Finished

     The book I've been reading deliberately is finished. It's the 4th book in Norwegian author, Roy Jacobsen's Ingrid  series. On my last trip to Norway, Berger who once lived on an island near the setting of these books, gave me The Unseen, the first of the series. In that book, Ingrid was a young girl. In the second White Shadows, she's mostly alone during the German occupation of Norway in WW II. The third book's, Eyes Of The Rigel, setting is immediately post war. 

   Just a Mother, the current volume, recounts life on the island of Barroy. Ingrid, the owner of the Island lives with several others including her aunt, children she's raised, her own daughter and various other family remembers. Jacobsen's spare prose intimates much that is left unsaid. The late Knut Hamsun, 1859-1952, was a Norwegian author who pioneered novelistic writing that emphasized a character's inner state (see his Hunger for example.) Jacobsen is much in that tradition and much of the appeal of his writing is insight into Ingrid's inner state.

    Likely much of the appeal of these books for me is the harmony between characters who think and act like the people with whom I grew up. A minor example is how guests are always offered coffee and when they are not it is noted. I've found all four books pure delight and, given the open ending of Mother, I'm hopeful another book will follow,

    Five of five starts for all four books.

Takk for alt,

Al