Maja Lunde. Memories and Hopes

2017: An elderly woman named Signe is navigating her sailboat, “Blue”, on the rough, stormy waters of the North Sea, eventually arriving, after a hazardous voyage, in Bordeaux, France, and then on the Canal Latéral de la Garonne, in order to encounter and confront once again her youth-years lover, Magnus.

2041: A young man, David, and his six-year-old daughter, Lou, manage to settle in a refugee camp in Bordeaux. Their house, in a town in South-West France, has been burnt to ashes, as ravaging fires have left entire regions parched and have separated (or completely wrecked) numerous families. David is convinced that his wife and their baby will also make it to Bordeaux and that the urgency right now is for him to take care of Lou until then. And he is also convinced that in the long run rains will come and everybody’s lives will go back to normal.

2020: The English version of Maja Lunde’s novel, „The End of the Ocean”, was published and its impact was overwhelming, all the more so as newsreels around the world gave extensive coverage to the huge vegetation fires in Australia, where the big cities were at the mercy of flames, of plumes of smoke, charred and covered by ashes. Moreover, it is a matter of common knowledge that, in recent years, temperatures have soared around the globe and that the sea level has constantly risen, endangering communities and destroying ecosystems. Climate change is a subject replete with present interest and global warming is, sadly, an everyday reality. In a strange manner, in her second novel, „The End of the Ocean” (2017), Maja Lunde succeeded in offering readers worldwide a highly-evocative picture of the kind of limit-situations we may all be faced with in the not too distant future, as well as a warning which, by recourse to fiction, is meant to alert us to the direction – not always the right one! – which mankind has chosen to go in, either out of lassitude or in the hope of fast material gain of sorts, yet without actually figuring out its long-term consequences. Because this is the key situation depicted in the latest novel published by the Norwegian writer, who had already gained worldwide repute upon the publication of her first novel, „The History of Bees” (2015).

In fact, Maja Lunde, who has been in recent years the recipient of all the great literary prizes in Scandinavia (Peer Gynt-prisen, Fabelprisen, Bjornsonprisen), has planned an all-encompassing tetralogy centred on the depiction of the major climate shifts on the planet under the destructive actions of people (as a parenthesis, the third novel of this series, „Przewalski’s Canal”, published in 2019, has enjoyed great success in Norway). In „The End of the Ocean”, in their teenage and early youth years, Signe and Magnus are idealistic and brimming with confidence; and so much in love with each other and with the beauty of Norway that they think they will be able to save the world – or at least change it for the better. However, life is anything but a marvellous fairy-tale and the beliefs and promises of youth will soon be replaced by financial interests… Magnus is the one who chooses to take this easy path and he soon becomes rich, trading even in Norwegian ice, which he exports, for huge sums of money, to the Gulf countries. Signe finds this unacceptable and, for years on end, she will fight those who persist in making a profit out of anything, even out of her much-beloved glacier.

The novel has a dual structure, with the text divided into chapters that constantly shift the narrative perspective. On the one hand, Signe narrates her present-day experiences and recounts her past, on the other hand, David struggles to survive alongside Lou and to keep (but mainly to make his daughter keep) hope in a future in which their lives will recapture their lost rhythms and regain their meaning. Both Signe and David narrate in the first person and one reads the text with bated breath, eager not only to find out what will happen next but also to envision a solution to the great challenges that mankind is facing nowadays. Moreover, Maja Lunde always has a symbolic structure in mind as well, as, for instance, while she struggling to sail on the right tack during a storm that is jeopardizing all her plans and, more than that, is putting her life at risk, Signe remembers fragments of the past, conjures up events of greater or lesser importance from her privileged childhood, when she enjoyed everything that a child might have desired but, more than that, she relives certain moments of her love for Magnus and tries – not to come to terms with their break-up but to understand, even if partially, after years and years, why it was that they separated. In his turn, David, who is in the refugee camp, is desperately trying to find salvage and eventually he arrives, alongside Marguerite, the woman whose soul is also ravaged by great losses, at a deserted house, where he comes across a vessel – Signe’s sailboat – their chance at a new beginning and at a real life. But it has not started raining yet, the dog days are not over and the canal that they are supposed to sail on in order to save themselves is still dry. It is at this point that the two narrative threads converge: Signe and Magnus’s past might embody the hope of the future for David, Lou and Marguerite, provided it starts raining and the waters start covering large areas of the Earth again…

The end of the novel is therefore slightly ambiguous, in tune with the writer’s intention to maintain a bitter-sweet tone, highlighting the possibility of (physical and spiritual!) salvation for her characters and underlining the importance of one’s capacity of abiding and of keeping hope even under the most trying circumstances; but also speaking, be it indirectly, by means of significant details, about the loneliness of the human beings in a world devastated by climate change and conflicts, about the lack of genuine connections with a community and about the chance at attaining individual salvation or, at most, salvation at the level of a small family nucleus. Because David is unable to establish a real connection with the ones next to whom he lives in the refugee camp, as all of the individuals there have chosen to carry their pain and despair or to nurture their feeble hopes only on their own… Thus, Maja Lunde speaks about the urge we all feel to save the world by ourselves or helped just by our family members, to only then – perhaps, who knows? – make it possible to re-kindle some connections at the level of a community so devastated by disasters that it almost seems to have forgotten how to be itself.

Read in this key, „The End of the Ocean” becomes a painful remembrance attempt and equally so a lucid act of cautioning contemporary mankind against the not so bright future it might soon face. Because, after all, 2014 is a sufficiently close date… If in her first novel, „The History of Bees”, the writer had tackled the sombre perspective of the disappearance of the tiny insects that are paramount to the survival of the human species, in the present novel she has addressed the threat of water shortage and the suffering that such a phenomenon might incur at an even faster pace. In addition, however, Lunde also reminds us about the existence of the refugee camps, where the people – albeit not driven out of their homeland by climate change – suffer under our very eyes in many European countries: yet another grim mirror and a painful memento addressed to a humanity that seems to have forsaken its capacity to resonate with the suffering of others…

The author evinces an unmistakable style, paying full attention to details, sometimes even highlighting apparently trifling matters in an attempt at shedding light, over and over again, on the fact that human existence does not consist only of great ideals and of difficult existential clashes but also of the small joys, of the fleeting moments of happiness, of one’s heartfelt delight at sighting fresh water or upon contemplating nature. Precisely for this reason, the characters she has devised are, just like the ones in „The History of Bees”, so poignant, expressive and utterly indelible. Little Lou’s small palms, sticky from the heat, Signe’s worn out, linty hat, Lou’s joy at the sight of the twelve water recipients that they discover in France, Signe’s fear, during the storm at sea, at the thought that she might not live to see Magnus again – and many other similar instances – will always make these images and these feathery human beings flash on in our minds and souls, easily conjuring up our own memories of people we have met or loved. Sometimes, indeed, the narrative instances pertaining to Signe, with her obsessive recollection of the past, may seem slow in the overall narrative deployment, but this pans out only by comparison with the dynamism of those fragments centred on David and Lou’s gruelling existence. The latter, forced by circumstances to survive and to take care of each other in an ever-hostile environment, seem to have been put through a lot more than Signe, who is struggling to keep her sailboat on the right tack amidst the unleashed seawaters. Absolutely remarkable, though, are the reflective passages, particularly those on water, in Signe’s inner monologues: “the entire life is water, the entire life has been water, wherever I went there was water. Water that was down-pouring from the sky as rain or snow, supplying the small holes in the mountains, spreading over the glacier and turning into ice, streaming down the steep slopes of the mountains and turning into thousands of tiny rivulets that flew into the River Breio forming, in front of the fjord village, a smooth surface that became one with the ocean if one followed it down its westward course. My whole world used to be water. The earth, the mountains, the pastures were just tiny islands in what the world actually was. And I used to call my world Earth, but I think it had better be called Water.” A highly exquisite and expressive Romanian version of this novel was published by Humanitas Fiction Publishing House, translated by Ivona Berceanu, an outstanding specialist in (and translator from) Norwegian literature, who has also offered Romanian readers translations from the works of Jo Nesbø, Bobbie Peers, Karl Ove Knausgård and Jørn Lier Horst. In „The End of the Ocean”, Signe believes in the histories that she calls to mind, in order to muster the courage to move on. David believes in the stories that he tells Lou, in order to keep up hope in better days to come. It is true that mere stories cannot save us from ourselves, but it is one of the main stakes of Maja Lunde’s novel to tell us that they, the stories that we sometimes tell ourselves, or those that we tell our loved ones, can help us look at the world from the right perspective, thereby attaining a more adequate self-knowledge and pondering more on the consequences of our own deeds.

Lucid and deeply introspective, tackling topical issues in an unsettling manner, „The End of the Ocean” masterfully brings forward not only our planet’s highly fragile ecosystem and the struggle of some brave people to preserve the vital resources of the Earth for the next generations but also the importance of keeping hope even under the most trying circumstances. And it also articulates some essential truths about the power of love and of forgiveness, about loneliness and the need for solidarity, about the kind of human beings that we are – or that we could (or should) become.

Maja Lunde, „The End of the Ocean”/ „Istoria apelor”, translated into Romanian by Ivona Berceanu, Humanitas Fiction Publishing House, 2021

Translated into English by Mirela Petraşcu