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NOVEL
Edvard Hoem
“Young man wants out”
October
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In this autumn’s novel “Ung mann wil ut”, the 75-year-old author Edvard Hoem brings out his own 14-year-old self to tell about the five vital years at Molde High School. It has become a nice and wistful picture of the times and an entertaining story about the joys and torments of youth. About the young Edvard, who stands with an increasingly wobbly leg in the school’s Christian team, and an increasingly steady leg in the small but fierce café and bohemian life at Kaffistova in Molde.
The shy and anxious 14-year-old who hardly dares to speak to a girl ends up as the town’s May 17th speaker five years later. He then took part in organizing Molde’s first poetry festival and is determined to become a writer. He has got an alpine hat, pipe and medium-long hair, writes in Romsdal’s Budstikke and has become a man to be reckoned with, and he is only 18 years old. One year later, he goes over the mountain to Oslo.
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The aging Edvard Hoem constantly appears in the text with his reflections and sometimes wonder about his own young self. Like when he sits there in the yard at Hoem in front of the old living room that is still in his possession and asks himself why he was so eager to get away from this childhood landscape. Where he now talks to God every single day.
The slight sadness that overwhelms the reader as the story of the young Edvard unfolds lies precisely in the recognition of the “lost years”. He is not always completely sure of his own recollection and his own memory, and allows doubts to appear. He also leans on conversations he has had with his old friends and classmates from back in the 1960s. This fierce decade when the Vietnam War left a mark on so many minds and thoughts, also in the young Edvard, who claims in the book that he saw the light as a 15-year-old, and became strongly politically involved. The later Soviet incursion into Czechoslovakia further contributed to this conviction.
But more than anything else, it is the long evenings in the library in the company of Americans such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway that are significant for the life path he has secretly chosen.
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A life path that has made Edvard Hoem a popular writer, precisely through the family biographies, which started with the fine “Slåttekar in the sky” and became ended last year with “Husjomfru”. A family saga that went straight into the Norwegian people’s soul.
It is there in Molde, as a 14-year-old, that he sits in the dormitory in Langmyrveien the day before he is to start secondary school, and there it sinks into him like a certainty that he will become a writer.
Edvard Hoem presents this journey in youthful exuberance and despondency to the reader in his well-known beautiful, finely flowing Nynorsk. Here, friendships and conversations and approaches to love are depicted that do not turn out to be more than just that, and a sexual experience that does not turn out to be quite the big splash either. On the other hand, the young poet Edvard is very excited when he can finally present his first poems to the poet Ragnvald Skrede in Oslo. A man who gently hints at a debut in a couple of years. Reason to celebrate then!
But a man who has partly walked and partly hitchhiked from Oslo to Molde and only has four kroner in his pocket should perhaps be careful about being invited to dinner at Molde’s best hotel.
The portrait Edvard Hoem draws of the hard-working mother, who not only takes care of house and home and six children, but also takes care of the barn and the sick father-in-law Edvard Knutsen, who lives on the farm, makes a strong impression. The father is not only a farmer, but also a preacher and is constantly travelling.
The author also offers nice situational pictures that evoke the distant, but still so close, 1960s. Like the mother’s food pan, which every other day is sent by bus into Molde so that the two sons, Edvard and Mathias, who live in a dormitory, will have a hot dinner. Food trays that the bus driver transports for free. Here is also a slightly painful description of the mother who, after many years, gets to greet an old schoolmate, the journalist and writer Simen Skjønsberg, who is in Molde at a poetry festival. He spent several years in German captivity, while Edvard Hoem’s mother had a child with a German soldier. An encounter which the author describes with fine feeling, without hiding what he experiences as a dilemma.
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“Young man wants out” has become a finely balanced depiction of a special time and a special destiny, unsentimental and critical of his own choices and assessments, but still filled with tenderness and understanding for the “puppy” he once was. Perhaps we can look forward to a fierce story about Edvard Hoem’s years as a poet in the capital?