The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen
Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2017, Roy Jacobsen’s The Unseen is a literary tonic: refreshing, subtle, uncomplicated, earthy, and steeped in time and weather.
I loved the fishing and farming vocabulary, and the creaking, guttural treatment of dialect.
“‘Whatever is washed ashore on an island belongs to the finder, and the islanders find a lot.’”
It’s the portrait of Barrøy, a small Norwegian island and the family who live there. At the start, Ingrid Barrøy is a toddler with clean nails and dimpled hands, though within pages she’s gutting fish and carding eider duck down.
Years pass. Storms break. People age. Women are invited to sit at the table.
Over time Ingrid becomes as rooted and shaped by the island as a windswept tree on a cliff.
Meanwhile the Barrøy family work to the bone. If a storm destroys their labours, they set to sea the next calm day to salvage what they can. Theirs is a life of repairs.
“You are not allowed to laugh in the classroom, for three reasons, the teacher counts on his long, thin fingers: it is disruptive, it is infectious and it looks stupid.”
I loved the fishing and farming vocabulary, and the creaking, guttural treatment of dialect. The prose is slow-burning; the narrator omniscient and factual. But as much as it is about island survival, The Unseen is also a novel about influence: between husband and wife, parents and child, buyers and sellers, islanders and mainlanders, and the distant reach of global politics.
Rich, unusual, and moving.
Ingrid’s saga continues in White Shadow (2020) and Eyes of the Rigel (2020). I recently bought White Shadow and am waiting for the nights to draw dark.
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