“Assisted by the humorous and poetic prose, daily life at a nursing home is portrayed in a low key and gripping manner … Steen succeeds well in mixing the tragic with the comical and the lyrical, and the novel is a much better read than the subject indicates. It contains the whole spectre from the burlesque to the resigned … a gripping and universal testimonial”
(Adresseavisa)
“The elements in this tight, dense, sometimes darkly humorous tale from a nursing home are nicely balanced against each other … In Thorvald Steen’s prose this has become both an unsentimental, occasionally humorous and witty story of how life, no matter how late in the day, still can offer great surprises and life-affirming experiences … Steen again shows that he can handle many genres – not only can he write convincingly about historical characters, he also has something true and uncomfortable to say, in his sober and unsentimental way, in the small scale drama format. Steen also manages to provide his story with a surprising twist, an final chord which gives the novel power and vitality”
(Dagsavisen)
“This is serious. And it doesn’t get less serious by the fact that the author himself has a muscular disease. Even though Steen carefully puts distance between himself and this person, this is still fiction partly based on experience. The effort it takes to make the body work as well as possible is very convincingly depicted … a sad and beautiful book”
(NRK P2)
“Steen writes with sober, realistic elegance about the decay of the body, and about how the dwindling body has taken control of life itself. In the letter to the daughter he reflects on how it has been to live with the certainty that he will gradually need professional care. This is written with mature, thoughtful, slightly melancholic, but unflinching power … Steen writes about the trivial absurdities of the nursing home with a mixture of political sting and occasionally pitch black humour … By focusing on the chronically sick, Steen poses some elementary questions about human worth and about how we relate to each other as a society”
(Morgenbladet)
“the prose lifts the reader, expands the images, make you savour the tiniest little word, every perfectly placed comma, the precisely selected phrases … a powerful manifest in favour of human worth. The book has a lot of warm humour”
(Vårt Land)
“Probably the best book I’ve read by Steen … a both well written and easily read existential novel which sooner or later will be relevant to all of us”
(Stavanger Aftenblad)
