When she greets me at the train station of her hometown, Hudson, two hours north of New York City, Davis is happy to explain how the project grew out of her idea of what it means to be an international writer: “You may ask questions in Norwegian-if they are simple,” Davis wrote in an email before the interview.
“I did not want to stop reading Norwegian,” Davis wrote about the experiment in The Times Literary Supplement: “I had become attached to my daily immersion in the tales, some quite dramatic, all curiously entrancing.” The result was a heartfelt passion for the book itself. The result-a 400-page epic, chronicling births, deaths and marriages over the course of four centuries-was described by some critics as somewhere between the endless genealogies of Genesis (“and Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob”) and Finnegans Wake.
It is a novel, of sorts, in which the acclaimed author Dag Solstad delves into the genealogy of his own family, fact by fact, name by name.
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