Starweed

It’s hot, and the house martins are swooping over Schweigaards gate and Oslo prison, over the stone sculptures, syringes, the prison wall, asphalt and cement; over picnics of kiwi and melon, over dandelions, willowherbs, and wild pansies. The house martins swoop over the ditch where the digger digs at the Hovin Stream. At Harald Hardrådes plass, bus 37 negotiates the roundabout and continues down the street. A goods train rumbles along the railway tracks laden with timber. Over Gamlebyen’s school, Bispegården and the monastery ruins, the house martins swoop. They swoop along Dronning Eufemias gate, over the bridge to Sukkerbiten, the Opera and the Munch Museum, and the sign that says not to feed the birds. In Gamlebyen, in the courtyard, the girls sing at the top of their voices, and inside the play structure, in the little hut, sits my daughter.

A mother drives across the country, over the mountains from east to west, with her daughter strapped into the carseat in the back. For the daughter, the trip is a passage through endless hours and landscapes, for the mother, it becomes a journey in and out of contrasting times, to what used to be a home.

Starweed is a novel about being four years old, about wishing you had a pet, about discovering the world on your own – and about a mother’s joys and sorrows at seeing her child grow up. It’s also a novel about transitions in life, about the fractures we suffer in detaching away into lives of our own, in daughterhood and motherhood.

Bråtveit’s story shifts subtly and powerfully between the everyday and the sublime, with keen and unfailing awareness of the brutal procession of our lives.