This is a descriptive book, slow and thoughtful. No clear insights are provided here, and you're required to do the work by self and reach conclusions if any. This is a poetic story of atmosphere, landscapes, and descriptions. ( )

This is a Norwegian bestseller in which the narrator ruminates about an arsonist who terrorized his community at the time of his birth. He also thinks extensively about his relationship with his father and his father's death. This book definitely has that Scandinavian feel - it is written a bit flat and matter-of-factly - it's not as dramatic as the subject of an arsonist on the loose sounds like it would be.

I liked it, but I found myself losing interest periodically and in the end I don't think it will be very memorable for me. ( )

Gaute Heivoll’s enormously satisfying novel/memoir, Before I Burn, recounts a period from the spring of 1978, when the people of Finsland, a remote, sparsely populated region in southern Norway, were terrorized by a series of deliberately set fires that destroyed homes and ruined lives. Heivoll’s cast of characters is made up of the people who were resident there at the time, a list that includes his own parents and, eventually, himself since he is born in the midst of the crisis. The book is billed as a crime novel, and though crimes are committed in its pages and police arrive to investigate, the prose has an undeniable literary polish and the story’s unconventional structure constantly chafes against the restraints of the genre. The action follows three distinct threads. In Finsland in 1978 fires are being set and no one can figure out who is responsible. At the centre of this is Dag, a smart, talented and deeply troubled young man and son of the local fire chief. In 1998 the twenty-year-old Gaute Heivoll, watching his father slowly succumb to cancer and profoundly dissatisfied with the routine path his life seems to be following, deliberately sabotages his law exams. And in the contemporary thread, Gaute, now a writer in his thirties, has returned home to Finsland with the intention of conducting first-hand research into the circumstances surrounding the fires while some of the people who experienced the fear and panic of those weeks in 1978 are still alive. Psychologically penetrating and chillingly evocative of what it must be like to feel threatened and helpless in your own home and suffer emotional turmoil at the hands of a force that is unpredictable and lacks both a face and a shape, Before I Burn grips the reader from the first scene and doesn’t let go until the unsettling epilogue. ( )

I rate this novel 3 1/2 stars. It is a dark and compelling thriller, set in rural Iceland. ( )

A house is burning at night. It is the first few minutes, before people have been alerted. All around there is silence. There is only the fire. The house stands there alone and no one can save it. It has been left to its fate, to its destruction. The flames and the smoke are being sucked up into the sky, or so it seems; there are creaks and groans, like distant responses. It is frightening, it is terrible and it is beyond comprehension. And it is almost beautiful.

The narrator of Before I Burn is an author who has decided to write a book about a series of fires which took place when he was a small baby - ten in the space of a month. He goes back to his family's home and starts to talk to the people who still remember those days; but what emerges is not a portrait of the arsonist but of the community which he came from, close-knit, taciturn, and with all emotions buried far below the surface.

We see all the arsonist's actions, but only his actions - we aren't told why he did what he did. There are things for us to interpret - all external facts, such as the fact that he was the fire chief's son, that he refuses to talk about his time in the army, or that when everyone was speculating about why the fires were happening he described the perpetrator as "a madman".

But the only emotions we are told about are those of the narrator as he is growing up, and as a result we almost borrow these emotions to understand the arsonist - perhaps, like the narrator, he never felt that he fitted in, he believed he had let his parents down. Perhaps, though, another person with another life would have drawn different conclusions about why he started to set fires. As the narrator says, "Who do we see when we see ourselves?" ( )