From Father

Name: From Father
Author: Lene Berg
ISBN: 9788205568761

By Lene Berg

Lene Berg was nine years old when her father, the writer and film director Arnljot Berg, was arrested in Paris accused of the murder of his third wife, Evelyne Zammit. This dramatic childhood memory is the starting point for From Father.

Description

In From Father, Lene Berg examines her father’s life and fate through a collage of her own memories and factual elements such as letters, psychiatric reports, unpublished and published texts, court documents, etc. From Father thus becomes an encounter between a living artist and a dead one, between a father and a daughter, between a woman and a man, and between contemporary Norway and the country in which Arnljot Berg lived and worked. The result is an astonishing and moving portrait of a sensitive and talented man – as well as a depiction of an unusual family.

Product information

Original titleFra far

Pages224

CategoryNovels

Praise

Shrewd novel about how we remember

Kjetil Korslund, Subjekt

Let me state right away that Lene Berg’s prose is wonderful. In addition to glimmering prose and clever composition, Fra far has everything one might wish for in a modern bohemian novel, in a novel of the arts, a crime novel with a twist of the humanities, one with all of Europe set as its stage.

Fartein Horgar, Adresseavisen

Her prose is always precise and poignant, sometimes hectic, sometimes harmonic, often humorous. It is obvious that Fra far is the work of an experienced artist, and Berg demonstrates that she is just as competent with the written word as she is with a film camera. This novel is reminiscent of Annie Ernaux’ works of memory, as well as other portraits of parents, such as Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972).

Carina Elisabeth Beddari, Morgenbladet

Lene Berg’s polyphonic text show us how “truth” is relative, and dependent upon point of view. The fact that the novel includes an unpublished and, by all accounts, autobiographical manuscript left behind by Arnljot Berg, allows father and daughter to meet in yet another medium in this novel.

Kåre Bulie, Klassekampen

The search for understanding might be futile, but luckily it results in literature that is both fruitful and fascinating.

Sigrid Elise Strømmen, Vårt Land

In From Father, Lene Berg has written a novel that transcends contradictions and that, following Arnljot Berg’s example, shows the enigmatic complexity of humanity, which contains both the capacity for complete destruction, but also love. Lene Berg never takes a moral stance on the events but deeply engages the reader and shows them a reality that doesn't add up and that cannot be fully understood. Berg’s prose is restrained and sensitive, and the linguistic collages are elegantly intertwined in a way that is reminiscent of images projected on a canvas, but where the coherence between the fragments is preserved.