“The Son of Saltstøtten” by Carl Henrik Berge – Reviews and recommendations

With debutantes, you never know what to expect, and “The Son of Saltstøtten” is a story I really didn’t expect.

Carl Henrik Berge, a young 30-year-old journalist from Bergen, has chosen to walk in some pretty big footsteps.

The question then becomes: how does it come out? And then: Kwa get out?

Unrest and stands of salt

The story takes us between different cities where strict, but not necessarily wise guardians decide who is allowed to enter.

Funny things send people wandering: a cloud turns into a floating city – how long will it stay afloat?

Things get complicated, a dangerous infection comes inside the gates and yes, people are born in the city of Ironsengen

A pillar of salt is a salt stone statue.

It is used figuratively to express that someone becomes paralysed.

It originates from the Bible, when Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt because she looked back when they fled Sodom.

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Salt supports aside, all of this could have happened today.

But neither the cities nor the people have names that place the story in time and space: we are in the “City of Marble” or in the “City of the Sea” and in the same way people are identified as “the blacksmith’s wife” or ” the boy”.

Nature points to the Middle East. Well-known props such as salt pillars and rush baskets with infants emphasize that we are in a biblical landscape.

Sometimes the language piles up below this:

Wanderers meet people who give enigmatic answers, answers that don’t always require great wisdom, but which often have an aura of wisdom and mystery,

God in the suburbs

While the Bible offers both brutality and various bodily practices, the associations occasionally slip in the direction of “Game of Thrones.”

No Old Testament prophet offers such details. Another feature that kept drawing my mind to “Game of Thrones” is religion.

Here, as there, it is not central to people.

Some speak of God’s punishment, others of gods or spirits, but mostly they seem like figures of speech.

Here there are neither clear ideas about the divine, nor ritual actions to speak of. Religion does not help explain either the universe or everything that happens.

What does this story want?

Language is what drives this novel. It is a brutal, beautiful and unusual image creation.

I imagine the iron bed, the lepers, the blacksmith’s wife, the marble city and walking in the mud after the scum has retreated. This is great quality.

Some episodes repeat themselves, such as when the boy places the salt support, which was once his father, on the horse when he is about to flee.

But here there are many people who wander, who meet different people with cryptic messages and who knock on the gates to let them enter the city where very different living conditions await them.

And though the novel ends with a nice ending to the boy’s story, I can’t find the keys to a more comprehensive understanding of the whole story.

“Saltstøttens son” is a linguistic feast and a ride of distinctive images. Few can do it after Berge.

But the novel left behind a vague atmosphere, rather than something that really caught on. I miss this.

But both the strong and weak aspects of the novel make me more than usual excited for the next book.

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