• The Pastor
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Archipelago Books

The Pastor

The Pastor

by Hanne Ørstavik, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken

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Liv is fascinated by words and their edges and echoes. As a student of theology in Germany, she researches how the language of the Bible was wielded against the indigenous Sami people during the 1800s. Liv excavates their past and her own, searching for meaning in a scene of Sami children gathering cloudberries and figs, from the memory of the magical weaver woman from an Astrid Lindgren fairytale she read as a child, or in how misstep and misunderstandings can lead to isolation and pain. With each new experience and confrontation, fresh questions about scripture and empathy and who she is arise. She wonders how “language, in all its plasticity, became so stiff and unbending,” and slowly, she bends it back toward her, building her own vocabulary of healing.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781953861085
Pages: 280
Publication Date:

Praise

In Ørstavik’s deeply thoughtful and captivating latest (after Love), a woman spends a year in Kjøllefjord, Norway, as an assistant pastor . . . The various threads shuffle seamlessly in Liv’s head and build to a heartbreaking crescendo, filled in with brilliant descriptions of the flat landscape (a church above the fjord sits “brilliantly white... on a dish of darkness”). Ørstavik distinguishes herself as a leading light in international literature.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Set deep in the endless night of an Arctic winter, The Pastor is a novel that pushes into that darkness—on an emotional, spiritual, and historical level—in search of some glimmer of clarity, some sense of meaning in an uncertain, insensible world . . . Martin Aitken’s sensitive translation maintains an atmosphere of profound longing for connection and contact.
—Joseph Schreiber, Rough Ghosts

Ørstavik skillfully weaves three levels of time together . . . [She] succeeds in creating a powerful story in which the reader hears the voice of the troubled protagonist who is struggling to find meaning in her life, meaning in her relationship with God and with those around her
—Christine Meloni, The Norwegian American

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