The Hills Reply

“There’s beauty to be found outdoors, but it’s not without its horrors. The conflicted role of humans in nature is a familiar theme, but few narratives hum with the surreal power of this one.”  — Kirkus Reviews

An intensely graceful novel recounting scenes of the Norwegian countryside from one of Norway's most beloved 20th-century writers

Tarjei Vesaas’s final work, The Hills Reply, is a flow of intensely lyrical autobiographical scenes. The vivid beauty of the wilds of Norway grounds the narrator’s interior flashes.

The first sketch finds a boy, his father, and their packhorse clearing a logging road buried in snow as their surroundings give way to a crisis. Profound insights into human behavior, solitude, and nonverbal communication stand up to the power and immensity of the natural world. The land speaks to (and at times almost swallows) the central character, as he is pushed to the edge of what a body and mind can endure.

The hypnotic pulse of Vesaas’s prose blurs the line between memory and hallucination, as it stares bravely into the unblinking eye of Nature. An unforgettable book, The Hills Reply is a visceral salute to the human spirit, to the ecstasy of wilderness, and to their tender overlapping.Contents
1. As it Stands in the Memory
2. In the Marshes and on the Earth
3. Spring in Winter
4. Daybreak with Shining Horses
5. The Drifter and the Mirrors
6. The Wasted Day Creeps Away on Its Belly
7. Washed Cheeks
8. Fire in the Depths
9. Words, Words
10. The Dream of Stone
11. The Heart Lies Naked beside the Highway in the Dark
12. The Tranquil River Glides Out of the Landscape
13. Beyond One’s Grasp
14. Just Walking Up to Fetch the Churn
15. The Melody
16. The Rivers beneath the Earth"Vesaas writes beautifully about the natural world, but he presents it as a frequently harsh and brutal place. Early in the book, one character encounters a crane, and a sublime passage about the grace with which birds move gives way to something much more visceral ... There's beauty to be found outdoors, but it's not without its horrors.The conflicted role of humans in nature is a familiar theme, but few narratives hum with the surreal power of this one."
--Kirkus Reviews

"This final work by one of Norway’s most significant writers of the 20th century has the abstract, colorist strangeness of Matisse’s late wall-hangings. What would happen if landscape entirely superseded people (as if this doesn’t happen when we die). Here’s a beautiful, arresting answer."
--John Freeman, Lithub

"Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas (also the author of The Ice Palace and The Birds) writes with an unassuming wonder that fills each moment with beauty and dread. The Hills Reply was Vesaas’ final book and in a hallucinatory fashion it again renders the smallness (but also precision) of the human mind against the immensity of the natural world. Vesaas is amazing in any season, but especially winter."
--Nate McNamara, Lithub

"A startling book whose style will challenge as well as invigorate readers... an unusual hybrid novel that is immensely rewarding and often stunningly beautiful. The Hills Reply is without a doubt one of the great reading surprises of the year."
--C.M. Crockford, Shelf Awareness

"This episodic novel was Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas’s last book before his death, and the English translation by Elizabeth Rokkan relates a complex, overlapping set of vignettes that take place against the backdrop of the Norwegian countryside."
--Emma Specter, Vogue

"Tarjei Vesaas is the best and most interesting Norwegian writer after the Second World War. His language is so sensitive, so open to his characters' minds and the landscape they inhabit, that it gives form to that space between - between people and other people, between people and nature - the space where our lives unfold."
--Karl Ove Knausgaard

"(Tarjei Vesaas's) last book. A visionary masterpiece. I revere Vesaas and Elizabeth Rokkan. First published in 1968 but feels philosophically and stylistically brand new for the major concerns of our time as regards nature, time and human loss. Astonishingly beautiful and strange."
--Max Porter

"Vesaas's story ... 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."
--David Varno, On the Seawall

"The text is a masterful subversion of nostalgia, and a unification of place, person, and past. Divided into episodes, each section is a meditation on the existential symbiosis between consciousness and its surroundings....Like Van Gogh’s Café at Night, where structures, people, and the unknowable ether above join to form a single unit, The Hills Reply intimates a concerted artistic whole through philosophical and aesthetic connectivity."
--Entropy Magazine

"A clear crystal of imagination...a rare kind of masterpiece"
--Daily Telegraph

"A rare mixture of creative vitality, conviction and artistry."
--Guardian

"An excellent translation by Elizabeth Rokkan catches the quiet, poetic mood."
--Sunday Telegraph

"Infinitely calm and strong."
--Daily Telegraph

"Disturbing and beautiful...elaborate and powerful."
--Sunday Times

"A book of great strength and beauty."
--The Times

"Vesaas reflects on nature as if writing from a time before cities conquered the earth; it cannot be beautiful because it is not yet lost . . . For us, nature cannot return to the state before it was named, it cannot return to a time before cities conquered the earth, it can only come within an inch. Vesaas closes this final inch."
--Tommy Cunningham, Who Can Lift It?
(Tarjei Vesaas’s) last book. A visionary masterpiece. I revere Vesaas and Elizabeth Rokkan. First published in 1968 but feels philosophically and stylistically brand new for the major concerns of our time as regards nature, time and human loss. Astonishingly beautiful and strange.
— Max Porter
Tarjei Vesaas is the best and most interesting Norwegian writer after the Second World War. His language is so sensitive, so open to his characters’ minds and the landscape they inhabit, that it gives form to that space between – between people and other people, between people and nature – the space where our lives unfold.
— Karl Ove Knausgaard
Just as one should write a note to an old teacher whose guidance becomes increasingly meaningful as the years go by, one should pay homage to those writers who have brought enjoyment and healing. Tarjei Vesaas belongs to them.
— Brita K. StendahlTarjei Vesaas (1897-1970) novelist, poet, and playwright, is widely regarded as one of Norway's greatest writers of the twentieth century. Vesaas spent the majority of his life in Vinje, living on the farmhouse that had belonged to his family for three centuries. Despite his apparent isolation, Vesaas proved to be a prolific writer, publishing twenty-five novels and several volumes of poetry, short stories, and plays in his lifetime. He won several awards, including the Gyldendal's endowment in 1943, The Nordic Council's Literature prize in 1963 for his novel, The Ice Palace, and the Venice Prize in 1953 for The Winds. His novel The Birds was published by Archipelago in 2016. He was considered for the Nobel Prize three times. About the translator: Elizabeth Rokkan was a professor of English at the University of Bergen, Norway from 1964 to 1990. She has received critical acclaim for her translations of the work of Tarjei Vesaas and Cora Sandel, and was awarded the St. Olav Medal for her efforts to make Norwegian literature available to English speakers.As It Stands in the Memory
THERE HE STANDS in sifting snow. In my thoughts in sifting snow. A father – and his winter-shaggy, brown horse, in snow.
His brown horse and his face. His sharp words. His blue eyes and his beard. The beard with a reddish tinge against the white. Sifting snow. Blind, boundless snow.
Far away, deep in the forest. Sunken roads in the drifts, gullies dug out of the drifts, logging roads walled in by snow.
Blind, boundless forest – because the horizons have disappeared today in the mild, misty snowfall. Here everything is silent, no sound is made on the logging-road in the loose snow as it piles higher and higher.
What is outside?
Nothing, it seems.
There is something outside, but it’s a boy’s secret, deeply concealed.
He shivers occasionally and glances at the wall of snow and mist. Of course he knows what ought to be there, but it is 
easy to imagine very different things when you are a child, or half-child, and too young to be with a sharp-tongued father, among heavy, soaking wet logs and a horse strong as iron.
Why think about what’s outside all the time?
Only more snow.
And hillsides that I know out and in, every hollow and cliff.
No use saying that.
I’m here to clear the snow. To make a logging-road.
No use saying that either.
It’s not so certain that there is anything outside. During the first hours you spend digging, before you’re too tired to think and imagine anything, life starts teeming outside the ring of mist and the wall of snow. Animals crowd round in a ring, their muzzles pointing towards me. Not ordinary animals. Animals I’ve never seen before. They’re as tall as two horses one on top of the other, and they lower red muzzles and strike at the wall of mist while they are thinking. They switch at the snowflakes with long tails, as if it were summer and there were flies. There are so many of them that they
can stand side by side in an unbroken ring – and they have small eyes that they almost close as they stand wondering and thinking.
Supposing the snow suddenly stopped falling – would they stand there exposed?
What would they do then?
What will they do anyway?
I want them there, that’s what it is.
So there they are. All day long.
Yes, they stand there thinking – while I clear the logging-road, digging and digging and thinking and thinking too. In the snowfall in a blind forest.
The shovel becomes idle in my hands.
Supposing it stopped snowing, supposing they were standing there.
What would they want?
They are so real that they have a slight smell that reaches me. It is probably much stronger close to them, and a little of it reaches me. Perhaps it is not a smell; it is not easy to decide what I sense it with. They stand side by side in a single ring
of flesh – but between them and myself there is the wall of mist and the falling snow.
Much too tempting to think about them. The snow collects on their muzzles, and their tails wave, raised as if in fight.
There is a sharp, “What is it?”
The boy starts.
What a question!
What is it? he asks, that one over there with his heavy shovelfuls of snow. An odd question when you can see that splendid ring of strange creatures. What is he thinking about over there? Must be thinking about something, he too. But you can’t ask him about it.
The question only meant that the shovel had been idle too long. He has a watchful eye for such things, and for many others, that one over there.
This is the toilsome daily round.
The man and the horse have hard tasks. The logs have to be taken the long way through the forest to the river. All the bad weather this winter makes such work endless drudgery.
The stern man gets no answer to his question. But the
shovel moves into action again, so all is well. It always goes as that one over there wishes. The gully in the snow has to be opened up farther, to fresh piles of logs lying deep in the snow. There was a road here, a gully, but now it is completely wiped out by the storm and the wind. The horse is sent ahead, and he wades through the snow and finds the road again with some delicate instinct of his, then the two of them follow him with their shovels and tramp about, widening the track the horse has made. So it goes, piece by piece.
Endless drudgery.
Don’t think about it.
Think about the solid ring of big animals close by in the twilight. Curious creatures that have not been seen in any book.
That’s not thinking, it’s resting.
Breath in what must be their smell. Here as everywhere else there is a smell of the hanging weight of fresh moisture. Wet snow, and snow melting on your face.
Restful to think about. Exciting to think about.