AshehougAgency

The Weight of Snow Crystals

The Weight of Snow Crystals is a strong and moving novel about a precocious boy who hides a terrible secret. It is also a painful portrayal of a father and son relationship, and how the ones who are closest to us can fail in offering love and support when we need it the most.

The protagonist is a fourteen year old boy living in Oslo in the sixties. Ski jumping is his great passion, and he has a genuine talent for it. His father, a soft-spoken optometrist, is ambitious on his son’s behalf, while his beautiful, but slightly absent-minded mother wishes that he would give up what she considers a dangerous sport. They are a loving and close family.

But something is very wrong with the boy, and he is alone with his doctor when he receives news of his test results; he has a rare muscular disease that will ultimately render him a paralytic. The deterioration can happen quite fast or over time – it is impossible to predict. And since just one more ski jump could be dangerous, he is told he must give it up at once. The boy decides to keep his condition a secret, refusing to come to terms with it.

The next time he jumps, his coach and the other boys at ski jump practice watch him as he lands, buckling his legs and breaking his ankle. Now his father hears about the illness, but insists that they keep it a secret from his mother. Why is it so important to hide the truth from her?

The boy recovers from the fall, but finds it increasingly difficult to conceal his worsening condition – at school with his classmates, on a date with a girl, and at home with his parents.

One night, the boy witnesses his mother suffering a violent breakdown and being forced into an ambulance by his father and a neighbour. His father is so preoccupied with his wife’s mental condition, that he is unwilling to realise what is happening to his son, and subsequently the boy experiences this as an abandonment and a betrayal. As the boy gradually experiences the loss of control over his legs, the father grows ever more vague and distant. He goes to see his mother at the asylum, but she hardly seems to recognise him. Finally, the boy decides to jump one more time. Knowing that it might be fatal, he still goes for the biggest ski jump of them all – Holmenkollen ski jump. I’ve got nothing to lose, he tells himself as he stands at the top of the ski jump, looking down.

The Weight of Snow Crystals tells the story of a boy facing the gravest and most difficult challenge of his life, and having to go the whole distance on his own.

Click here for English sample translation.

Praise for The Weight of Snow Crystals:

”Wonderful, beautiful and shocking…. It is written from the heart, pure and complete. A bull’s eye!”
(Adresseavisen)

”Thorvald Steen is convincing in the long run, much due to his consistent, almost Hemingwayian style. Steen writes frugally and retained, as if he himself is putting his ear to his story to register and recount it as perfectly as possible … a book I will remember for a long time”
(Göteborgs-posten, Sweden)

”You read it with increasing commitment … The Weight of Snow Crystals is a powerful little novel … you want to read more”
(Dagens Nyheter, Sweden)

”A glowing novel, tender and strong at the same time”
(Radio Sweden)

”Thorvald Steen writes with sincerity, credibility and weight!”
(Ystads Allehanda, Sweden)

”Thorvald Steen’s autobiographic novel The Weight of Snow Crystals is so quiet, so close, so free of all attempts of artistic embellishment that you unconditionally press the main character, a fourteen-year-old boy, to your bosom.”
(Nya Wermlands-Tindningen, Sweden)

"A gripping portrait of a young man, at once powerful and beautiful."
(Cumhurriet, Turkey)

"Great literature from the north."
(Radikal, Turkey)

”Steen stands steadily… Thorvald Steen has delivered a sore, tender and raw story which is told in a linguistically confident form, stripped of emotionalism, but with plenty of warmth. And with considerable insight. The book is about broken dreams, delicate bonds between people who relate to each other, about dawning, insecure feelings. The Weight of Snow Crystals is a book about growing up, a bildungsroman –a and a book about skiing and snow. Over a number of years Thorvald Steen has delivered strong books in one genre and from different epochs. With this book he has, in a way, come home, and he may well achieve – and deserve – a breakthrough with a large audience”
(Aftenposten)

”Thorvald Steen recounts precisely, simply and interestingly. Especially gripping is the description of the boy’s despairing and bitter confrontation with his father … a powerful and captivating description.”
(Borås Tidning, Sweden)

“Twenty points for style. Subdued and dramatic about betrayal and broken dreams. Thorvald Steen’s eighth novel, The Weight of Snow Crystals, is one of the most moving youth portrayals I have read… The Weight of Snow Crystals has a dramatic nerve that runs throughout the book. This intensity is as much to be found in the things that remain unsaid, as at the surface….. What makes The Weight of Snow Crystals really stand out in this autumn’s flood of books is a exceptionally good and trustworthy narrative perspective”
(Bergens Tidende)

”gripping without being persistent … In its unobtrusiveness it is a beautifully written novel”
(Sundsvalls Tidning, Sweden)

"With Oslo 1970 as backdrop, Thorvald Steen has written an absorbing novel about growing up, with a very special story at its centre. A story about solidarity and friendship, dawning love and the feeling of betrayal. Stylistically and linguistically it is, as always, a gratification to read Thorvald Steen"
(Avisa Hordaland)

”Steen has captured this stubborn contempt of death, and behind it a tiresome melancholy, in an excellent manner, with everyday details and small, discrete changes of style here and there.”
(Uppsala Nya Tidning, Sweden)

”With the publication of The Weight of Snow Crystals, Steen had a big breakthrough in Norway in 2006, which I can easily understand … Steen’s novels are suitable for reading aloud and dramatising, because you have to listen to the silence between the words; like when snow crystals fall.”
(Helsingborgs Dagblad, Sweden)

"Short and precise. Steen’s writing is condensed…[ Steen] is a master at describing the despair over broken dreams"
(Haugesunds avis)

"Thought-provoking novel about ski jumping, psychiatry - and growing up. The prize-winning author Thorvald Steen's 17th book since his debut in 1983 is a powerful experience. A lot is due to Steen's extensive knowledge of the subject. Steen's language [is] simple, direct and sincere. With its less than 200 pages, you will quickly read through The Weight of Snow Crystals. The compelling story, however, will stay with the reader for a long time"
(Fædrelandsvennen)

First published: 2006, Forlaget Oktober
Thorvald Steen: Biography and bibliography

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