February 6, 2023
Hesselager’s underwhelming debut centers on the incestuous relationship between a Viking brother and sister. Things start off with Folkví seemingly poisoning Gerd, the fiancée of her brother, Áslakr, though the scene is not fleshed out until the conclusion. In the interim, Folkví attempts to learn her mother’s trade as a midwife. While her brother is away on an expedition, she meets a suitor named Od, though that doesn’t stop her from being despondent when Áslakr returns and announces that he, too, has met someone. Folkví stumbles in her mother’s shadow and battles with her incestuous desire to hold onto her brother “at whatever cost” and to make him “want to possess me.” Áslakr, following a brief interlude with the Norns, who prophesy the impending end of the world, reflects on many of the same events covered in the novel’s first half while raising a child alone and anticipating the wedding of his daughter. The concluding revelation doesn’t compensate for the listless and florid narration that precedes it (Folkví, steeling herself for Áslakr’s departure, “will remain at home with her combative desires,” where “restlessness quivers in her body”). There’s a provocative premise, but not enough emerges from it.
March 1, 2023
In this debut novel that takes place in a mythical Viking age, a young man named �slakr brings his betrothed back to his rural village, surprising and devastating his sister Folkv�, whose love for him tips into the obsessive (and is ultimately incestuous). Told in two halves, the first from the perspective of Folkv� in the days leading up to her brother's wedding, and the second years later and from �slakr's perspective, the narrative darts back and forth through time within the two sections. This is also true of the prose style, which, in Aitkin's translation, places vocabulary seemingly intended to evoke ancient times alongside figures of speech and dialogue plucked right out of the twenty-first century. Similarly, Folkv� relays a simultaneous self-consciousness and self-love that might resonate with contemporary readers. But her world is not ours. Norse gods communicate with the characters through omens and weave their lifelines into a tapestry culminating in Ragnar�k's end-of-days, years-long blizzard. In this Viking tale, magic allows souls to switch bodies so that they may realize their desires.
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Starred review from March 1, 2023
A brother and sister's incestuous relationship becomes something even stranger in this novel set in Viking times. Folkv� and �slakr were born into a prominent family in an isolated coastal village sometime during the great Viking era of trade and exploration. Folkv� trains with her mother to become the area's v�lva, a kind of seer responsible for acting as a mediator between the world of men and that of the gods. Meanwhile, �slakr is thought to be one of "the most promising of all the children in the headman's yard," sure to become an important member of the expedition crews who travel far down the coast in search of new trading ports. But when the siblings' parents both die suddenly after a brief illness, Folkv� and �slakr are forced to navigate their adult roles before they are fully prepared, including their first sexual experimentations, which they undertake with each other. With �slakr gone for the winter months on his first expedition, Folkv� begins a relationship with the darkly magnetic Od, a stranger from outside the village, but when �slakr returns betrothed, all the formidable force of Folkv�'s concentration turns to her obsessive quest to keep her brother for herself. The book is narrated from both siblings' perspectives--Folkv�'s section set in the summer of her brother's betrothal and �slakr narrating from many years later as he looks back on the life that followed his marriage. While there is a marked difference between the ways they interpret the world, the constant thread of delight in the natural world's magic and awe in the face of its total domination of mortal lives weaves through every sentence of the sublimely described setting. This is so well achieved that the slender chapter bridging the period that passes between the siblings' stories--told from the perspective of Urd, one of the three Norn sisters who weave the threads of human lives from their land beyond mortal time--serves to underscore the reality of their mystic lives rather than excuse or explain the novel's forays into mythological fantasy. A magical book about love and death and the slender, enduring line that connects the two.
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