• The Hills Reply
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Archipelago Books

The Hills Reply

The Hills Reply

by Tarjei Vesaas, translated from the Norwegian by Elizabeth Rokkan

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Tarjei Vesaas's final work, The Hills Reply, is a flow of intensely lyrical autobiographical scenes. The vivid beauty of the wilds of Norway grounds the narrator’s interior flashes. The first sketch finds a boy, his father, and their packhorse clearing a logging road buried in snow as their surroundings give way to a crisis. Profound insights into human behavior, solitude, and nonverbal communication stand up to the power and immensity of the natural world. The land speaks to (and at times almost swallows) the central character, as he is pushed to the edge of what a body and mind can endure. The hypnotic pulse of Vesaas’s prose blurs the line between memory and hallucination, as it stares bravely into the unblinking eye of Nature. An unforgettable book, The Hills Reply is a visceral salute to the human spirit, to the ecstasy of wilderness, and to their tender overlapping.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781939810380
Pages: 272
Publication Date:

Praise

(Tarjei Vesaas’s) last book. A visionary masterpiece. I revere Vesaas and Elizabeth Rokkan. First published in 1968 but feels philosophically and stylistically brand new for the major concerns of our time as regards nature, time and human loss. Astonishingly beautiful and strange.
—Max Porter

The text is a masterful subversion of nostalgia, and a unification of place, person, and past. Divided into episodes, each section is a meditation on the existential symbiosis between consciousness and its surroundings. . . . Like Van Gogh’s Café at Night, where structures, people, and the unknowable ether above join to form a single unit, The Hills Reply intimates a concerted artistic whole through philosophical and aesthetic connectivity.
—John Kazanjian, Entropy Magazine

Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas (also the author of The Ice Palace and The Birds) writes with an unassuming wonder that fills each moment with beauty and dread. The Hills Reply was Vesaas’ final book and in a hallucinatory fashion it again renders the smallness (but also precision) of the human mind against the immensity of the natural world. Vesaas is amazing in any season.
—Nate McNamara, Lit Hub

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