The Pastor Virtual Book Talk
BackCategory
Entertainment
Start date
2021-10-19 13:00:00
End date
2021-10-19 14:00:00
Address / City
58 Park Ave New York
Location
NY, US
The Pastor Virtual Book Talk with Hanne Ørstavik & Rebecca Dinerstein Knight. On October 19, join Scandinavia House to celebrate the release of the new novel The Pastor in a virtual book talk with award-winning Norwegian novelist Hanne Ørstavik! With moderator Rebecca Dinerstein Knight, Ørstavik will discuss her gripping new release, out that day in translation by Martin Aitken from Archipelago Books.
Liv, an intense and reticent theologian, is fascinated by words and their edges and echoes, and researches how the language of the Bible was wielded against the indigenous Sami people during the 1800s. When she moves to a bitterly cold fishing village to to work as the church’s new pastor following the death of her dearest friend, Kristiane, she begins planning her sermons while studying the violent interplay of Norway’s Christian colonial past. Becoming acquainted with the villagers and their private tragedies, excavating their past and her own, she searches for meaning from scenes such as of Sami children gathering cloudberries and figs, from the memory of the magical weaver woman from an Astrid Lindgren fairytale she read as a child, or in how misstep and misunderstandings can lead to isolation and pain.
With each new experience and confrontation, fresh questions about scripture and empathy and who she is arise; as she wonders how “language, in all its plasticity, became so stiff and unbending,” she slowly bends it back toward her, building her own vocabulary of healing.
Martin Aitken’s translation of this extraordinary novel rings with the brilliance and rigor of a master.
This event will take place as a Zoom webinar; please ask questions in the chat or send them in advance to info@amscan.org. Registration is required; please sign up at the link.
“The various threads shuffle seamlessly in Liv’s head and build to a heartbreaking crescendo, filled in with brilliant descriptions of the flat landscape (a church above the fjord sits “brilliantly white… on a dish of darkness”) . . . Ørstavik distinguishes herself as a leading light in international literature.”—Publishers Weekly
Liv, an intense and reticent theologian, is fascinated by words and their edges and echoes, and researches how the language of the Bible was wielded against the indigenous Sami people during the 1800s. When she moves to a bitterly cold fishing village to to work as the church’s new pastor following the death of her dearest friend, Kristiane, she begins planning her sermons while studying the violent interplay of Norway’s Christian colonial past. Becoming acquainted with the villagers and their private tragedies, excavating their past and her own, she searches for meaning from scenes such as of Sami children gathering cloudberries and figs, from the memory of the magical weaver woman from an Astrid Lindgren fairytale she read as a child, or in how misstep and misunderstandings can lead to isolation and pain.
With each new experience and confrontation, fresh questions about scripture and empathy and who she is arise; as she wonders how “language, in all its plasticity, became so stiff and unbending,” she slowly bends it back toward her, building her own vocabulary of healing.
Martin Aitken’s translation of this extraordinary novel rings with the brilliance and rigor of a master.
This event will take place as a Zoom webinar; please ask questions in the chat or send them in advance to info@amscan.org. Registration is required; please sign up at the link.
“The various threads shuffle seamlessly in Liv’s head and build to a heartbreaking crescendo, filled in with brilliant descriptions of the flat landscape (a church above the fjord sits “brilliantly white… on a dish of darkness”) . . . Ørstavik distinguishes herself as a leading light in international literature.”—Publishers Weekly
Organizer
Scandinavia House
Phone
212.779.3587
Email
info@amscan.org
