Your story “Elias” (translated, from the Norwegian, by Damion Searls) is the internal monologue of a man in a small village in Norway, a loner, with only one friend, from whom he is somewhat estranged. Elias is one of three narrators in your forthcoming novel “Vaim.” He plays a minor role in the actual plot of the book, so why was it important for him to be at the center of it?
To me, writing is an act of listening. I listen, of course, to what I have already written. And then to something unknown, somewhere out there. The writing is this listening, to write is to listen. I don’t plan anything. Writing happens.
Elias is an anxious person and an isolated one. How easy was it for you to inhabit his thoughts?
Not difficult at all. I feel sympathy for all my characters. And in a certain way I think every character in what I have written is also partly the person I am.
Elias is estranged from his friend, Jatgeir, because a woman came into Jatgeir’s life and moved in with him. Why is that situation so alienating for Elias?
Because the woman who moves in with Jatgeir doesn’t like Elias. Or at least she doesn’t like that Jatgeir keeps company with him. Why she is like that I don’t know. Often we don’t know why something is the way it is in life, and so also in fiction. My job is to paint a picture, to write a kind of story, not to explain it.
The story involves an encounter with a ghost, or at least with what seems to be a living person, though that person has actually already died some distance away. How do you conceive of ghosts? As actual spirits, released from their corporeal form, or visions conjured up by the eyes or minds of those who see them—or something else?
I feel the word “ghost” is wrong, it limits the experience that Elias has too much, or explains it too much. Your question is relevant for both Elias and me: What is actually happening? Is it real at all? Elias doesn’t know. I don’t know. As a writer, I am writing exactly what is there, out there, what it means I don’t know. If I knew it, I ought not to have written it. I don’t see any point in writing riddles. Life is enigmatic in itself.
Your seven-volume novel “Septology” was told in a single sentence. So is “Vaim.” No periods appear in “Elias,” though you do use paragraph breaks for dialogue. What is the benefit for you of writing in this way, without allowing the pause or sense of finality that a period would give the reader?
Writing “Septology” that way just felt right. It provided the novel with the right flow. I learned something from writing that way that I perhaps used when I wrote “Vaim.” It wasn’t that I set out to write without periods, but you have to follow the dictates of the writing in each and every way.
I never intend anything. I am sure that when I am writing with intention the writing will suffer. It isn’t about my intentions, or my plans, my ideas, but about the intention of something that’s already there and that I, so to speak, have to bring to the visible world.
“Vaim” is the first in a trilogy of novels set in the fictional village of Vaim. What makes this place such a productive one for your fiction? Is it based on your home village?
I wouldn’t call it a trilogy. They are three separate novels that are connected because they are set in the same imaginary place. It isn’t the village where I grew up, either, though it shares elements from various places in the western part of Norway, where everything I write is situated, to the degree that it exists somewhere outside the fiction at all.
But seen from another perspective everything I write is connected to the village where I grew up and lived my most formative years, even if I haven’t lived there since I was fifteen. The language, the landscape, the moods derive from that place. ♦
