Four Hundred French Insults
Ellenes, Øyvind: Fire hundre franske fornærmelser2011, Forlaget Oktober, 165 pages
Rouen, Normandy, France: A group of young men. On their way to life. They are Norwegian students at a French high school. They are staying in a dormitory. They are homesick. They read. They cram. They drink. They long for love. They meet a flood of new and strange impressions. They are insecure. Fumbling, awkward, emotional. Among them is Even Tjern, who the novel follows, in its desultory way, through three years at this institution, until he is twenty. Four Hundred French Insults is a sort of bildungsroman, written in a form that changes between the collective and the individual.
Praise for FOUR HUNDRED FRENCH INSULTS:
“A great writer … The novel keeps the reader in a tight grip”
5/6 (Fædrelandsvennen, Reviewers’ books of the year 2011)
“[Ellenes’] best novel so far finds its material in a French gymnasium with as school class of Norwegian boys. But in addition to being a bildungsroman, it is also a novel of how a life is created through text.”
(Hamar Arbeiderblad, Books of the year 2011)
“a novel which reaches for the intangible, a novel which wants to catch another atmosphere, another time, the loneliness, distance and estrangement that arises in an encounter with another language, other customs, other systems … It is on this level that the novel is exceptionally good … The prose is tender and thoughtful … Ellenes is an elegant stylist who throughout his works has been picking up impulses from the French roman nouveau and domestic modernist traditions … [his great breakthrough] should come; this is a writer who should be talked about also outside of inner the circles of literary Norway.”
(Dag og tid)
“Øyvind Ellenes’ fine novel Four Hundred French Insults is cinematic, poetically bleak and – not least – enormously confident in its execution … most of all the novel says something about how difficult it is to put a life into writing … Ellenes writes like a film director as he slides in and out of different perspectives. That creates great images … absolutely one of the best novels of the previous year.”
(Vårt Land)
First published: 2011, Forlaget Oktober
Øyvind Ellenes: Biography and bibliography
