For I So Loved...
Sortland, Bjørn: For så høgt har eg elska Winner of Gyldendal's competition for Best Romantic Novel 2003
"Ten faces are looking at me.
It is possible that I haven’t taken their expectations into account, not sufficiently. They must have paid at least ten pounds each to listen to me read.
I haven’t prepared well enough, either; in the end I had to run to make it in time. The last twenty-four hours I have been unable to think about anything except what will take place in my own flat tonight. But of course, the ten people who are now sitting expectantly waiting for me to read, with open hearts for all I know, they don’t know this. I touch my nose, like Pinocchio. Or like the American president who lied about his mistress that time. They probably think it’: s just because I’m young and scared. In general. "
There are a thousand million things. She has a small mole on her right underarm. She always goes for fragile projects. She doesn’t like me smoking. She sleeps so quietly I’m always afraid she’s dead. She says I’m an idiot who keeps on smoking when I’m so afraid of dying. She’s longing to go home to God. She’s smarter than I am. She never goes home until they turn off the lights. She’s unimpressed with the fact that I’ve got cancer again. Her eyes will be just as unbearably beautiful until the day she dies. A thousand million things.
With fits of sweating, a drastically unreliable stomach and a galloping hypochondria, Johannes is waiting for The Woman I Love to come home. Bu instead, a message just as clear as it is cryptic, reaches him: She wants to be left alone. But does she? Johannes clears out his savings account and ventures on a desperate search that takes him back towards the heart of the Amazon, where it all started, a long time ago.
What is love? What does love do? Presumably we cannot, and perhaps never should, find the answers to these questions. But they can be examined with intensity and linguistic vigour, as they are in this novel. The narrator Johannes is a relatively neurotic man, but he never takes himself too seriously. He is driven by an extreme hypochondriac anxiety, a heartfelt religious doubt and an inevitable, but impossible love.
Praise for "For I So Loved...":
"Charming prize-winner" (VG)
"a gripping and entertaining page-turner" (Bergens Tidende)
"fascinating and prolific" (Stavanger Aftenblad)
"a good and thoroughly sustained project" (Aftenposten)
"well-deserved winner of Gyldendal’s competition for Best Romantic Novel" (Adresseavisen)
First published: 2004, Gyldendal. Rights by Aschehoug Agency
Bjørn Sortland: Biography and bibliography
