Roy Jacobsen (1) (1954–2025)

This is the best novel set on an island that I've read since the outstanding Elizabeth Ogilvie Bennett's Island sagas set in Maine. Only one small, close-knit family remains on Barroy, a Norwegian coastal islet, and as they have for hundreds of years, now only five inhabitants remain, all laboring intensely to feed and clothe themselves and their livestock: grandfather Martin, his daughter Barbro, son Hans, Hans’ wife Maria, and their daughter Ingrid. As seen through Ingrid's fearless show more eyes, from childhood through adolescence, Barroy is a paradise of rock, sheep, and boats, with minimal and difficult connections to the surrounding larger and more populated islands. Their perseverance and the battering down by the weather – storms, droughts, and heat waves alike - is fascinating, as is the dialogue that the clever translators have turned into Norse patois. As the family’s numbers diminish and grow, the reader becomes annealed to their lives and it is indeed a relief to discover that this fine book is part 1 of a trilogy. There is admiration and almost disbelief at the challenge of maintaining their mastery of such a wild and unforgiving locale. show less

What is the meaning of this novel's enigmatic title? For me, "The Unseen" are the book's protagonists, the Barrøys, who own and live on one of the tiny, remote islands off the coast of Norway - aptly named Barrøy. When the novel starts, the Barrøys are old widower Martin, his son Hans (who has recently assumed the mantle of "head of the family"), Hans's wife Maria, their toddler daughter Ingrid and Hans's sister Barbro, who is "not quite there". "The Unseen" follows the fate of the show more Barrøys over roughly three decades. This might make it sound like a "family saga" or even an updated "Nordic saga", except that, instead of epic battles against gods and monsters, we witness the Barrøys' daily challenges as they toil to eke out a living from the island's soil and the surrounding sea.

From hints throughout the book, we get the feel that the novel is set roughly a hundred years ago, but the story it relates has a feeling of timelessness, an eternity marked by the recurring seasons. The sun rises and sets. The years roll by. Storms rage, wreak havoc and recede. Children are born. So are lambs. Old men die. So do cows. There are brushes with death - the sea sustains life but it can also take it away. The surrounding world tries to stake its claim over the island, as when there is an insistence that Barrøy be put on the milk route, or when the price of Barrøy's produce is determined by the Mainland's fickle rules of supply and demand. But Barrøy lives on in splendid isolation as a new generation of Barrøys proudly continues the family traditions.

The novel's language, as rendered in the joint translation by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, is poetic yet lean and blunt. There are plenty of pages of nature writing, but nowhere does it become florid or overly sentimental. Use of dialogue is spare, which is a good thing as the thick dialect of the islanders is conveyed in a dense form of English (I wonder if it is an invented form of speech or based on an actual dialect).

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that The Unseen became a bestseller in Jacobsen's native Norway. It's a striking novel, but no page-turner. Its beauty is as austere as light refracted through a glacier. And just as memorable.


An ebook version of the novel was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review show less

It’s always bittersweet to see children grow up and mature into full fledged adults. The same can be said of a series once it has achieved its final form. So it was with [Just a Mother], the fourth of The Barrøy Chronicles, which follow Ingrid Barrøy from a small child on a remote island off the coast of Norway to the matriarch of a family on that same island.

Writing on sagas in Literary Hub, Jacobsen says:

The motive behind saga writing seems to be two very profound - and hardly

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transient - existential questions, that predicate on each other: Who are we? And where do we come from?

Although the Chronicles seem fairly straightforward at first browse, these two questions are at their heart. Over the course of the four books, Ingrid, in her own no nonsense way, works to find who she is, then who the father of her child is, then who that child is and will be. These searches, both introspective and physical, are initially set against the backdrop of her island of Barrøy, then into a discovery of the wider Norwegian world, then into what Norway itself is in the aftermath of WWII. The arrival of a young boy, Mattis, whom no one claims, perhaps exemplifies Jacobsen’s saga questions.

Like Ingrid, the country has undergone its own upheavals during the war and the reckonings which followed.. Both are left with the questions of what matters in it all, what should be put aside in order to move on.

[Just a Mother] is the final book in the series, as Jacobsen died in 2025. Knowing this as I read this last volume, I wondered if he intended it to be the last, or if he had intended there to be more. It doesn’t really matter in the end, as there is a sense of completion to this last novel. Ingrid’s life and that of the island have grown and evolved through the series. The reader knows both lives will continue, that the story is never really over, and is content with that. show less

The Unseen takes place on a tiny island off the coast of Norway in the early 20th century, where the Barroy family lives and works. It is just the 5 of them: grandfather Martin, father Hans, mother Maria, their daughter Ingrid, and Barbro, Hans' sister. They have occasional contact with the small town on the mainland and Hans goes off to fish every winter. But Hans builds a quay on their island, which opens them up a bit more to interaction. And as Ingrid grows older, a wider life begins to show more intrude on the island and their world expands.

This book is very Scandinavian in tone. If you've read much Scandinavian lit, you'll know what I mean - spare sentences, hard work, little fun, weather that dictates life, interior, little dialogue. I love it. The characters end up being rich, though as a reader you discover them differently than you're used to in American and British books. I love the setting and learning the small details of life in this sort of location. And there is plenty of drama - it's just not presented dramatically.

This is the start of a trilogy that follows Ingrid, and I will definitely continue it.

Original publication date: 2017
Author’s nationality: Norwegian
Original language: Norwegian
Length: 272 pages
Rating: 4 stars
Format/where I acquired the book: purchased for kindle
Why I read this: review caught my eye show less