Set on a Norwegian island 95 miles above the Arctic Circle, Rebecca Dinerstein's debut novel, The Sunlit Night, is the wistful story of two young people--one American, the other a Russian immigrant to the United States--thrust by misfortune into a romantic encounter in this most unlikely of places.
The novel pairs recent college graduate Frances, fleeing a failed relationship and her parents' crumbling marriage in New York to intern with an artist who paints only in the color yellow, and 17-year-old Yasha Gregoriov, whose first return visit to Moscow from his home in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn is shattered by the sudden death of his father. Determined to carry out his father's wish to be buried at the "top of the world," Yasha accompanies the body to the Viking Museum, a decidedly modest attraction where tourists come to celebrate events like the whale meat festival and to practice archery while picnicking on a boulder-strewn beach, where the elder Gregoriov is buried. "Yasha and I had both come a rather far and strange way, toward either an end or a height," Frances observes.
With the arrival of Yasha's mother and her lover, and the web of attractions that blossom among the characters as the one between Frances and Yasha simmers, Dinerstein subtly complicates the plot while allowing the tension between her protagonists to build. A skilled portraitist, Dinerstein layers precise brushstrokes of detail on a foundation of keen emotional insight to raise her supporting characters above the level of caricature, whether it's Haldor, the lovelorn chief of the Viking Museum, the unaffected blacksmith Sigbjørn, Frances's feuding parents or Yasha's self-absorbed mother.
Dinerstein's appreciation for her Norwegian setting, shaped by the year she spent there on a remote northern island (a visit that inspired her bilingual English-Norwegian poetry collection, Lofoten), shines in her descriptions of the stark but beautiful natural environment. That's especially true when Frances describes the eerie phenomenon of constant daylight in July, "the sun in perpetual motion, the sky turning orange and cranberry until at three it returned to blue, and I felt ready for bed."
In her first novel, Rebecca Dinerstein has demonstrated a level of mastery that would be impressive even in a much more seasoned writer. The Sunlit Night is a funny, wise and tender story, a near perfect blend of disparate elements that's reflected in the ambiguous, yet vaguely hopeful, ending that provides the fitting conclusion to this unusual love story. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Rebecca Dinerstein's first novel is a tender love story set on a remote Norwegian island.