Power

Original, fascinating and with an utterly assured sense of style. [...] Dahl’s strength is that she is very much able to be independent in terms of the material in which she is immersed. She uses the events of war and their aftermath more as a kind of raw material or backdrop, then turns it up a notch, thus succeeding in creating a free-standing and especially clear-cut work of fiction. [...] Dahl has a deft touch throughout and is able to evoke both the war situations and retrospective reflections on them in an exceptionally convincing way. [...] By the end, my copy was almost ruined by my underlining in ballpoint pen of turns of phrase and wordings deserving of praise, for which there is, unfortunately, no room to mention here. In conclusion, I instead offer a rare note of positivity: This is how you do it! You are a role model for any writer in this genre, Hanna Dahl!

By cultivating uncertainty as a linguistic and narrative technique, Hanna Dahl leads us into the fog of the past without shepherding us safely out to the other side. The result is an occasionally frustrating but always interesting deconstruction of individual recollection as history.

Hanna Dahl has chosen to show solidarity towards a lonely elderly man, an ardent opponent of hindsight, and the limited perspective he had in a submarine and a cave in 1945. This solidarity, in turn, invites the reader to orientate themselves more closely in the immediate area and to do some deeper reflecting of their own. The Germans’ Operation Schneehund was actually part of the almost unknown history of the war in Finnmark that I would like to read more about. […] As such, the novel’s uncompromising exploration of the art of constraint may also make readers wonder and search further on the fringes of what we are being told. That in itself is one bonus of good books.

Hanna Dahl writes with ingenuity and insight about the self-understanding of a national traitor.