves slowly, unfolding alongside Liv's own development that comes of it. I found she was a difficult character to understand at times, but she becomes easier to empathise with as the story moves forward. I found that this was one that I needed to return to at my own pace, rather than being one that pulled me back in again. Despite this, I enjoyed the examination of language and how this can be employed to include, exclude, harm and help others - and the challenge of wielding this tool wisely while also establishing authentic and honest relationships. This aspect was uniquely relatable and cause for some reflection that lasted beyond the completion of the novel.
The novel moves slowly, unfolding alongside Liv's own development that comes of it. I found she was a difficult character to understand at times, but she becomes easier to empathise with as the story moves forward. I found that this was one that I needed to return to at my own pace, rather than being one that pulled me back in again. Despite this, I enjoyed the examination of language and how this can be employed to include, exclude, harm and help others - and the challenge of wielding this tool wisely while also establishing authentic and honest relationships. This aspect was uniquely relatable and cause for some reflection that lasted beyond the completion of the novel.
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