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Toxic

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
Englisch
Orenda Bookserschienen am23.05.2024
Shamed schoolteacher, Mathilde, moves to a dairy farm in the Norwegian countryside for an 'easier life', but she's soon up to her old tricks ... upending and unsettling the lives of two reclusive farmers. Exquisitely written, razor-sharp and simmering with an unexpected tension, Toxic marks the return of one of Norway's finest writers... `Flatland has the gift that I most often covet in the work of other writers: the ability to make everyday events compelling ... how the quietest existence can brim with urgency and drama´ Ann Morgan `Helga Flatland writes with elegance and subtle humour´ Daily Express `The author has been dubbed the Norwegian Anne Tyler and for good reason´ Good Housekeeping -------------- When Mathilde is forced to leave her teaching job in Oslo after her relationship with eighteen-year-old Jacob is exposed, she flees to the countryside for a more authentic life. Her new home is a quiet cottage on the outskirts of a dairy farm run by Andres and Johs, whose hobbies include playing the fiddle and telling folktales - many of them about female rebellion and disobedience, and seeking justice, whatever it takes. But beneath the apparently friendly and peaceful pastoral surface of life on the farm, something darker and more sinister starts to vibrate and, with Mathilde's arrival, cracks start appearing ... everywhere. ------------ Praise for Helga Flatland `The most beautiful, elegant writing I've read in a long time´ Joanna Cannon `Helga Flatland writes with such astuteness about families´ Prima `I absolutely loved its quiet, insightful generosity´ Claire King `So perceptive and clever´ Rónán Hession `Thoughtful and reflective´ Observer `A beautifully written, bittersweet, moving and poignant ... a wise novel of great insight´ NB Magazine `Poignant and beautifully written ... The prose and style, with the dialogue enveloped in the narrative, is intimate, evocative and moving´ Kristin Gleeson `I love the sophistication, directness and tenderness of this book´ Claire Dyer `The most satisfying book that I've read in a long time ... masterful´ Sara Taylor `A moving and exquisite read´ Shelan Rodger

Helga Flatland is already one of Norway's most awarded and widely read authors. Born in Telemark, Norway, in 1984, she made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Stay If You Can, Leave If You Must, for which she was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas' First Book Prize. She has written four novels and a children's book and has won several other literary awards. Her fifth novel, A Modern Family (her first English translation), was published to wide acclaim in Norway in August 2017, and was a number-one bestseller. The rights have subsequently been sold across Europe and the novel has sold more than 100,000 copies. One Last Time was published in 2020 and is currently topping bestseller lists in Norwaymehr
Verfügbare Formate
TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR17,00
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
EUR9,59

Produkt

KlappentextShamed schoolteacher, Mathilde, moves to a dairy farm in the Norwegian countryside for an 'easier life', but she's soon up to her old tricks ... upending and unsettling the lives of two reclusive farmers. Exquisitely written, razor-sharp and simmering with an unexpected tension, Toxic marks the return of one of Norway's finest writers... `Flatland has the gift that I most often covet in the work of other writers: the ability to make everyday events compelling ... how the quietest existence can brim with urgency and drama´ Ann Morgan `Helga Flatland writes with elegance and subtle humour´ Daily Express `The author has been dubbed the Norwegian Anne Tyler and for good reason´ Good Housekeeping -------------- When Mathilde is forced to leave her teaching job in Oslo after her relationship with eighteen-year-old Jacob is exposed, she flees to the countryside for a more authentic life. Her new home is a quiet cottage on the outskirts of a dairy farm run by Andres and Johs, whose hobbies include playing the fiddle and telling folktales - many of them about female rebellion and disobedience, and seeking justice, whatever it takes. But beneath the apparently friendly and peaceful pastoral surface of life on the farm, something darker and more sinister starts to vibrate and, with Mathilde's arrival, cracks start appearing ... everywhere. ------------ Praise for Helga Flatland `The most beautiful, elegant writing I've read in a long time´ Joanna Cannon `Helga Flatland writes with such astuteness about families´ Prima `I absolutely loved its quiet, insightful generosity´ Claire King `So perceptive and clever´ Rónán Hession `Thoughtful and reflective´ Observer `A beautifully written, bittersweet, moving and poignant ... a wise novel of great insight´ NB Magazine `Poignant and beautifully written ... The prose and style, with the dialogue enveloped in the narrative, is intimate, evocative and moving´ Kristin Gleeson `I love the sophistication, directness and tenderness of this book´ Claire Dyer `The most satisfying book that I've read in a long time ... masterful´ Sara Taylor `A moving and exquisite read´ Shelan Rodger

Helga Flatland is already one of Norway's most awarded and widely read authors. Born in Telemark, Norway, in 1984, she made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Stay If You Can, Leave If You Must, for which she was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas' First Book Prize. She has written four novels and a children's book and has won several other literary awards. Her fifth novel, A Modern Family (her first English translation), was published to wide acclaim in Norway in August 2017, and was a number-one bestseller. The rights have subsequently been sold across Europe and the novel has sold more than 100,000 copies. One Last Time was published in 2020 and is currently topping bestseller lists in Norway
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781916788145
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum23.05.2024
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse1039 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.15207332
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe




 


The rhythm of four hundred feet stamping in unison sends little tremors through the building, and me. I take a large swig of beer and stare down at the fiddle still resting in its case. Look how nicely Vesla is sleeping,´ Johannes would often say when opening the fiddle case. As a child I felt slightly uncomfortable about the way he referred to his fiddle, but as an adult I realised that it was because he was always drunk when he was about to play, and that he talked about her - and to her - as if she was a child, but at the same time something he desired.

All I inherited from Johannes was my name and that fiddle. He tried getting my mum to change both these things just before he died. Can´t you change his name?´ he cried desperately time and again in the final months of his life. He´s twenty-five, Dad, it´s a bit late for that now,´ laughed Mum while looking at me. What would you have me call him?´ she asked when he repeated the question. Whatever you want,´ cried Johannes, anything, but he ain´t getting my name.´

Are you ready, Johs?´ says a voice behind me.

I bend down, pick up the fiddle, and follow the woman whose name I can´t remember out of the practice room and to the back of the stage. It smells of burnt dust and sweat, and I hear my name being announced through the stage curtain: And the next person on stage is not just anybody, he is the grandchild of - and, yes, playing the very same fiddle as ...´ I straighten my shoulders, smile, and walk out into the spotlight in the middle of the stage then stand there, totally calm, until the applause subsides - long enough to hear the audience twisting impatiently in their seats, just as Johannes always did in order to create a sense of anticipation.

Kari Midtigard,´ I finally say into the microphone, before smiling at the audience, then pausing once again, fully aware that my playing in no way lives up to the confidence that my pauses and wry smile might suggest. Do you know Kari Midtigard from Tinn, she never lets any boys in, Kari is pretty and Kari is kind, and now this fair sweetheart is mine.´

They have to see the story you´re playing,´ Johannes often said, they have to hear the connection between the notes and the story, which should lift each other up. Not like that,´ he would say, you´re telling it like you´re going to the shop, it´s so flat, your words should dance, come on, one more time, stand up, tell us, and play as though you mean it.´

I bring the fiddle to my chest, and play the song about Kari Midtigard from Tinn.

 

I stopped checking the results of the fiddle competitions I enter long ago, knowing that my name will be way down the lists, but that´s fine, it´s not why I play, I´ll tell anyone who might wonder - on this particular evening it´s Ingrid.

So why do you play,´ she asks while trying to untie the waistcoat of my costume.

I´m too drunk to help her, and my fingers are too numb, as is the rest of my body.

Because it´s in my blood,´ I say, do you know who my grandfather was?´

I´m not ashamed of using Johannes´s name like that, and besides, it´s perhaps one of the few things about me he would have approved of. Be careful you don´t end up in bed with one of our cousins,´ Andres once said, it´s more than likely Johannes had children with women other than Grandma, the way he carried on.´ It helps that you´re good-looking,´ Johannes once said to me, it really does, when you´re as talentless as you are.´

Of course,´ says Ingrid abandoning the unlacing, instead moving her hands down to the belt and finding my knife. Aww, it´s so little and cute,´ she says removing it from its sheath.

I think it´s a pretty normal size,´ I say.

Glad to hear it,´ she says, smiling.

The next morning I wake up alone in my hotel bed. My back aches. I have to do something about it before the spring ploughing - those endless hours in the tractor seat. I find my phone, and see the giant headlines about new infections. Andres is no doubt terrified right now, he´s been worrying about coronavirus since first reading about it in December. He´s inherited Johannes´s anxiety - and all the little movements in the tiny muscles around his mouth that come with it, as well as the sceptical look and restless joints that make him look even more like Johannes than he already does. More than I do. You´re like a big, secure rock, you are,´ my mum once said, calm and silent, you always have been, and you should be happy about that.´ But Johannes always said the music lies in our nerves, in which case our nerves should have been distributed a bit more fairly, because Andres is demonstratively uninterested in music - in all music, but particularly folk music, despite the fact that he has almost perfect pitch. His skin prickles if anything´s sharp or flat, Play the right note, damn it!´ he would shout through the wall between our rooms when I practised the fiddle as a child. I can hear the difference between a bum note and the right note, but not to the same degree as Andres, for him it´s physical, it´s in his nerves.

I send him a message saying that I´ll be home in time to do the milking. Two minutes later he replies asking if I can stop at the wholesaler on the way and pick up some garden lime. I take a shower, comforting myself with the fact that he´s still capable of looking away, for a moment at least, from all the symptom reports that accompany the headlines.

 

The farm that Andres and I run has been in Mum´s family since the 1600s. Mum has two older brothers, but when she was still a child Johannes decided that Mum would eventually inherit the farm, and no one objected of course. He was a pioneering feminist, she occasionally says. No one objects to her saying that either, but it´s at best a favourable rewriting of the dictatorial and arbitrary way Johannes governed his surroundings. He never ran the farm himself, that was done by his brother, who lived alone in the cottage while Johannes and Grandma and their three children lived in the farmhouse. That´s what he wants,´ said Johannes, that´s how he wants it.´ I´ve never understood how the farm´s running and its income was shared back then. I was four years old in 1987 when Johannes´s brother died suddenly and my mum officially took over. Johannes and Grandma moved into the cottage, and I moved the three kilometres from my father´s childhood home to that of my mum. In the heart of Telemark,´ Johannes said, who, despite the fact that he didn´t know one end of a mower, or a cow for that matter, from the other, used the farm for all it was worth when it came to how he presented himself. He would tell stories, both on and off stage, about his family, about the farm, the people and animals, placing himself at its centre, a big farmer among other big farmers. He told so many tales about the farm and my ancestors that it´s impossible now to know what really happened - whether he rewrote and elaborated on the stories he´d heard, or if what he said was true. One of his favourite stories was how my ancestor was directly responsible for why Telemark remained terra incognito for so long. He beat the cartographer to death,´ said Johannes, so no one dared go near the county for years.´ It was a story he told regularly, and proudly, as if it said something honourable about the family - and he carried on telling it, undeterred, even after Andres´s girlfriend, a historian, corrected him during a Christmas dinner that everyone still remembers but nobody mentions.

The farm includes a cottage, a farmhouse, an old sheep shed that Andres is converting for meat production, and a new high-tech milking shed. In addition, it comes with four hundred acres of fields and forest. Andres, who is two years older than me, and has the right of inheritance, wavered and worried in typical style about what he should study and what career he should choose before deciding in his late twenties that his safest bet, after all that, was to come home and take over the farm, in line with what Johannes had already decided years earlier. I have been to agricultural college, I´ve worked as a stand-in farm manager and have been clearly focussed on eventually running a farm, be it this one or another, for as long as I can remember. It´s what I´m good at, it´s what I can do. Johannes knew it, my mum knows it. And Andres - whose refusal to make decisions means he cannot run a company that, due to the weather and wind and seasons, requires you to make decisions every day - definitely knows it. I can´t do it without you,´ he said before making his mind up, you know that,´ and, about the farmhouse: I don´t want it ... really, I´d rather live in the cottage, it´s what...

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Autor

Helga Flatland is already one of Norway's most awarded and widely read authors. Born in Telemark, Norway, in 1984, she made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Stay If You Can, Leave If You Must, for which she was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas' First Book Prize. She has written four novels and a children's book and has won several other literary awards. Her fifth novel, A Modern Family (her first English translation), was published to wide acclaim in Norway in August 2017, and was a number-one bestseller. The rights have subsequently been sold across Europe and the novel has sold more than 100,000 copies. One Last Time was published in 2020 and is currently topping bestseller lists in Norway