Marit Kapla

Osebol is an isolated hamlet of about forty houses in the north of Värmland, not far from the Norwegian border. People used to live from logging, hunting and subsistence-farming, but nowadays there are few jobs, and young people have to go elsewhere for school or work. The shop has closed, the bridge needs repairs, and the population is getting older rapidly.

Journalist Marit Kapla, who grew up in Osebol, went back to the village in 2016 and 2017 to interview just about all the people who live there, old and young, natives and incomers (there are two Hungarians, a Pole, and two Dutch couples settled in the village, as well as a few urban Swedes and a stray Norwegian). She lets them talk about their background, their memories of growing up, the work they do or used to do, their problems and worries, what they feel about living in the countryside, and just about anything else that happens to come up.

There's no narrator's voice introducing, explaining and correcting. Everything we read in the book is told in the words of the local people, arranged into chapters house by house. To make us focus on the orality of what we're reading, Kapla has laid the text out on the page like free verse, using line-breaks instead of punctuation to give us a sense of the natural rhythms of speech. There are equally natural sudden changes of topic, as new ideas come into the speakers' minds, and where there are several family members being interviewed together, Kapla allows them to alternate or interrupt each other, presumably all according to the way the actual interview went.

It's an unusual strategy, and a risky one (a friend commented that it is strange to read about the decline of the logging industry in a book that must have consumed a good few hectares of timber), but it does seem to work: the characters of the individual speakers come across very strongly. I steamed though this at fairly high speed, as it needs to go back to the library, but I think it's a book to savour and come back to, really. And it will make you want to take that long-postponed trip to Sweden...… (altro)