Mouth towards a Frozen Fjord

Inger Bråtveit

Original title: Munn mot ein frosen fjord
Publisher: Tiden Norsk Forlag, 2002
Pages: 124 pages

Bråtveit portrays in a precise, poetic language the imaginative games of a girl who struggles to keep her experience coherent, and the story itself seems to follow dream logic. The grandfather takes care of the grandmother, who sings an America song and can only remember things from long ago. As the girl switches between parents and grandparents, so does the story move between different layers of experience and memory, leading the reader into a strange world of feathers, dogs, and jumping rabbits.

Awards

Nynorsk litteraturpris award 2003
Debut of the year 2002 (forfatterne.net)

Inger Bråtveit

Photo: Signe Fuglesteg Luksengard

Inger Bråtveit is one of Norway’s most exciting younger authors and the recipient of several awards and grants, including the New Norwegian Literature Prize and the Bjørnson Scholarship. She debuted as an author in 2002 with the novel Mouth Towards a Frozen Fjord. Her second novel, Siss and Unn, was nominated for the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature in 2008.
Bråtveit published her third novel Alice A4 in 2015, nominated for the Young Readers’ Critics’ Prize. The Art of Swimming (2018) is a hybrid novel applauded for its wise and beautiful prose. Starweed is her fifth novel.