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Mother's and Father's Story

Nominee to the prestigious 2006 Nordic Council's Prize for Literature

”Mum, do you love Dad?” I once asked my mother, in my distant childhood. We were in the kitchen, home at the farm in a small village on the Western coast of Norway; it was a winter’s night. The walls in the kitchen were blue, the lamp in the ceiling was on, and it was dark outside the window. Mum rattled with pots and pans, she was tidying up after our evening meal. For all those years, it was in the same way: Around nine every night the dairy work was done, the cows had been milked and the horse had been tended to. Mum had come inside to bring the day to a close.

Perhaps I was six years old. In that case, the year was 1955.

I had discovered that there was something called to love, and I thought about what that could be. When I finally dared to ask my mother I was nervous, because I didn’t know if she would get angry. But I wanted to know what lay in such a strange word, and I wanted to watch her face when I asked her.

Edvard Hoem writes about what his parents never talked about, about how his mother and father met in 1945, and events leading up to the two of them – an unlikely couple – ending up together. A layman predicator, Edvard Hoem’s father held more than 700 meetings during the Second World War. Hoem’s mother, on her part, was a cook in a nursery home, and had a daughter with a German soldier.

Mors og fars historie is about how life sometimes follows a path of its own, and how nothing turns out the way we had thought it would. The story of a predicator and a young woman with a past is a story about grief and betrayal and failure, but above all about reconciliation and the will to live. It is a tribute to a different era and a different country.

Praise for Mother's and Father's story:

"You'll read it in one go ... "
(VG)

“Beautiful about mother and father. The family’s secret story becomes present and honourable literature…a beautiful and distinctive piece of writing, a love story in the form of memoirs, a confidence that, for better and for worse, is close to bursting with all the emotions it contains”
(Dagbladet)

"Hoem has accomplished the masterpiece of balancing between the intimate-tyrannical and the reserved, impersonal... he can afford tenderness, sincerity and dignity without ever becoming sentimental. It takes an author of Edvard Hoem's stature to succeed in doing something like this ..."
(Aftenposten)

"A sharp and gentle family portrait... Dignity and tenderness are two words that can be used to characterise Edvard Hoem's memoir-novel "Mother's and Father's Story "... With sobriety and stringency - but also with plenty of warmth and a desire for understanding - the author draws the portrait of one family's life during the war years and in 1950s Norway. The image of the young Kristine, who unblushingly loved a German soldier and sat in the darkness of the movie theatre at Lillehammer watching German films, is told with much tenderness and a feeling for all-consuming love"
(Dagsavisen)

"... one of the best Hoem has written. You'll read it in one go ... The plot is exciting, peppered with dramatic stories, filled with sorrow and deceptions, accidents and pure scandals ... He writes with criticism, with distance - and with love. A warm and clear novel, which I will recommend to everyone ..."
(VG)

"Edvard Hoem has written an exciting and heartfelt story, full of pathos and strong emotions"
(NRK)

Click here to download sample translation.


First published: 2005, Forlaget Oktober
Edvard Hoem: Biography and bibliography

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