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DARKNESS: Tore Renberg had access to both melancholy and rage when he wrote about Tollak in the book that Norwegian booksellers voted as winners of the Bookstore award. Photo: Signe Christine Urdal
Norwegian booksellers have spoken: Tore Renberg (48) has written the best book this year and wins the Bookstore Award 2020.
Tore Renberg wins the bookstore award for the novel “Tollak til Ingeborg” in fierce competition with authors such as Lars Mytting, Karl Ove Knausgård, Maja Lunde and Zeshan Shakar.
See the full list of nominees here!
– Oh my God, yeah, it’s amazing! He had decided that this was too tough a competition. 2020 has been a really desperate year for everyone, but a really strong year for literature in our country, says Tore Renberg by phone from Stavanger.
The VG critic gave an enthusiastic roll of the dice 6 for “Tollak til Ingeborg” and wrote: “Herre jemini, Tore!”
Read VG’s Dice Roll 6 review here!
He himself has given some thought to what makes the nation’s bookstores vote for the book about the old, furious and contentious Tollak as this year’s winner.
– Tollak almost leads a vendetta against the contemporary and a contentious battle against everything and everyone around him. But actually I think he’s more in touch with the spirit of the times than he thought. Among other things, there is an angry man in America who refuses to give up, who refuses to laugh, who refuses to lose.
– So you say Tollak looks a bit like Trump?
– Hehe, nhei. But there is something in men and this fatal rage that many have in them. The book becomes a kind of study of the male talent for anger, bitterness, pride, stubbornness and violence. At the same time, Tollak also has the capacity for love and deep pain, and this duality I think is recognizable to many.
Ble deppa
He ended up in a somewhat dark place while writing the novel about Tollak, the old man who is about to die, but who has a cruel secret that he needs to tell before he leaves this world.
– Yes, it is dark, and I am an author who allows me to be very strongly infected by my own material. When I write about the Hillevåg gang, his energy spreads to me, and when I write about this combative man, it affects me.
– I have accessed a melancholy and a rage, and it is a place that is not good to be. For me it is a sign that I am working well, but my wife has asked me sometimes, “Have you been with Tollak for a long time today?” He was depressed, it’s true, says Renberg, who thanks his wife Hilde for constantly bringing him back to everyday life.
SECOND TIME WINNER: In 2008, Renberg won the Bookstore Award for “Charlotte Isabell Hansen.” He thus becomes the sixth author to have received the award twice along with Kristian Kristiansen, Roy Jacobsen, Erik Fosnes Hansen, Lars Saabye Christensen and Per Petterson. Photo: Marie von Krogh
– She works in psychiatry and has a great way of dealing with it. Preferably with a smile and a little pinch, he jokes a bit with me and says I have to go out into the world again: “You have kids, wife, mom” and things like that. She reminds me of the community that I have, but that Tollak does not have, Renberg says and points out.
– In that sense, it is interesting that this award is for the blackest book of the ten! But now my readers say they will love Tollak anyway. And that’s when I think of the benefits of literature. It allows us to understand other people.
Read also: He was rejected by the Cultural Council, nominated for a prestigious award
Literature was salvation
Tore Renberg decided to become a writer when he was a child and does not believe he has given up the dream even though the big publishers rejected it seven years in a row.
– I can hardly explain it, but my will was so strong. He had the naive belief that if he practiced enough, he would make it. So after going to school, riding my bike, and traveling with friends, I went home and wrote poems and stories. And he was rejected so much when he was 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 years old.
Behind all the attempts there was also something else. An upbringing with restlessness and intoxication in the family.
– Everything that got in the way of writing. It was kind of a desperate attempt to understand why people get hurt so badly. So for me, it has always been a personal and private starting point for writing.
also read
Renberg: – I am a broken child
– Literature was a lifesaver, Renberg emphasizes.
– No meat with my mother
In both last year’s novel “There is no time to lose” and this year’s novel, he writes about old protagonists.
– I am 48 years old now, and I have a completely different line of sight than those who are 70, 80 and 90 years old now than before. A different kind of understanding of what it means to grow old. Think of all the changes that are happening so incredibly fast now, for the ancients it is almost impossible to keep up. I’ve seen my mother go to a parking machine to put money in, but then that parking machine wants me to press an app on the phone to pay. It annoys me and annoys me when she doesn’t understand what to do and maybe she just drives from there without parking.
– No meat with my mother, I want to scream. Think how exhausting and insulting it must be; everything you can, everything you’ve read, everything is taken from you. And replaced by applications.
Also take a look at this roll of the dice novel 6: Exceptionally good
So Renberg thought: What if one of them says no? I will not agree with this.
– As Tollak says in the novel: «I am Tollak for Ingeborg. I belong to the past. I have no plans to find my place anywhere else. “
The crown bookstore award celebration will be sharing a bottle of sparkling wine with the aforementioned wife, or as Renberg puts it:
– «Cava with kånå»! And then it’s sitting for me when everyone’s gone to school and work, and thinking, Okay, we’ll be taking another 25 years, then, says Renberg, who this year celebrates his 25th anniversary as a writer.
Psst! «Tollak to Ingeborg »er in fact, the first New Norwegian book to win the Bookstore award since Tarjei Vesaas won for “The Bridges” in 1967.
