It’s the early eighties. Arvid Lunde moves to a small industrial town deep inside a West Norwegian fjord to work as a teacher at a local secondary school. He looks as if he wants to be swallowed up by the town, as if he wants to become one with the smoke, the rain and the fog. Then one day the spirit of the age enters his skinny body. People suddenly realize that Arvid Lunde has become a millionaire trading stocks.
A furniture seller from a Bergen suburb gets into his car and sets off for Sweden, while Norway are hosting the winter Olympics at Lillehammer. He wants to commit one last, desperate act. There was a time when he was a person who knew people’s dreams, who delivered happiness on people’s doorsteps. Now his shop has closed, and the woman he is married to no longer remembers his name.
They are un-living and no one can see them. The drive grey official cars of the brand Toyota Corolla, and the pass through the streets of the decrepit city of Oslo. They carry the names of long dead prime ministers. They do what needs to be done, in the shadow of the light of social democracy, a distant, falling star.
Saga Night. The Lunde Trilogy is three novels in one, three stories from three desperate, mythologized decades of recent history. It’s about how we got to where we are, or about how we lost our way, or about what is left of the dream of the life we were supposed to share.
