“Brilliant and vividly of the darkness”
“Pia Bergström drawn in Niels Fredrik Dahl’s ”Mother night””
“Författarjaget get a diary of his aged mother. A secret diary which she wrote during the nights when he was small. He does not want it, but receive in order not to hurt. It takes 13 years and the mother can die before he reads: “
“”I’m sitting in the dark. It goes glowing rivers in me. There is no solution. I will not escape.””
“In the ”nattboken”, he meets a completely different mother than the distanced he felt when she was alive. A woman who goes several years in psychoanalysis, but not capable of other than lying to his psychiatrist and desperately writes to him at night instead. But she can’t handle the truth. Ashamed and afraid of their inner chaos.”
“In the beginning appears to ”Mother night,” be a fine but conventional bourgeois barndomsskildring with detaljskarpa scenes: the mother with migraine in a darkened bedroom and the youngest child (författarjaget) anxiously circling, silent observance, bortmotad, never so near the mother that he desires. The mother who married young, who experienced the war and the bombs and destruction in the small Norwegian coastal town of Molde, and who always kept a distance to his son, brought in his polite shell.”
“But the novel breaks soon detached from both barndomsskildringens and modersporträttens templates, worsens, involving more and more of his own and the mother’s livssvårigheter. With its both compressed and lösrivna fragmentstil, that makes the whole both drastically renskrapad and rare frank, succeeding Niels Fredrik Dahl touch on some difficult, difficult to explain things in ”the darkness”.”
“It amazes the son many times that he as an adult and middle-aged recovering alcoholic, divorced several times and with a tendency not to be true to their nearest, but with a completely different external life than his reclusive, fake and rigid old överklassmamma, yet feel so similar to her. Not least when it comes to ljugandet, secrets, svekfullheten.”
“”On the one hand, hunger for closeness, love, contact. On the other, and the strongest side: the anxiety over this closeness, the feeling of not cope with a deep contact with another human being” (from the mother’s nattbok).”
“somehow, he takes the mother’s life from her when he ”uses” her life story, her diary with strong words, he reshapes her arbitrarily. But as he put it ”took” she also, involuntarily, something that should have been his when she pulled away in their own darkness, or low with severe migränplågor and really wasn’t present when he was small and lacked and needed her. “
“He says now that the two ”overlap” each other, a concept that you can consider when you feel trapped in the abstract inheritance and the environment-think when it comes to who you become and why.”
“”Nothing is as I think it is and I may not know anything about what she thought of or dreamed of …” declares författarjaget evasive towards the end.”
“Still unable to Niels Fredrik Dahl, by the escape of the language and the easy way the pictures are put next to each other, actually, for the rest of us also remove it too early subjugated and shackled young girl and show glimpses of a different, full of life, sometimes with an ugly, raging wolf inside, with teeth, a girl who loved to run fast, a woman who secretly expect and enjoy the men’s stares. ”If I hadn’t been so terrified and afraid I had gone from man to man,” she writes in nattboken.”
“So flicker the livsglimtarna past, dark nights with glowing rivers, a elderberry that smells a efterkrigsmorgon in Molde, the author’s urdruckna wine bottles thrown out surreptitiously through the window, the mother’s final months of silent staring through the window from the radhussoffan … all in all they are brilliant, both ogarderad, vibrant and self ironic story about the difficult issues. “
“Trans. Stephen Farran-Lee”
