The birds Book

The world is a hostile place and, according to Mattis, people don't mean what they say when they speak. A simpleton, a weirdo, a child imprisoned in the body of an adult man, Mattis muses over the factors that separate him from the rest of the small community of the nameless village lost somewhere in a rural area in Norway where he and his sister Hege subsist in a cottage by the lake.

Condemned to be permanently out of work due to his slow-witted faculties and lack of social skills, Mattis is bitterly aware of his inadequacy and secretly yearns to possess the wisdom and strength of other townsmen while his sister wastes away the remnants of her youth knitting sweaters that will provide some coins to get by without starving. Unable to keep his job as a hired hand working the fields of a neighboring farm because"his fingers won't do as they are told", Mattis creates a world of his own where time dissolves into thin air as soon as the woodcock flies over the cottage leaving a radiant trail of light, which precludes the thunder of the upcoming storm, before it glides down on the entangled branches of the twin aspens that guard the garden. A world where he can articulate witty remarks to flirt with farmgirls, find a job as a ferryman shuttling people across the lake, meet two playful mermaids trapped in women's limbs and invent a system to read The birds' language.

"You are you, a voice inside him seemed to be saying, at least that was what it sounded to him. It was spoken in the language of birds. Written in their writing. You are you, that was what was written."

The human need to establish bonds that will break down the barriers between individual isolation and collective belonging is written all over Mattis' actions. What transforms the worn out theme of the stereotyped misfit resisting an unyielding society into a beguiling narration that interweaves menacing natural imagery with occasional outsburts of genial writing is Vesaas' astute tapestry of symbolic and recurrent hints anticipated by an omniscient voice, capable of generating a tension as thick as fog, which is reflected on the aseptic frozen lake where Mattis rows his dreams, longings and fears.

Nature is as beautiful as it is lethal, deadly lightening might fulminate the aspens, the wind might whistle lost birdsongs of the ensnared woodcock and Mattis' boat might bring Jørgen, the muscular lumberjack, into Hege's life and destroy the fragile ecosystem that Mattis so assiduously constructed over the years in the blink of an eye, but Vesaas' stark prose and the disturbing blend of tenderness and apprehension that paints the tone of the narration with the colors of a barren landscape will remain long after the last page is turned.

And the wind will subside and in the lake, now a becalmed pool, the birds will make a solitary dance and speak through their graceful footprints and you, the reader, will miraculously understand their language because somewhere in-between fable and hapless reality Mattis has become the reader and the reader is now Mattis and when the boat sails the glacial waters of an ominous future, you two will walk, hand in hand, towards the sound of flapping wings and create a cozy nest with sundrenched memories of a long gone but never lost childhood.

"The bird came, bringing with it all those things for which there were no words."

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