レビュー要約

• 余白の多い自由詩の形式が、喪失、沈黙、断絶を物語の構造として感じさせる。神話的な響きを持ちながら現代的で読みやすく、サーミの歴史を取り戻す試みとして評価されている。

レビュー

• 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.

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