National Book Award for Translated Literature
Aednan: An Epic
An epic poem of Sámi land, family, migration, and survival that expands from individual voice into collective memory.
Work Information
Memory of dispossession breathes through the long flow of the poem.
Tracing Sámi history, family memory, and the loss of land in long, sustained lines, the poem lets one voice expand into collective memory. It holds together dispossession, inheritance, and the endurance of a people.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Knopf
- Published
- 2024-01-09
- Pages
- 448 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.68 x 3.45 x 23.88 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780593535455
- ISBN-10
- 0593535456
- Price
- 5511 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Family Saga
SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • The winner of Sweden’s most prestigious literary award makes her American debut with an epic, multigenerational novel-in-verse about two Sámi families and their quest to stay together across a century of migration, violence, and colonial trauma. “Crystalline prose that reads like poetry and myth at once. There are intricate layers of beauty and meaning here in sparse clusters across a vast new landscape as I’ve never read before. The music of this book is old, and it is new, and it is old.”—Tommy Orange, bestselling author of There, There and Wandering Stars In Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the earth, and my mother. These are all crucial forces within the lives of the Indigenous families that animate this groundbreaking book: an astonishing verse novel that chronicles a hundred years of change: a book that will one day stand alongside Halldór Laxness’s Independent People and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter as an essential Scandinavian epic. The tale begins in the 1910s, as Ristin and her family migrate their herd of reindeer to summer grounds. Along the way, forced to separate due to the newly formed border between Sweden and Norway, Ristin loses one of her sons in the aftermath of an accident, a grief that will ripple across the rest of the book. In the wake of this tragedy, Ristin struggles to manage what’s left of her family and her community. In the 1970s, Lise, as part of a new generation of Sámi grappling with questions of identity and inheritance, reflects on her traumatic childhood, when she was forced to leave her parents and was placed in a Nomad School to be stripped of the language of her ancestors. Finally, in the 2010s we meet Lise’s daughter, Sandra, an embodiment of Indigenous resilience, an activist fighting for reparations in a highly publicized land rights trial, in a time when the Sámi language is all but lost. Weaving together the voices of half a dozen characters, from elders to young people unsure of their heritage, Axelsson has created a moving family saga around the consequences of colonial settlement. Ædnan is a powerful reminder of how durable language can be, even when it is borrowed, especially when it has to hold what no longer remains. “I was the weight / in the stone you brought / back from the coast // to place on / my grave,” one character says to another from beyond the grave. “And I flew above / the boat calling / to you all: // There will be rain / there will be rain.”
LINNEA AXELSSON is a Sámi-Swedish writer, born in the province of North Bothnia in Sweden. In 2018, she was awarded the August Prize for this book. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden. Translated by Saskia Vogel.
Reviews
-
Beatiful!
Beautiful writing and a somewhat new approach to telling an epic story in verse. Very enjoyable, highly recommended if you like poetry in a larger framework.
-
Must read
Great book. Innovative and important. Excellent translation.
-
Verse novel about the Sami (Lapps)
This is a recent novel by a Swedish writer about the Sami (formerly called the Lapps) who live in the northernmost stretches of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. The novel begins in the years before World War One when the Sami/Lapps were allowed to roam freely across this Arctic landscape. The story continues to the later imposition of national boundaries in this land, which forced these people to choose a particular country in which to live exclusively. They were also forced to largely give up their formerly nomadic existence. The book ends with the contemporary movement among Sami to re-learn their lost heritage. Unusually, this novel is written in verse. Although the book reads quickly, the verse form requires more thought to understand it. I read it twice through to make fuller sense of it.
-
Strange
Didn’t realise it was all done in unreadable prose
-
Tragic, Moving, and Hauntingly Beautiful
It has been some time since I was this enthralled by a book. I’ve read it in its entirety in a single afternoon and evening. It felt consumed by the tragic hard lives of the Sámi narrators of this epic poem. It was historical of course, but there was something mythological about this poem almost, something mythical which bleeds nearly dry throughout the decades of the poem, before being born anew with vibrancy and passion. There are several poignant images from this poem that will be woven like reindeer sinew into my thoughts—headlights illuminating a golden eagle rising from a reindeer carcass; a frightened lonely little girl crying in the dark during her first night at a Nomad School to reform and westernize her indigenous identity; woods and trails submerged in the icy waters of a continually-rising reservoir created by a dam; cold light across tundra peppered with migrating reindeer herds. It has been some time since I read a literary work this hauntingly beautiful. A brilliant achievement by Linnea Axelsson.