“Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes and goes.” – Jean Cocteau, Orphée
Tarjei Vesaas’s lyrical, coming of age novel opens with two poems: “First Preface” and “Second Preface.” Not only do they introduce the book’s themes of memory, nature, death, and the passage of time, their doubling (two attempts at a preface) sets up the book’s recurring cycle of mirrors and echoes. (The original Norwegian title, Baaten om kvelden, even contains an echo, perhaps more loudly indicating what it means when “the hills reply.”)
The book is alternately challenging and simple, ungraspable and deeply immersive. What carried me through was not the narrative so much as the space that opened up for me to engage my subconscious. The poems’ spare details and nebulous landscape activated a direct channel to my earliest dreams and memories, beginning with the first tercet: “My first dream. / My delicate dream / of gliding water and my dream.” The experience was unexpected and uncanny, given that the author was born in 1897 in Norway, and I was born ten years after Rokkan’s translation was first published in England in 1971. He died in 1975.
But Vesaas’s river made me think of my river, the churning, pungent Mohawk of the ’80s. I recalled looking through the window from the upstairs landing outside my childhood bedroom, over the trees and across the bank to the river’s eastward flow into Schenectady. As I read the next lines, “The heart swells beside gliding rivers / The rivers eat into the shores / Shrinking shores lose their name,” I remembered watching the storms come and pass, the ice heave in spring, an occasional speedboat. In “Second Preface,” an image of a boat emerges “between the sharp outlines of shadows,” and I felt myself descending the narrow dirt path from the bank to the shore, where I would throw stones and step over dead fish and stare across the water into the trees on the river’s desert islands. As I breathed in the silent stillness captured by Vessas’s writing, scenes from my childhood floated in front of the page, and I remembered a recurring dream of a barren hill that absorbed a low underground rumbling, which would then grow so deafening that the hill would collapse. I would wake up in terror. Near the end of the book, Vesaas describes how that dream haunted me for years: “What is stillness like when it is so great that it cannot be grasped? When it has come gliding out of its own place and feels more oppressive than thunder?”
Bursts of verse and lyrical abstraction seep into all of the novel’s scenes, flooding the roughly sketched story with endless sloughs that slowed me down to reorient what I was reading. Fortunately, a series of vivid images from eventful moments hold the book together. First, there is a young boy shoveling snow from a logging road with his father; they are deeply connected in silence as the boy imagines a ring of horses encircling him from outside a wall of falling snow. He is with his father and apart, in his own world until his father notices he’s stopped working. The boy reluctantly resumes the task, longing to stop again and breathe in the scent of the horses. “Here as everywhere else there is a smell of the hanging weight of fresh moisture. Wet snow, and snow melting on your face.” The “hanging weight” of falling snow melds with his body performing the endless task, the body of his father supervising, and the imaginary horses.
Often, characters absorb the landscape into themselves or are absorbed by it, resisting obliteration by hanging onto hallucinations such as the ring of horses. Later, a man will lie in a cold marsh to stare up at a swoop of cranes. “The marsh has a painful grip on me,” he confesses. “I am soaking wet and feel heavy as a stone.” Yet he remains there uncomfortably, perhaps wishing for the birds to give him some clue for how to fly.
When summer comes for the boy from the snow, he meets another boy named Per, with whom he is mutually drawn to walk at daybreak to the riverbank near his house. As they look across the water at the sunrise and a hill reddening around the edges, a new mysterious glow comes from behind them and lights up the hillside. Then a girl appears there, and they watch her strip naked while the light burns increasingly bright. As it blinds them, they envision “a wave of shining horses, or a waterfall of them … pouring down the hillside like an unpent damn.” The unexplainable light and the eruption of horses make them think of death, though in their minds they “were not about to die, we were alive and more than alive, we were open and ready to be filled with what was coming.”
While the boys’ glimpse of death amidst their sexual awakening feels safely out of reach, the narrator dwells elsewhere on death’s constant presence. A beautifully eerie scene, like something out of a Malaparte novel, describes the peaceful faces of five dead soldiers on the forest floor in a night rain. When the sun begins to rise, a gleam appears on them, “The afterglow of crimes that rises up to heaven.” Often in The Hills Reply, men are drawn toward forces of death. A man stares into his reflection in the river until he falls into the water and nearly drowns, barely willing to fight the current. A young man follows a similar impulse, climbing a mountain where a noose hangs at the top of the rock face. He touches his forehead to the noose and feels a pleasant burn, but resists the urge to hang himself. He climbs down to the road and finds a girl working in a garden. They converse awkwardly, and he presses his burning forehead to hers, causing her to flinch as “disappointment engulfs him like an avalanche.”
Is the narrator an older version of the boy looking back, alternating between first and third person, memory and hallucination? This is not entirely clear, but the boy’s arrested sexual development is partially informed by “The Melody,” the novel’s final unsettling tale of a household where the parents take long absences in the dark snowy woods, while upstairs two older girls who were hired for help around the house receive visits from sexual partners and remove their clothing in front of him. In his spare time, the boy pores over an album of photos of his mother as a girl, more interested in her than the girls upstairs. Still, his mother catches him looking at the girls and begins to tell him about sex. When the mother won’t let him stay up to wait for the father to come home, he suggests he might know about his father having an affair. The Oedipal scene is doubly unresolved, as she both sends him away from her side and prevents him from confronting the father upon his return.
Vesaas’ story is bleak with loneliness. It rumbles with an ache for connection to people, animals and visions, and ultimately the earth, which waits to fulfill our mortal destinies. It is also enlivened by a discipline of active dreaming, the writer tuning in to “the pulse in the night … for what one does not understand.” In hands like Vesaas’, it’s a discipline worth honing.
[Published by Archipelago Books on December 10, 2019, 272 pages, $18 paperback]