The desolate beauty of a Nordic winter mirrors the interior landscape of a troubled priest in The Pastor, a mesmerizing study of spiritual unease by Norwegian novelist Hanne Ørstavik.
Liv, a theology student uprooted by grief following the death of her friend Kristiane, abandons her Ph.D. fellowship in Germany to take a position as an assistant pastor in a small town in northern Norway. She is looking for God, she says, "not in the form of some remote aesthetic, more as a commitment, a place to stand in life." Ørstavik makes evocative use of her setting, letting the "allure of the horizontal" and the "vast, open expanse" of the place set the tone for Liv's fitful mind, wherein boundaries--between past and present, inside and out, language and reality--often dissolve.
Within Liv's own traumas are haunting resonances with the subject of her academic research: a rebellion by the Sami, an indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, against the colonizing Norwegians some 150 years previous. Liv identifies with the Sami for what she sees as their "foundational and original experience, a swell of powerlessness and rage" that speaks to her own religious ennui. With writerly grace and moral seriousness, Ørstavik bends these parallels toward the novel's most profound insights about how both language and violence might mediate a relationship with the divine.
Translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken, whose translation of Østravik's novel Love was a National Book Award finalist in 2018, The Pastor summons a sweep of images and questions bound to linger. --Theo Henderson, bookseller at Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle, Wash.