The title of this novel, for which Fosse was awarded the Nordic Council Prize in 2015, seems to be a kind of joke - it's actually a sequence of three rather compact novellas: Andvake (Sleepless), Olavs draumar (Olav’s Dreams) and Kveldsvævd (Weariness), which together come to something like the length of a standard single-volume novel. Andvake was originally published separately in 2008, and it was a couple of years later that Fosse decided to add the remaining two parts to the story.

All three parts deal with a young couple, Alida and Asle, who run away from the fishing village where they grew up when Alida becomes pregnant. In the first part, they are walking through the rainy streets of Bergen looking for a place to stay - with obvious biblical overtones, the townspeople insist that there is no room in the inn, but eventually they find a place for Alida to bring her son into the world. In the second part, Asle, now called Olav, goes through a nightmarish experience in the town on his own, and we get a new view of what happened in the first part. In the third part, we shift to the viewpoint of Alida, as seen - or imagined - by her daughter, Alise, in old age.

All three parts are written in a distinctive, poetic style, with strong echoes of the Bible (and presumably of medieval Norse texts). There also a seems to be a link to the structure of traditional Norwegian fiddle music - we're alerted to look for this because Asle and his father and son are all fiddle players. Fosse normally writes in long run-on sentences with minimal punctuation, but here and there he switches to short punchy sentences where the full stops stick out like drum beats. There's a lot of repetition, too, with phrases that come back again and again, adding to the dreamlike, meditative feel of the text established by the prevalent imagery of sleep, tiredness and dreaming.

The background to the book is one of rural poverty without a safety net. The world is tough, lives are cheap, but life goes on, fish have to be caught, and the consolations of religion seem to be irrelevant. We never get more than hints as to which century we might be in, and the hints are often contradictory - sometimes it feels like the late 19th century (as seen by Ibsen and Munch), sometimes we could be in the middle ages. Bergen is clearly still a fairly small town, without much contact with the wider world, and is always referred to by the archaic name Bjørgvin.

Not a cheerful book, by any means, but one that does interesting things with form and language: definitely something it would be interesting to read in the original. Especially if I knew more about the context! ( )