Siss and Unn

Nominated to the Critics' Prize 2008

Unn lives in a tiny village with her mother, Mummy Big, who loves her daughter, but who is unable to overcome the grief of having been abandoned by Unn’s father when Unn was still a little girl. When Mummy Big suddenly falls ill and dies, Unn moves in with her aunt, a kind, but taciturn woman.

When the far more extrovert Siss moves to the village from Sweden, a beautiful friendship starts developing between the two girls. The novel follows Siss and Unn from their first meeting as young girls through early womanhood. As they enter university, their relationship starts taking a dark turn – one of them thrives, while the other is destroyed.

In an effective and intelligent manner, Bråtveit borrows elements from as seemingly disparate literary forms as the lyrical symbolism of modernist master Tarjei Vesaas, the whimsical lightness of ladies’ fashion magazines and the impending doom of the greek tragedy. SISS AND UNN is a hauntingly beautiful exploration of women’s lives today, of their relations with each other as friends, mothers and daughters, and of the psychological costs of the constraints and expectations imposed on them by modern culture.

Click here for sample translation

Praise for SISS AND UNN:

"Brilliant Bråtveit [...] With her second novel, SISS AND UNN, Inger Bråtveit shows what a conscious, stylish and brilliant author she is. And one could be tempted to say: What a brave author! […] Inger Bråtveit has written one of this autumn’s finest novels.”
(Dagsavisen, Norway)

“Six years have passed since Inger Bråtveit’s landmark debut, MOUTH AGAINST A FROZEN FJORD. Now the author is back with a literary work of art which reinforces her position as one of the most innovative, form conscious writers in Scandinavia. […] But Bråtveit isn’t just a great poet in the prose form, she is also an unsnobbish troublemaker who lifts from high and low in popular culture as she weaves this text, which should get its rightful place in the Norwegian canon. […] Bråtveit is a gifted, experimental writer, whose sophisticated books offer a language to savour and, not least, an understanding of the forces of doom which haunts relations and people.”
(Silje Stavrum Norevik, Bergens Tidende, Norway)

"... a burning, intense novel of crystal and ice [...] sad and beautiful."
(Klassekampen, Norway)

“I like Inger Bråtveit’s new book. And more than that: I am enchanted by the characters, the thoughts, the nature, the life in the village; and everything is depicted in a language so sensitive and poetic that the every day life opens up and comes close.”
(Anne Berit Skeie, Suldalsposten, Norway)

”A solid novel about writing your own script and daring to improvise in your role […] a very successful experiment in distances. The book’s textual universe is fragmented and bleeding all through the novel. The novel stays the course and in a refreshing way suppresses all illusions of a coherent totality, progression and smooth surfaces.”
(Linda Kaspersen, Adresseavisen, Norway)

“The language in this novel is lyrical, and an exterior voice is central. This works extremely well; the voice is so strong and good that it sucks you into the novel’s universe and forces you to accept the story and the premises it dictates. The pain and the loneliness shoots out from the book pages and into the reader’s spine [...] For me, this story is not forgotten after the last page, it stays in my body as a faint ring. And I know what book my mother will be getting from her daughter this Christmas”
(Ellen Engelstad, Universitas, Norway)

”All in all, Inger Bråtveit has lived up to the expectations her first novel created six years ago, the one that won her the Nynorsk literary award. She is highly aware of style and form, and I think old Tajei [ Vesaas, Norwegian author and poet] would have approved of this novel.”
(Oddmund Hagen, Dag og Tid, Norway)

”For Per Petterson and Inger Bråtveit the family is difficult and unavoidable as a premise for personal and political development. In their novels the breakdown of the family becomes the breakdown of the individuals, in particular on a deeply personal and psychological level, but around this there are material, structural and cultural matters which precisely because they are part of these psychological “problems”, can’t easily be solved or forgotten.”
(Norsk litterær årbok 2009)

First published: Forlaget Oktober, 2008
Inger Bråtveit: Biography and bibliography