A review by thebooktrail88
The Bird Tribunal by Agnes Ravatn
5.0
Travel the locations of the novel here: The Bird Tribunal
This is a haunting melody of a novel. Strangely compelling, yet deeply unusual in style and substance. This is a new style of Nordic Noir for me – quite an eerie read that left me thinking a great deal about the novel I’d just been immersed into. It felt like a dip in an icy fjord. I stood at the edge of the book and dipped in my toes for a little while before fully immersing myself into it – but what a reward! – and a shock in more ways than one but I want to go back in and do it all again.
Allis is an unforgettable character and Sigurd eccentric and very very strange at the same time. There is a real sense of gothic eerie shadows to this novel and Rosie Hedger has done one brilliant job as the translator. This must have been tricky to translate in places but it reads like a charm.
I think the magic of this novel is not really knowing how to take it in parts and to have it as a literary enigma of sorts. Only Allis Hagtorn and Sigurd Bagge really have the answers. This is a tense relationship that I felt I was only seeing the parts they wanted me to see – but how that kept me pressing my nose to the window!
Ice ice fiction at its chilling, remote and claustrophobic best.
This is a haunting melody of a novel. Strangely compelling, yet deeply unusual in style and substance. This is a new style of Nordic Noir for me – quite an eerie read that left me thinking a great deal about the novel I’d just been immersed into. It felt like a dip in an icy fjord. I stood at the edge of the book and dipped in my toes for a little while before fully immersing myself into it – but what a reward! – and a shock in more ways than one but I want to go back in and do it all again.
Allis is an unforgettable character and Sigurd eccentric and very very strange at the same time. There is a real sense of gothic eerie shadows to this novel and Rosie Hedger has done one brilliant job as the translator. This must have been tricky to translate in places but it reads like a charm.
I think the magic of this novel is not really knowing how to take it in parts and to have it as a literary enigma of sorts. Only Allis Hagtorn and Sigurd Bagge really have the answers. This is a tense relationship that I felt I was only seeing the parts they wanted me to see – but how that kept me pressing my nose to the window!
Ice ice fiction at its chilling, remote and claustrophobic best.