Dear Shepherd Boy
Fossum, Marita: Kjære gjetergutt“Do you think God can punish us if we kill father?” Mille asks. “No, God doesn’t punish children,” says Felix, dragging on his cigarette, “at least not really unhappy ones.”
The action takes place during a few midsummer days in the early seventies. Mille is eight, and would rather be a boy. One morning she sees her father kill her dog. With her brother Felix, she plans revenge. Marita Fossum has written a book that enters a child’ s universe and shows the child struggling to do right.
Praise for Dear Shepherd Boy:
”A touching book which successfully tackles a depraved theme. Last year’s winner of the Brage Prize shows she can come up with the goods … Few authors could manage to haul such a depraved scenario ashore. But Fossum can. She has a unique feeling for language so she can take liberties others cannot … What might have been sentimental, becomes grippingly sad. The melodramatic, dramatic. And the child’s fury is not sentimentalized: she lets Mille be as horrid as only a child can be … As a reviewer in a small country like Norway, one should guard against constantly drawing parallels to Hamsun. But there is something about Fossum’s writing which makes me unable to restrain myself: the naive and beautiful description of human rage, of faith in God, and nature”
(Dagbladet)
”A fine balance between the painful and the witty seen through a child’s eyes … Fossum still writes prose that works and which makes the small grand”
(Adresseavisen)
”A frightening, puzzling novel … she writes so well and with such energy … solid, quality literature, without a doubt … language-wise, it is exciting and original”
(NRK, Boktilsynet)
” Dear Shepherd Boy is actually one of the strangest books I have read… The language is both tightly knit - clean-cut - and completely unspectacular, almost entirely stripped of metaphors and unambiguous symbolism. The text communicates its intentions only in extremely subtle ways; it is like observing a remote, almost averted world. But suddenly the text starts to offer - and it still does”
(Klassekampen)
“With Dear Shepherd Boy, Marita Fossum takes one step in what you almost truthfully could call the central prosaic Norwegian novel: There is childhood, there is summer, there is family - and not least there is an underlying seriousness, connected to death and nascent sexuality. But Fossum balances and conjures up her motif in a way that makes this a good reading experience, and in addition quite simply a wise book”
(Morgenbladet)
First published: 2006, Forlaget Oktober
Marita Fossum: Biography and bibliography
