Echoes of the City

I've previously read one Lars Saabye Christensen novel, The Model, which I quite enjoyed, but not as much as this author's reputation made me feel I should. So I was eager to give this new Don Bartlett translation of Christensen's Echoes Of The City a try. This novel is already being called his masterpiece and I can understand why it is garnering such acclaim, although I wasn't so moved by it myself. The gently meandering story is set in Oslo in the years following the Second World War as the city's people attempt to overcome the immediate past and look to the future. It will soon be Oslo's 900th anniversary which must be celebrated although ideas differ about exactly what or who should be the central focus. I felt that Echoes Of The City had a strong sense of poignant melancholy to it. Almost a huzun nostalgia (if you've read Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul). Much of the atmosphere comes from small actions such as a woman trying on a Dior New Look dress that she will never be able to afford or a child unwittingly selling Red Cross stamps for the wrong price. Interspersing the chapters with reports from local Red Cross meetings adds to the sense of people, especially women, being desperate to improve their lives and their society, but without the means to do so on enough of a scale to effect real change.

I think I would be more enthusiastic about Echoes Of The City if it hadn't been quite such a long book. The pace is very slow throughout. It is beautifully written though so I could appreciate individual scenes and loved Christensen's clarity of vision in portraying his characters. However, at half way through the novel I was already finding I was forcing myself to pick it up again to read just a couple more chapters. For a voracious reader such as m, this is practically unheard of! I didn't want to abandon the novel because, as I have said, it has good points and I wanted to find out what happened in the end. I just wish the end could have come a hundred or so pages sooner.