“There were a lot of problems during the time I wrote about in 'Echoes of the City', but I stand by the fact that we’ve also lost a great deal of what we had then,” says Lars Saabye Christensen.
When Lars Saabye Christensen was cleaning up his mother’s home after her passing, he came across some old Red Cross records. These ultimately laid the foundation for the first volume in the popular author’s trilogy Echoes of the City.
“The records from the meetings at the Fagerborg branch of the Red Cross absolutely fascinated me. They were dry and withered, and testified to the local goodness from a universal perspective. I wanted to delve into the life that existed in between these meetings,” explains Lars Saabye Christensen.
When we meet him, he’s just getting back from a weeklong vacation in the United States, and upon returning home has enjoyed a number of very positive Norwegian reviews.
“I really appreciate it! It would be a bit strange if you didn’t care about what others thought after having invested so much time and energy in a book. Actually, I think reviews mean even more to me now than when I was younger. Even after forty years of practice, it doesn’t get any easier to write a new novel. You’re always in danger of repeating yourself, so it’s important to look out for that. To be fair, you don’t have to come up with all that much that’s new every time but at least a little bit has to be.
Otherwise, there’s not much point in writing a new book,” asserts the 63- year old author.
The old stomping grounds
Nonetheless, in the first volume of Echoes of the City, he takes us back to the old stomping grounds we’ve seen before – the Kristoffersen family home at Kirkeveien 127 in Oslo. It’s the same apartment where he let Barnum in The Half Brother stay years ago, and it’s an apartment he knows from his own childhood; his mother grew up there and his grandparents lived there when he was a boy.
“I’m not so keen on doing a lot of research, so I made it a bit easier on myself by choosing this particular apartment in this particular area. It’s a place with a language I know and enjoy, and it’s important that the readers feel they can trust the author,” comments Saabye Christensen.
He admits with a smile that, at the same time, he obviously had to do some research for this book as well – including studying old postcards.
“But you know, that’s a fun task for me! I save those kinds of things, and it’s the only hobby I have. The postcards have given me so many photos and details from the city as it once was.”
Is the past nostalgic?
It is his precise ability to color moods and languages and to capture an era’s distinctive character that many bring up as Lars Saabye Christensen’s greatest strength. His texts are characterized by both melancholy and darkness – and a clear touch of the nostalgic, according to many. However, he’s not particularly thrilled with being labeled with this last trait.
“People are quick to call you nostalgic just because you write about recent history. The fact that I write about the post-war years doesn’t necessarily mean I’m longing for that time,” states Saabye Christensen, who has nevertheless become the focus of an “everything-was-better-before” debate.
“There were a lot of problems during the time I wrote about in Echoes of the City, but I stand by the fact that we’ve also lost a great deal of what we had then. While rights for minorities and economic conditions have gotten much better, I’m afraid that the confidence society needs as a cornerstone is on the verge of cracking. Just look at how terror threats change our surroundings physically. It’s hard to imagine that all the concrete blocks on pedestrian streets and everything else that’s put up to prevent terrorist attacks will someday be removed. They’ve come to stay, and I understand they have to. But it’s sad,” says Saabye Christensen.
He also questions the alleged tolerance levels of today, believing that they may only extend to a certain point.
“We boast about today’s tolerance – while at the same time we have more bullying and more nervous wrecks than ever before. There’s something amiss here.”
Father, mother and son
The plot in Echoes of the City spans the period from 1947–1951, and centers around the life of the Kristoffersen family. As Jesper is starting school and gets a little sister, his father – advertising man Ewald – is working on an exhibition for Oslo’s 900th anniversary and his mother Maj staying at home and taking on the job of treasurer for the local branch of the Red Cross. Like many of Saabye Christensen’s young male characters, Jesper is a bit special – some might say autistic, but the author is satisfied with calling him “sensitive”.
“He’s easily affected by the world around him, which is both a strength and a weakness. Jesper is a boy after my own heart,” says Saabye Christensen, who portrays what he describes as a “fairly common father-son relationship” in the book.
“The average father in those days was relatively distant. Not so much because of a lack of love, but because of the way family roles were at that time,” the author emphasizes. In Echoes of the City, Jesper relates more to female characters – to those who protect children.
A love letter
Some critics have described Echoes of the City as a love letter to women of the postwar era?
“Yes, that’s one way of looking at the book. After all, it has a strong women’s perspective, which in the past has often been overshadowed by other stories. A woman’s role in that time was to be the faithful one who looks after the house, home and children,” replies Saabye Christensen, who starts the book in the same year as the Red Cross protocols that inspired the trilogy. He believes these records have served as both a “doorway” and a “restriction” to the material.
“Some names have been changed, but otherwise, the records are quite faithful – just as I found them. Beyond that the book is pure fiction,” says the Oslo man, who in a previous interview stated that he couldn’t imagine writing anything hurtful about the postman or his immediate family.
“I draw my ethical boundaries where I feel it’s appropriate. Writing fiction is my profession, and I should be able to express what I want to without hurting others,” he says. He does not, however, wish to communicate a strong opinion about literary realism, characterizing the debate as “problematic and rather crude”.
“All writers lean towards a reality, and all fiction is rooted in this reality. It doesn’t help to operate with any kind of “Be careful”-poster for fiction, but what worries me is that the reality- debate may have changed people’s view of the novel. It has been limited, restricted and privatized by everyone looking for autobiographical features in what’s being written – and that’s unfortunate for literature.”
Cancer diagnosis
Speaking of reality, without revealing too much of the plot, we can just as well reveal that the father of the house, Ewald, gets a cancer diagnosis early in the first book. Saabye Christensen also received the same diagnosis, and has undergone chemotherapy treatment himself.
“I wrote the cancer-chapter before I got my own diagnosis, though, so it’s interesting that Ewald’s reaction was not all that dissimilar to my own. That something so dramatic can also seem so liberating – it’s a tremendous paradox,” says Lars Saabye Christensen, who doesn’t want to dwell much on his illness except for mentioning “it seems like everything will be okay”.
“But it does have an effect on the aspect of time. Anyone who’s over 60 knows that the horizon is moving ever closer, while time is just moving faster and faster. With a diagnosis as well, this becomes even clearer, and you try to choose things even more rationally, without it necessarily always being easy.”
People who have read a lot of Saabye Christensen have probably also noticed that, throughout his entire authorship, he has been more occupied with time than the average writer, which is in part indicated by his use of a variety of different metaphors to describe the passage of time.
“Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been preoccupied by time. I can even put a date on when the concept of time really hit me. On my way to school each day, on Drammensveien, I walked past a watchmaker with several watches on display in the window. One day, I realized that each one was showing a different time. It made me uneasy that – even at the watchmaker – there were clocks showing the wrong time. And that’s been hanging over me ever since, for better or worse,” says Saabye Christensen.
Moreover, time is a strange factor for a writer, he points out.
“You spend so much time on a novel that when you write the last period you’re a different person to the one who wrote the first sentence.”
See the book
The last period is, for that matter, much more demanding than the first sentence, something the author emphasizes by saying that “the last page has the weight of everything that lies ahead balancing upon it”.
“Besides, you always find yourself in a completely different place at the starting point than at the finish. In the first phase of the book, I often spend a lot of time working out the characters. I give them the background they need and put them in the environment they belong in. Everything has to be in place before I can build the rest of the universe brick by brick, but eventually you get to the point that the plot is almost self-propelled,” explains Saabye Christensen, who reveals that whenever he’s writing a book, he tries to close his eyes and “see the book”.
“The images you see are the ideals you never quite meet, but which you can at least try to approach.”
Of all the books he’s published, he highlights Beatles as the most fun to write.
“There were no expectations of any kind, no pressure – neither from myself nor from anybody else. The whole writing process therefore felt like a liberating experience. It was just fun the whole way.”
Reunion with Kim
When he was finally able to “see” Echoes of the City, he also realized that it would require space. However, after the 800 pages long Magnet came out just two years ago, he didn’t want to write yet another brick of a book, and therefore decided on a trilogy.
“I realized that the material could easily be divided into three, and that that would give me more wiggle room than if everything had to be one volume,” the author says.
At the same time, he confirms that it’s possible to only read volume 1 and still get a lot out of it, but that it doesn’t work the other way, that is, to read volumes 2 or 3 without having read the previous ones. Those who read all three will travel through postwar Norway all the way into the mid-1970s.
“We follow the characters from Echoes of the City for about three decades. Everyone gets their stories and fates told, with Jesper and his hearing-impaired friend Jostein as the main characters in Volume 2,” Saabye Christensen reveals, and follows up by telling us that an old acquaintance pops up in the last volume: Kim Karlsen from Beatles.
“Jesper and Jostein’s paths will cross Kim’s. He only has a peripheral role, but we still learn a lot more about what happened to him after Beatles,” says the author.
“In the past, I’ve almost always had new plans when a project was completed. But now, it’s a bit like, ‘what in the world am I supposed to do now?’” laughs Lars Saabye Christensen, and almost answers himself: He wants to write more for theater, while at the same time a poetry and music project rolls along at home in Norway.
From the Norwegian by Olivia Lasky.