Pee-stained pages of Norwegian prose

That's what a book looks like after the close encounter with cat piss. I choose to laugh rather than cry. It must've happened sometime around the first week we had our kittens, and it was partly down to my own laziness. For at least a week, maybe two, I refused to check what's going on behind the couch, though I knew that frightened Little Mary had been hiding there the first night. She didn't climb onto the bookshelf, little peanut, but when the girls were playing, some of the books from the pile fell to the floor and were left there, unattended, for a while (a long while, as the books stink like a dead mackerel). I'd decided to help them with vinegar; the one in the photo still stinks, maybe there's no magical cure :(, but I'm trying once again.

Going back to the book itself—I love Vigdis Hjorth, I love her passion. Over a year ago I discovered two brilliant Norwegian writers: her and Jon Fosse (actually, Fosse much earlier, in autumn'23). The latter got the Nobel Prize, which means a lot of his work has been translated into English and my mother tongue. Vigdis is far more obscure. Just yesterday I found myself frustrated that I don't know Norwegian. Only five of her books are available in English, only four books translated into Polish, luckily two of them are different from the ones in English, but still a big part of her work is inaccessible to me. Feck! Only now have I realised that both, Hjorth and Fosse, debuted the same year of 1983. Both their voices are of extreme literary beauty.

I've read Hjorth's Is Mother Dead, A House in Norway, and Will and Testament so far. I got If Only, on paper and as an ebook (the exact one in the photo, smelling of Little Mary's pee), and Long Live the Post Horn! on my e-reader waiting for their turn. As for Fosse, I'm reading his writings in two languages: have read I-II and III-VI of Septology (in Polish, translation of the the last part is coming out soon), A Shining (in Polish Białość), and two in English: Scenes From a Childhood and The Dead Dogs. I don't tend to read just one writer intensely, so it'll take me a fair while to get through more of their work. Still, even thinking about it makes me happy.