Ever since her debut in 1998, American Elizabeth Strout’s literary characters have charmed readers and critics across the world. The headstrong, unpredictable Olive Kitteridge gave Strout the Pulitzer Prize, and was adapted into an award-winning TV series, and the novels about the writer Lucy Barton, who grew up in poor and dysfunctional surroundings on the Illinois countryside, have been embraced by readers. All her books are translated into Norwegian by Hilde Rød-Larsen.
In Strout’s new novel, The Things We Never Say, we meet Artie Dam – a middle-aged and respected history teacher in Massachusetts, a very ordinary man. He is the kind of person that keeps the community together, always with a kind word to the students who need it the most. But Artie feels a growing sense of loneliness and alienation, and a secret revealed makes him question even those closest to him, and what he really knows about the people in his life.
This is a novel about our ability to speak truthfully to each other, and about the things we never talk about. The story is set in 2024, when Donald Trump is reelected, and Strout shows how the country’s growing polarization is lodged into the local communities, into people’s bodies, marriages, families, friendships, and into conversations in which so many things no longer can be said.
It is in the quiet, everyday life that the big dramas play out in Strout’s universe. With warmth, precision and depth, she portrays the inner landscapes of ordinary people’s lives, always with a keen eye for how class conflicts and political unrest seep in and take root in them.
Strout is joined by writer Marie Aubert for a conversation at Det Norske Teatret’s main stage, about the big dramas in everyday life, about truth, solidarity, and the things we never say.
The conversation will be in English.
