Reviewed by Abby Walthausen

Hanne Ørstavik's The Pastor opens with a failed sermon on the prodigal son, one in which the narrator, Liv, uses too many words and finds too little point. As a new priest assigned to a parish in northern Norway, she has been instructed not to preach too long because the congregation "won't remember what you've said, only the experience of it." The advice feels especially pertinent here because she cannot quite decide why she picked this particular parable—she thinks maybe it has to do with her hope that she will be welcomed "home" into this unfamiliar northern community where she has fled in the wake of her friend's suicide. I have an inkling that the choice evokes her struggle to understand and interpret that very suicide—doesn't the joyous reception a father gives to his reckless prodigal son contradict Christianity's position on suicide as sin and aberration? But Liv is not a character who comes quickly to terms with her own motivations. Nor is she one to cleave to definitive answers. She hears herself ramble and she mistrusts instincts, the unforgiving fjords around her, language itself.

The plot of the novel hangs loosely around a trinity of suicides, in response to which Liv must act in three very different roles. Following her friend Kristiane's death, Liv meets for the first time and identifies with the woman's long-ago abandoned daughter. When Liv's roommate's daughter attempts suicide, Liv finds herself stepping into a mothering role herself, taking over domestic tasks, caring for a younger daughter. With the third death, she must act from a more removed position in her new role as pastor. Both parents of the deceased girl are so cold and difficult to relate to that Liv is most in sympathy with the girl's dog, which was shot by the father in the aftermath of her death. Liv is mother, daughter, canine ghost, but her multitude of perspectives gives her little insight into the meaning of these destructive acts. In life, all three women communicated through artifice: tattoos, goth bedrooms, puppet shows. In death, not one of them left a note. This cluster of suicides makes for a very dark book but also sets up a framework in which, in spite of this being a novel, wordiest genre in literature, the value of words might still be honestly and plainly doubted and interrogated.

When Liv speaks to herself, she uses her own name, and it feels like a very forced invocation to "life:" try as she might, everything around her is filled with dissociation. The landscape changes and shifts, her mind is "a jellyfish;" wiping her wet feet on a doormat recalls "the fluids of the body, everything that runs out of you when the muscles let go." Several times, translator Martin Aitken uses the term that Liv "cannot make purchase" on her ideas, on her surroundings. It is jarring to see this strange, Biblical-feeling term more than once, but it is unique in conveying a certainty that the right surface is out there, but she is the one groping. When she remembers Kristiane's criticisms of theology as "nonsense," she finds herself in agreement, while still arguing for it as an imperfect "framework" for reaching towards something more. In fact, she began her theology studies as an escape from her former pursuits in economy, which she found stiflingly reliant on systems, on answers.

The idea of this "framework," of the scaffolding that rejects completion, recurs throughout the book. In reflecting on the physical church, she "wished that churches had glass walls at the rear rather than the altarpiece, so the gazes of who were there, rather than stopping at the altar, could continue through the glass wall to what was outside and beyond. The way the language was supposed to be well, the words of the sermon, no more than a transparent membrane." On the cover of the book is printed the black and white image of what looks like beams for an unfinished A-frame chapel. On closer inspection, it is actually a stockfish rack, a structure for fermenting and drying cod, a place that carries significance in the book as it is where Liv's parishioner commits suicide. Liv visits the site—as she is one who rejects answers, it almost seems like she is looking for a miracle. But a stockfish rack is where fish go to petrify, not multiply.

And this is not the grimmest Nordic scaffold within the work—pieces of historical text surrounding the hanging of two Sami rebels and the whipping of a Norwegian priest appear throughout the book. Aside from preaching, Liv is doing research on the 1854 Alta Conflict, the only fatal clash between indigenous Sami and colonizing Norwegians. Like much else that Liv encounters, she does not come in on one side or another, and this particular rebellion is a test case for that sort of refusal. Both sides here are purportedly Christian, the Sami rebels rising up with a fundamentalist, fervent version of the colonizer's religion. Does Liv see herself as a rebel? As the neutral Norwegian priest who is flogged for state tax policy? She is both insider and outsider of Samiland, insider and outsider of religion. 

Much of Hanne Ørstavik's ambivalence in her presentation of Liv can be found in this heroine's deeply ingrained sexism. She has left social economics in favor of "feminine . . . wishy-washy and relational" theology. At a conference, even though she rages at the moral certainty of the cadre of men who dominate the event, she desperately wants to join their conversation and is livid—crude even, screaming internally about the presumed affinity of "cunt-brains"—when she is seated next to one of their wives. But ultimately, it is not that she wants to reject the feminine in favor of the masculine or vice versa—it is that she wants to decolonize everything, to lean into every ambiguity, to smack the certainty out of every answer. It is a line of thought that makes sense for long ruminations on suicide. The deceased may have some answer, but it is not for the purchase of the survivor, to whom every line of inquiry remains perpetually open.