Dave's Book Blog: "The Birds" by Tarjei Vesaas

Saturday, 13 January 2024

"The Birds" by Tarjei Vesaas

This book is the interior monologue of Matti, a 37 year old man living with his forty year old sister, Hege, in a small town in Norway. He is regarded by the others in his community as a 'Simple Simon' because he says strange things and he finds it difficult to concentrate (his inner life is by no means simple, being full of imaginative and spiritual thoughts) for long enough to hold down even the simplest of jobs. They tolerate him, even sometimes paying him for work that he cannot do and giving him free sweets, but he knows what they say about him and he is ashamed. Like anyone else he wants to be respected and admired. What he doesn't appreciate is how his sister has sacrificed her life to look after him, and he doesn't understand why sometimes she can be tetchy with him.

In some ways the story is a picaresque, a series of loosely connected events, although Matti is scarcely a picaro; he's loveable but not a rogue. He is a bit like Don Quixote, having an unusually imaginative inner life, although this is not a comic novel. His adventures include a woodcock that flies over his house, sheltering in a privy during a thunderstorm, a disastrous day of working at turnip weeding, sinking in his rowing boat and having to be rescued by two girls, plying his trade as a ferryman, and the dreadful consequences of his encounter with a lumberjack.

There are moments when we fear for the consequences; my heart was in my mouth more than once. Matti is an innocent in the sense that he does not understand the rules and restrictions of society, but he still has the normal needs of a young man and danger is always lurking underneath the surface, though this is rarely the danger that Matti fears (eg being struck by lightning). His fundamental problem is that needs Hege to look after him for the whole of his life but she has needs too and he only vaguely understands that nothing lasts forever.

The whole thing is written with a naive simplicity, in short sentences and short paragraphs, treating Matti's highly imaginative inner monologue with the same level of objectivity as actual events. This gives an indelible impression of someone who is simple in one sense and highly complex in another. The dialogue is full of ambiguous statements, achieving a high degree of verisimilitude, while at the same time brilliantly conveying to the reader, if not always to Matti, how others think of him, particularly the long-suffering Hege, torn between caring for Matti and finding personal fulfilment for herself. Matti, in particular, is prone to making gnomic statements which perfectly embody the gulf between his inner life and his ability to explain it using everyday words. Perhaps he ought to stick to the language of the birds.

It is a beautifully written book.

Perspectives:

It's a book showing how all creative people are supported so generously by those who go out and do the work.
It's about how women support men.
Mattis is neurodiverse and this explores that.
Mattis has superstitions and lives in an almost magical world; don't we all?
It's about the loss of innocence.
The village with its lake are the Garden of Eden ("If this isn't a paradise you're living in, then I don't know what is."; 2.21); Mattis is Adam and Hege is Eve and Jorgen is the serpent.
"We are presented the world strictly from Mattis’s perspective, and typically from his often inaccurate perceptions. He struggles to understand what others are thinking, and by extension their identities. ... It’s a terribly lonely world in which he lives, if one filled with a beauty that only he sees, from the lake he lingers on, to the birds flying over his house, which only he bothers to look at and appreciate, despite his very best efforts to tell others about them." Daniel Kushner 2016 in The National Book Review
"a masterful, haunting novel ... Mattis ... becomes frustrated very easily, he struggles to express himself, he has strange obsessions (about birds) and finds it very difficult to understand why other people do not share his interests. On a personal level, he is lonely, and both scared of approaching people and over-confident when he does." Scottmanleyhadley 2015 in Triumph of the Now

Selected quotes:

"He was certainly lost in contemplation and let the twilight grow deeper and deeper, in so far as you could call it twilight and not just something unspeakably gentle." (1.5)
"He sat surrounded by baffling problems, waiting with an important question." (1.11)
"Some shining cars rushing past restored his courage. It was so easy meeting cars you didn't know. No one sitting inside them knew he was Simple Simon." (1.13)
"Over the years Mattis had collected a large number of stories about lightning and what it did - but it had never struck a privy. Strange, but true." (2.24)
"He wriggled his fingers furiously round his ears. Flash and thunderclap were coming together now. One, two, three. It wasn't the interval between lightning and thunder he was counting, it was the time he had left to live." (2.24)
"It's a question of life and death. If it isn't Hege, it's me. Which would you rather? said a voice inside him." (2.25)
"He was being given sweets like a child - although he knew great things like shattered trees and lightning and omens of death. ... He had been made to feel small. The worst of it was that the storekeeper had only been trying to be kind." (2.25)
"His thoughts flapped helplessly around while he remained sitting still. The world was full of forces you couldn't fight against which suddenly loomed up and aimed a crushing blow at you." (3.37)
"Isn't it odd that you only become clever when it's too late? he thought." (3.44)
"He glided away from the shore. He was rowing and the things he was leaving behind remained in view the whole time." (3.46)
"Across the desolate water his cry sounded like the call of a strange bird. How big or small the bird was, you couldn't really tell." (3.47; last lines)