The Susanne

This was my first Faulkner. I read it in pre­par­a­tion for a course in mod­ern­ism which I’m taking this autumn (I wanted to get a head start on the read­ing list as I’m taking five courses instead of the recom­men­ded three).

At first I really struggled to get into it. I didn’t find it very inter­est­ing after read­ing the back cover, saying it was the story of a woman’s death told by mem­bers of her family, and then all the chapters were pretty boring at first. None of the char­ac­ters seemed to have any­thing inter­est­ing to say. But then, some­thing changed. It might have been that I got to know the char­ac­ters a little better, it might be that their weird­ness became more evid­ent, but I star­ted loving it!

I spent a week on the first 50 pages and then about a day on the rest. I simply couldn’t put it down. I loved the fact that the char­ac­ters, Addie Bundren’s family, were if pos­sible even more weird than my own family. I loved that they were so honest about everything even when they hid things from each other: they may have hidden the facts of things but they always left their heart on their sleeve. I loved that they all thought ‘I’m the only one who really, truly loved her.’ I loved that every­one else had their own the­or­ies about the dif­fer­ent mem­bers of the Bundren family and that none was right. I loved it because it made it so clear that life is so ambigu­ous, truth is in the eye of the beholder, and that what others think never mat­ters until you let it.

Here’s a link to the book on amazon; I strongly recom­mend read­ing this. If you’ve a weird family or if you’ve the most normal family in the world, this will give you a new per­spect­ive on life. I promise!

Today so far has been won­der­ful: prob­ably the best 17. May in years. When we woke this morn­ing we were greeted by snow­flakes fall­ing out­side our window. The Boy­friend and I dressed and shared a quite eleg­ant yet simple break­fast of cham­pagne, some rye crack­ers, grapes and fenalår before set­ting out on today’s adventure.

As we left the flat after break­fast and made our way towards the city centre and the royal castle, the tem­per­at­ure had risen slightly and snow had given way to heavy rain and sharp wind. We met up with The Boyfriend’s brother and pro­ceeded through the throng of rev­el­lers towards the castle to find a good place to spot the King and also watch the children’s parade - and we suc­ceeded beyond expect­a­tion. It was freez­ing, it was wet, my shoes were a touch too high and about a size too big, a man kicked me with his muddy shoe and we only man­aged to catch occa­sional glimpses of the Royals whenever a strong gust of wind would blow aside a branch of the tree which obscured our view of them. Yet is was bril­liant! We waved our little flags and shouted HURRA! with the chil­dren, we spot­ted a rel­at­ive of The Boy­friend and The Brother in one of the march­ing bands and we really had a great time.

After a while I found I could no longer ignore the pain in my feet, and as we were just about frozen through we left the cel­eb­ra­tions and made our way back home where I cooked up a gigantic (at least for three people) brunch. Actu­ally I hadn’t meant for it to be quite of that scale but I found as I was cook­ing away that I simply couldn’t stop. One thing inspired me to make another and in the end I’d made, clock­wise from bottom left: scrambled eggs with chives, warm potato salad, tomato and moz­zarella salad, a plate of smoked salmon and my spe­cial gravlaks (which turned out great I might add. A tad salty, but tasty!), mus­tard sauce for the salmon and aïoli, both home made, fresh baguettes (which I only heated up so no credit there), a plate of cured ham and fenalår (cured leg of lamb), and asparagus with cured ham and parmesan. It was quite a feast!

All this took about an hour to get ready, so luck­ily I thought to serve up a cheese, cured ham and rye crack­ers plate to sus­tain the two hungry men whilst they waited, as well as some italian ice cream cake which I’d pre­pared last night. We feasted upon all this for a while until we were well and fat, and then lounged about for a while trying to catch our breath. The Brother provided some enter­tain­ment in the form of his lovely guitar play:

After brunch we sep­ar­ated for a few hours to get some rest before the evening’s shenanigans: we’re going to a con­cert! Farm­ers Market are play­ing at Rock­e­feller and I’m well excited. I know Stian Carstensen’s music from his Christ­mas Jazz shows home in Eids­voll, which are simply bril­liant. He is a musi­cian quite dif­fer­ent from any other I can think of: incred­ibly tal­en­ted in both tech­nique and per­form­ance, as well as dazzlingly cre­at­ive and ener­getic. I simply can’t wait!