A rejected adoption application leads a woman into madness and stalking. Brit Bildøen’s new novel is based on the author’s experiences, but also takes a purely imaginary turn.
In Tre vegar til havet (engl. Three Roads to the Sea) we meet a woman living an isolated life in a seaside village, working with the marking of birds and avoiding thinking about her past.
The novel’s three parts, ‘The Exile’, ‘The Body’ and ‘The State’, together make up a story of desperation, revenge and self-imposed exile. The woman we get to know over the course of the novel has been refused approval to adopt a child from China – a child she has been waiting for four years. This tips the woman into madness, and she subsequently starts to stalk her case worker.
Celebrated authors
Brit Bildøen was born in 1962. While working as a librarian in the industrial area of Husnes in Western Norway she was accepted by the Skrivekunstakademiet (Academy of Creative Writing) in Bergen, where she studied under established and celebrated authors Jon Fosse and Ragnar Hovland. Eight of the ten students in Bildøen’s class at the academy became published authors, Bildøen among them. Her debut poetry collection, Bilde av menn (Images of Men), was published in 1991, and she has since published a range of works in various genres.
Bildøen’s works have also been translated into several languages, and she has received a number of literary awards for her poetry. Her latest novel differs somewhat from her previous works, and brings the recently coined term ‘reality fiction/autofiction’ to mind. Is this her contribution to the genre?
‘I don’t really like the term “reality fiction/autofiction”’, says Bildøen. ‘But authors often like to use their own experiences as a starting point – and that’s what I’ve done here.’
How much of yourself is there in this new novel?
‘A little. The adoption story is my own – I’ve been through exactly the same thing as the protagonist. When my husband and I applied for approval to adopt a child from China, we were below the age limit set by the Norwegian authorities. But by the time our turn actually came around, we were – in the eyes of the authorities, at least – too old. And so our approval wasn’t renewed. The novel contains authentic correspondence and documents from that process. But the difference between myself and the woman in the novel is that she starts to follow her case worker – she becomes a stalker‘.
Fighting bureaucracy
Bildøen grew up in the island community of Aukra, just outside Molde in north-west Norway.
How much has her background influenced her work?
‘A lot, I’m sure. Every other book I write seems to be set in the countryside, while the others are set in cities. My last novel, Sju dagar i august (engl. Seven Days in August), was set in Oslo. My latest is mostly set in a tiny village in south-west Norway’, says Bildøen.
Tre vegar til havet, Brit Bildøen’s latest novel, explores three different fates that are gradually revealed as relating to the same woman – a woman living in isolation to avoid thinking about her past. As the novel progresses, the reader also gradually comes to understand why the woman has chosen to isolate herself in this way.
‘After we were refused I thought I’d use our experience of the adoption process in a book, but for a long time it was too painful. But with time, I’ve been able to give those experiences another shape. It was liberating to discover that I could use our adoption story as a foundation that I could build upon imaginatively’, says the author.
Celebrated and translated
In 2014, Brit Bildøen received the prestigious P2 Listeners’ Novel Prize for her previous novel, Sju dagar i august – a novel partly about the grieving process following the tragic terrorist attack that took place in Norway in 2011.
‘In that novel, all the characters are completely fictional,’ says Bildøen. Foreign rights to Sju dagar i august have been sold to several countries. The novel was also adapted for theatre by the author, and performed at Det Norske Teatret in Oslo.
In the past year, Bildøen has also written the lyrics to the hugely successful musical Kristin Lavransdatter, based on the trilogy of the same name by Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset.
‘Those who work with musicals say that lyrics are often neglected, and when the dramatist asked me whether I wanted to write them, I jumped at the chance. It was just great fun’, says Bildøen. Sju dagar i august has already been translated into Chinese and English, and Bildøen’s 2011 novel Adam Hiorhts veg (engl. Adam Hiort’s Journey) has been translated into German. Bildøen also works as a translator, and is currently translating Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas into Norwegian Nynorsk.
When the launch of Tre veger til havet is over, Bildøen wants nothing more than to sit down and read for pleasure – and of course to eventually start work on something new. Preferably in her apartment in Oslo, or in her study in a fishing village by a fjord in the north-west.
For more information
Stilton Agency: Brit Bildøen and Tre vergar til havet
Books from Norway: Tre veger til havet