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"In this extraordinary and engrossing book, an unexpected cultural phenomenon in its native Sweden, the stories of Osebol's residents are brought to life in their own words. Over the last half-century, the automation of the lumber industry and the steady relocations to the cities have seen the village's adult population fall to roughly forty. But still, life goes on; heirlooms are passed from hand to hand, and memories from mouth to mouth, while new arrivals come from near and far. Marit Kapla has interviewed nearly every villager between the ages of 18 and 92, recording their stories verbatim. What emerges is at once a familiar chronicle of great social metamorphosis, told from the inside, and a beautifully microcosmic portrait of a place and its people. To read Osebol is to lose oneself in its gentle rhythms of simple language and open space, and to emerge feeling like one has really grown to know the inhabitants of this varied community, nestled among the trees in a changing world" -- from Publisher.… (more)
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Journalist Marit Kapla, who grew up in Osebol, went back to the village in 2016 and 2017 to interview just about all the people who live there, old and young, natives and incomers (there are two Hungarians, a Pole, and two Dutch couples settled in the village, as well as a few urban Swedes and a stray Norwegian). She lets them talk about their background, their memories of growing up, the work they do or used to do, their problems and worries, what they feel about living in the countryside, and just about anything else that happens to come up.
There's no narrator's voice introducing, explaining and correcting. Everything we read in the book is told in the words of the local people, arranged into chapters house by house. To make us focus on the orality of what we're reading, Kapla has laid the text out on the page like free verse, using line-breaks instead of punctuation to give us a sense of the natural rhythms of speech. There are equally natural sudden changes of topic, as new ideas come into the speakers' minds, and where there are several family members being interviewed together, Kapla allows them to alternate or interrupt each other, presumably all according to the way the actual interview went.
It's an unusual strategy, and a risky one (a friend commented that it is strange to read about the decline of the logging industry in a book that must have consumed a good few hectares of timber), but it does seem to work: the characters of the individual speakers come across very strongly. I steamed though this at fairly high speed, as it needs to go back to the library, but I think it's a book to savour and come back to, really. And it will make you want to take that long-postponed trip to Sweden...