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.
The 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.
Return to Somme ultimately, after a journey in search of that evocative past that has awakened with force, almost fiercely, claiming Edvard's full attention, It is a reunion with a stage that still has a lot to tell you and to clarify what it is and what it 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.
You can now buy the novel The sixteen trees of the Somme, the latest book by Lars Mytting, here:
The truth is that I found it fantastic. A good saga that you don't get tired of reading.
It seemed very short to me. It hooks you from the first moment.
The feeling of brevity is always better than the typical one: I had x pages left over. The higher the synthesis capacity, while maintaining the weight and depth of the weft, the better, right?