The Birds (Peter Owen Modern Classics) - Softcover

Tarjei Vesaas

4.13

5,708 ratings by Goodreads

9780720614947: The Birds (Peter Owen Modern Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0720614945 ISBN 13: 9780720614947

Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers, 2011

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'Tarjei Vesaas has probably written the best Norwegian novel ever, The Birds.' --Karl Ove Knausgaard

From the author of The Ice Palace comes another dazzling tale of delicate beauty and deceptive simplicity.

The Birds is the story of Mattis, who has mental disabilities and lives in a small house near a lake with his sister Hege. She ekes out a modest living knitting sweaters, and from time to time encourages her brother to find work to ease their financial burdens. Struggling to find work and acceptance onto the farms of local farmers, Mattis sets himself up as a ferryman, only without any passengers to take across the lake. Then one day J�rgen, a lumberjack, requests a lift. When Mattis introduces the lumberjack to Hege, he soon finds he has made a terrible mistake ...

The Birds sings with the quiet and poetic intensity expected of one of greatest Scandinavian writers of all time, Tarjei Vesaas. It is also as subtle, powerful and sensitive a depiction of mental disability, as Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Hadden's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

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Review:

True visionary power. --Sunday Telegraph

Disarmingly insightful ... Vesaas conveys subtle emotional rhythms with masterful economy. --Tablet

Beautiful and subtle. --Scotsman

About the Author:

TARJEI VESAAS was born in 1897 in the remote rural Telemark district of Norway, where he spent most of his life. Throughout his life he published several novels, volumes of poetry and a book of short stories which was awarded an international prize at Venice in 1952. One of his novels, The Ice Palace has brought him international recognition, and Peter Owen called it "the best book I have ever published". Vesaas was awarded several other prizes and was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in 1964, 1968 and again in 1969. He died in 1970, his reputation as the leading Nordic writer firmly established.

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