In other hands, a wartime story about betrayal and desire might melt into sentimental mush – but Parrett’s book is moving and delicately crafted
When Einar, one of the narrators of Favel Parrett’s new novel One for Sorrow, looks at his weary father in the bathhouse, he wonders, “Had he ever been young and alive and ready to spring into the air? I could not see it.” Papa is diminished by comparison to Einar’s new teacher, Johan Kristiansen, a recent arrival in the Norwegian city of Trondheim. At the bathhouse, the teacher “looked like he might suddenly spring into the air, like a young deer feeling joy”.
As Einar, on the cusp of adolescence, starts to separate himself from his sad, silent parents, he finds in Johan a surrogate father and a model for a life beyond provincial poverty. After their first class together, “I had this feeling in me that maybe things might go well for the first time in a long time.” The teacher is tall, virile, cosmopolitan – and unlike so many of the laconic residents of this city by the fjord, he is eager to talk: “I liked listening to him talk about ordinary life. His life. It made me feel like I was part of his world.”
One for Sorrow by Favel Parrett is out now through Hachette