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Irving Stone’s biography of Jack London, and many more. There were travel books from
all corners of the earth. It was like the world.
We all looked upon that bookcase as a piece of furniture, and what we especially liked
were the carvings. But one day as a young boy, I picked out one of those books and opened
it. And I discovered that it made sense to me. It was possible to read. So I did.
My mother was an intellectual. She worked for a long time in a chocolate factory, then
she washed schools, public buildings, hotels. She washed at the Park Hotel where the rock
groups stayed when they played in Oslo. One time she came into a suite where the bathroom
was a real mess, and there were two of the boys still in the room, and she bawled them
out. They kind of cracked and said, It will never happen again Mam. I believe they were
Robert Plant and Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin. Nice ordinary lads, she said afterwards, just
a drink too many. Happens to everybody.
My mother always read books. Books in Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, German, English. She read
Hemingway and Steinbeck. She read Alan Sillitoe and Aldous Huxley. She read Somerset Maughan.
She read Knut Hamsun. She read Dubliners by James Joyce in fact.
I never saw her sleep. When in bed, she did not touch the pillow with her head, but rested
her elbow on it, her hand supporting her head. And I could ask: What are you reading? And
then she did like this (turning the book); Günter Grass, she said: Die Blechtrummel.
My mother thought I was intellectually lazy, because I didn’t know German.
She did not own a single book. What she did was she went to the local library. It was
a good library with good people working in it, all women of course. One of them had previously
held a job in the local kiosk. She was a friend of my mother and a passionate reader. That
library is closed now, I am sorry to say.
My mother showed me how the books were organised, the fiction, the poetry, she explained to
me this wonderful invention called the Dewey classification system, that if you gave it
half an hour of your attention, you can get the basics of it, and it could point you in
any direction you felt like going, if you wanted to educate yourself.
This impressed me so much, that after I quit school one year before my final exams (because
they didn’t give me time enough to read), I went to the main public library in Oslo
to knock at the Personnel Manager’s door, and I told him he had to give me a job. And
he did. Those were the days.
So I trained to be a librarian, but after three years of that, I got a job in a bookshop,
a wonderful bookshop called Tronsmo, in the centre of Oslo. It was a little like the City
Lights bookstore in San Francisco but it was better in American literature in fact. It
was my university. And it was there I started to read the Irish. Joyce, and Beckett of course.
My all time favourite storyteller: Frank O’Connor, and Sean O'Faolain. I read Liam O’Flaherty
and Brendan Behan, Edna O’Brien and Sean O’Casey, the autobiography. I read a little
Yeats too, and have seen his gravestone, I went there, with the famous lines, "Cast a
cold eye, on life, on death, horseman pass by." Those words have always made me want
to go home and write.
All of this I say to flatter you of course, but conveniently, it is also true. And I say
it to avoid talking about my novel, Out Stealing Horses, which, incidentally, is why I am here.
I avoid it because I guess you expect me to say something wise about it. But, as everyone
in this room already knows: a work of fiction that is only moderately successful in its
own field is always wiser than its author. And we should rejoice and be happy for that,
for you, as well as I, have heard authors talk about their work, and have been left
none the wiser.
I can say this, though: that when you start a novel, with perhaps a very slim idea of
what it is going to be about, and a little scared move into a territory that is unknown
to you, I have found that something very wonderful happens, and that is that the world of your
own reading opens up to you, and you realise that there has been someone there before you.
And I have never found that in the least oppressive. Instead, it is a comfort. You are not alone!
For example, you cannot be a Norwegian and write a novel like this and not be aware of
a book called Pan, published in the 1890s by Knut Hamsun. But more important, as this
is payback time: those of you who have read Out Stealing Horses cannot have missed the
open hommage to Charles Dickens, or perhaps more the feel of Dickens, and how he worked
with fate, or with whole lives and the struggle to change those lives, before it was too late.
And there were more; L.P Hartley, William Maxwell, Richard Ford, books with a voice
of urgency in them.
And then, when I was hesitating to start the final chapter, not wanting to get off on the
wrong foot, I woke up one night with some lines ringing in my head, and those lines
were in English. I jumped out of bed, ran into the living room, and immediately found
the book that I had not read for ten years, opened it, and there they were: The opening
lines of Voyage in the Dark, by Jean Rhys. And they go like this:
It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost
like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave
you right down inside of yourself, was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold;
light, darkness: purple, grey; but the difference in the way I was frightened and the way I
was happy.
I translated those amazing lines, and I used them, and I knew, I could not go all wrong.
My point is, as you see: you are your own master, but you are not alone.
And when I say that a novel which is any good is always wiser than its author, it is of
course the reader that makes it so, adding her intelligence, sensitivity, and generosity.
So can you all imagine my intense and upset pleasure when these readers, this jury decided
to honour Out Stealing Horses? I mean, from that shortlist? Of course you do, and that
is why you understand how happy I am. And also, that it should come from Ireland, from
Dublin. How fantastic. Thank you so much.
And thank you so much to Anne Born for her great work, for her generosity, and for her
patience with me, who is perhaps not the easiest person to work with.
Thank you very much to Geoff Mulligan and the people at Harvill Secker. And thank you
very much to Chistopher MacLehose, the one and only. To have been selected by him, in
the first place, to be on his list, has been a great honour. And finally thank you to NORLA,
Norwegian Literature Abroad, for their constant support, and for the fact that they have been
banging for so long at the door of the English speaking world, and just might have gotten
a foot in. It is not easy, I can tell you. But this brilliant invention, The International
IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, may perhaps be used as a crowbar on that door? I think so.
In any case, and again, thank you so very much. We are not alone. You are not alone.
Thank you.
[clapping]