“A far-sighted, moving novel about roots, rose cultivation and belonging, written with a poet’s sense of linguistic details”
Kaja Schjerven Mollerin, Klassekampen, Best of 2019
“The Rose Novel is a novel about love, loss and longing, told through meticulous horticulture … Berg masters the art of subtle suggestion. He doesn’t dwell too long at events, but continues with the story, quickly and brutally … The essayistic passages about the qualities of roses never seem unmotivated, on the contrary. All the elements – dialogues, flashbacks and the science of roses – elegantly unfold and become a gorgeous unity, not unlike the rose itself”
6/6 stars, Fædrelandsvennen
“Berg writes like a true insider on the nature of roses, about rose breeding and its cultural history. He understands the epistemological potential of mixing the essayistic with fiction in his investigation of the perhaps most peculiar sub-discipline of horticulture … Berg’s prose is full of silly humour, which brushes elegantly up against the, at least in my mind, elegant, elevated art of rose cultivation”
Morgenbladet
“Berg definitely does the rose justice with his treatment of it in The Rose Novel. The extent of his knowledge is actually quite astonishing, and the main character’s passion for rose breeding is contagious. I must admit I went straight to a garden centre and bought a rose bush after finishing the book”
Vårt Land
“The surprises line up … the prose is direct, with short sentences that are poetic, without being pretentious … The novel’s gardener is a person the reader is quickly taken with … At least as interesting as the rose breeding is the coming-of-age story of the novel, about the friend HP who ‘had more fathers than any of us had teeth in our mouths’, about the friend Live, who gets cancer and dies, and about the girlfriend Laure, who carries an entire rural community inside her”
Aftenposten
“The skilled poet and essayist has filled the pages with fragrant plunges into the biology, anthropology and history of rose breeding, to such an extent that we are convinced that the world of roses can tell us at least a little bit more about life, and our civilization, than, let’s say, carrier pidgeons or sourdough … The roughness we know from Øyvind Berg’s poetry resonates with both narrative absurdity and melancholy … The prose simply shines … The rose breeder and the rose author both do their jobs thoroughly, with rolled-up sleeves, but what they open up is only hinted at, a fragment of nature in humans, its beauty. No elaborate ideas, no cocksure cultural critique”
Klassekampen
“An intoxicating enthusiasm for flowers … a giddy, strange and vital hybrid of a bildungsroman, which in its tribute to roses and everyday radicalism also contains an exhuberant, playful poetics … the detailed material is conveyed with such wild enthusiasm, such explosively generous prose that it’s a joy to read, while at the same time the plot gets a far deeper intellectual resonance … In a time marked by increasing polarisation, by murky thoughts of purity, walls and isolationism, a time where barely veiled nazi pseudoscience is on the rise again, The Rose Novel’s political edge is well-timed. Still, this is no political manifesto, the novel is much to wild in both its prose and world view for that … The novel simply aims for joy … a light, warm, vital book full of sunshine, love and flowers”
BLA
