The Four Winds - Softcover

Brantenberg, Gerd

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1879679051 ISBN 13: 9781879679054

Publisher: Women in Translation,U.S., 1996

Synopsis

This bittersweet coming-of-age novel is a beautiful evocation of the student milieu of northern Europe in the 1960s - a time of new ideas and enormous social and political changes.
Inger, a bright young woman from Fredrikstad, graduates from high school, spends a year in Edinburgh working as an au pair for a bourgeois Scottish family, then returns to Norway to study at the University of Oslo. There, crushes, clandestine relationships and the exhilarating first signs of the Scandinavian gay and lesbian liberation movement mark Inger's struggle to come to terms with her sexuality. At the same time she begins to see more clearly how her parents' alcoholism affects her family, making these relationships more complicated and confusing.

About this title

From the Publisher

Women's Review of Books, July 1996
After the death of her parents, with the sutdent movements of the late 1960s on the horizon, Inger glimpses the possibility of converting her great "catastrophe"--always falling in love with women instead of men--into a self-respecting way of life. She begins to foresee a time when women who love each other can stop "fighting against joy." "When would the ice finally break up," she wonders, "so they could see themselves, look at their reflection in the water and see that they were magnificent?" The time may not be yet, but The Four Winds is a valuable contribution to the inevitable meltdown.

Edition details

• Publisher: Women in Translation,U.S.
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1879679051
• ISBN 13: 9781879679054
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 270