The House in the Dark

The House in the Dark

Part allegory, part fable, The House In The Dark was written in secret during the German occupation of Norway, and gives a stirring picture of how a society struggled to stay united under the strain of being watched by their invaders.

TARJEI VESAAS was born on a farm in the small village of Vinje in Telemark, an isolated mountainous district of southern Norway, in 1897 and, having little taste for travel and an abiding love of his native countryside, died there in 1970 aged seventy-two. A modernist who wrote, against literary convention, in Nynorsk rather than the Danish-influenced literary language Bokmål, he is regarded as one of Norway’s greatest twentieth-century writers. The author of more than twenty-five novels, five books of poetry, plus plays and short stories, he was three times a Nobel Prize candidate, although he never won the laureate. He did, however, receive Scandinavia’s most important literary award, the Nordic Council Literature Prize. He first began writing in the 1920s, but he did not gain international recognition until the mid-1960s when Peter Owen first published his books in translation; since then they have appeared in many languages. Doris Lessing described The Ice Palace as a ‘truly beautiful book … poetic, delicate, unique, unforgettable, extra ordinary’. The other work of fiction which, together with this novel, is generally regarded as his best is The Birds. At the time of his death he was considered Scandinavia’s leading writer, and to this day coachloads of his fans go on pilgrimage to his farmhouse home.

CONTENTS

Translator’s Foreword

1 In a Bewitched House

2 High and Dry

3 They Are Tunnelling Underground

4 The Arrow Polisher

5 The Brain

6 A Glimpse inside the Stockade

7 Frank and Freda

8 The Sentry

9 High and Dry

10 The Austere Face

11 The Dark

12 A Crossroads

13 On the Run

14 Inwards

15 The Heart through the Stone

16 Afterwards

17 Drawing Lots

18 The Finger

19 Acceptance

20 Henry and the Chorus

21 This Is Where They Are

In Memory of Stig

TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD

The House in the Dark was written in Norway during the Second World War in unusual circumstances. Tarjei Vesaas had already recorded his interpretation of the unleashing of violence on the world in 1939 in his novel The Seed, published in 1940.¹ By 1945 no one doubted that the war would soon be over, but in Occupied Norway there was much uncertainty as to how it would end. In her memoirs of her life with Vesaas,² Halldis Moren Vesaas, herself a poet and writer, relates the details of the novel’s composition and the effect on her husband and herself of the news of the ending of hostilities:

‘Tarjei, who was always inclined to imagine the worst, believed that the final struggle in Norway would be severe, and did not doubt that he would be taking part in it himself. That winter and spring of 1945 he worked more steadily than he had ever done before, or would do later. Normally he never worked at night, but now I used to wake in the small hours and see the light of his desk lamp still shining under the study door…. As usual he made little reference to what he was doing. But I understood that it must be something important.