The best Lars Mytting books

It will be a matter of time (little), that all the work of Lars Mytting it arrives at the Spanish bookstores to give a good account of a very remarkable bibliography and that transits between genres with great ease, always with the trace of a humanism towards introspection but that paces the plots intensifying each scene.

Norwegian literature, beyond labels of the Nordic black genre with great current representatives such as Jo Nesbo, always offers a rich and varied melting pot of creativity in which works of the unpredictable and fascinating melt. Gaarder and the no less disturbing Karl Ove Knausgård, reinventor of the autobiography as a fictionalized portrait in installments.

And of course, Lars Mytting is not far behind with his great novels favored in its dissemination by the worldwide take-off, back in 2010, of a book as special as "The Wood Book."

Although the literary career of this author already predicted great successes since in 2006 he managed to become a bestseller in his country with the particular becoming of a character faced with the world as Erik fyksen.

As we have new works by this author, we will make up the usual podium of his bibliography. For now, we are paving the way ...

Recommended Books by Lars Mytting

The wood book

Who has not ever approached the trunk of a felled tree to elucidate about its antiquity through its concentric rings? There is something atavistic about it. And of approach to other times of a time that perhaps did not belong to us, considering the greater longevity of many trees lost in the forests ...

Under these notions we find in this book that sensation of elementary relationship, of idling time only concerned with marking the steps between stations with rings, while simply breathing. The challenge for a writer who is about to narrate about that other passing of life is to be able to offer action, reasons for reading, perhaps the tension, the doubts, the mystery.

When this is achieved, the magic of that magnetism arises through a literature that tells us about ourselves with a slow pace that stops everything else, so many and so many claims that ask us for another accelerated pace. Without leaving aside a lyrical aspect loaded with symbolism, in this novel we undertake the simple task of observing a human being of today who, however, submits only to the tempos of yesterday, with a detail that strangely seems at times a tutorial on the tasks of the woodcutter but that ends up splashing us with that passion for the little things.

The small is the essence, the rest is artifice and pride. The elemental of the lumberjack in search of the best tree is deep wisdom of the environment, relearning from the observation given to the senses without modern trompe l'oeil. A novel to enjoy from a particular sense of connection with the most basic.

The sixteen trees of the Somme

In 1916, the Somme region of France was bathed in blood as one of the bloodiest scenes of the First World War. In 1971 the well-known battle claimed its last victims. A couple jumped into the air when stepping on a grenade from that scene.

The past manifested itself as a warlike phantom, like a sinister echo that reverberated years later. Worst of all is that the couple left a son, who at three years of age was lonely without a clear destination, in any sense. All that could only be captured as a vague memory, a dreamlike veil. During the following years in which Edvard grew up with his grandfather Sverre, he hardly evoked that gloomy circumstance that marked his beginning of life.

But at some point the past always ends up visiting us for better or for worse, it offers us a quick look in the mirror of what it was, and sometimes it leaves us a de facto indelible reflection, and that we believed we never treasure. Edvard suffers from that claim effect from the past and is pushed to know more, to know more. Or at least to review the path made, the one that leads you crestfallen when you have lost something on any journey. Ultimately returning to the Somme, after a journey in search of that evocative past that has awakened with force, almost fiercely demanding Edvard's full attention, is a reunion with a scenario that still has much to tell him and to clarify about what is and what could be. In Edvard's trip we also know intrahistories of that Europe as orphaned as Edvard, a Continent like a sum of brothers bent on discord throughout their existence.

Undoubtedly a masterful parallel to go back in the life of Edvard, in the truth of his parents and in the harsh reality of a Europe that sometimes seems to have also erased its past, that from which to learn and extract necessary lessons.

5/5 - (13 votes)

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