White Shadow

by Roy Jacobsen Narrated by Ann Richardson

Overview

The highly anticipated sequel to International Booker and Dublin Impac Award-shortlisted The Unseen



No-one can be alone on an island . . . But Ingrid is alone on Barrøy, the island that bears her name, and the war of her childhood has been replaced by a new, more terrible present: the Nazi occupation of Norway. When the bodies from a bombed vessel carrying Russian prisoners of war begin to wash up on the shore, Ingrid can't know that one will not only be alive, but could be the answer to a lifetime of loneliness-nor can she imagine what suffering she will endure in hiding her lover from the German authorities, or the journey she will face, after being wrenched from her island as consequence for protecting him, to return home. Or especially that, surrounded by the horrors of battle, among refugees fleeing famine and scorched earth, she will receive a gift, the value of which is beyond measure.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for White Shadow

"Richer, even more provocative ... The heroine of Roy Jacobsen’s White Shadow knows every inch of her home turf, a tiny island off the coast of northern Norway that her people have inhabited for generations. To get a full sense of what it’s like to subsist on Barrøy and how 35-year-old Ingrid comes to be living there alone, it helps to read The Unseen, the first volume in Jacobsen’s trilogy, which has also been translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw. But even without that background, the novel’s account of Ingrid’s experience of World War II is unsettlingly easy to follow."
—New York Times

"White Shadow retains many of The Unseen’s pleasures, not least Jacobsen’s clean, spare prose . . . a noble tribute to the human struggle for decency."
—Daniel Marc Janes, Times Literary Supplement

"With every sentence in his new novel, Roy Jacobsen shows how his characters carve their morality out of the dried driftwood found on the small islands of war-ravaged Norway. White Shadow is yet another masterpiece by Jacobsen, who continues in this short novel to track the vicissitudes of the life of his young heroine Ingrid Barrøy ... White Shadow is a powerful psychological novel."
—World Literature Today

"Seldom do we find a protagonist who pushes against her confinement as subtlety and deftly as Ingrid does, and who allows herself, while trapped in circumstances that are beyond her control, to be so open, inquisitive, and even loving. In White Shadow Jacobson offers a portrait of a woman who is single-minded but not rigidly so, purposeful but not devoid of feeling ... The intensity of feeling just beyond the actions described, and the effort itself of forging language to capture their evanescent reality, seems like a literary accomplishment in the family of more overtly “sophisticated” novelists like Thomas Bernhard or W. G. Sebald."
—Book Post

“An unsentimental story that combines the cosmic with bracing emotional austerity.”
—Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

"Disarmingly plainspoken narration brings into sharp relief both individuals and a world in wartime crisis."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A powerful read."
—David Mills, Sunday Times

"A beautifully written and profoundly moving exploration of conflict, love and human endurance."
—St. Catherines Standard

Praise for The Unseen

"Even by his high standards, his magnificent new novel The Unseen is Jacobsen's finest to date, as blunt as it is subtle and is easily among the best books I have ever read."
—Irish Times

"A beautifully crafted novel . . . Quite simply a brilliant piece of work . . . Rendered beautifully into English by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, The Unseen is a towering achievement that would be a deserved Booker International winner."
—New European

"A profound interrogation of freedom and fate, as well as a fascinating portrait of a vanished time, written in prose as clear and washed clean as the world after a storm.”
—The Guardian

"The subtle translation, with its invented dialect, conveys a timeless, provincial voice . . . The Unseen is a blunt, brilliant book."
—Financial Times

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2020-12-26
The second novel in Jacobsen’s Ingrid Barrøy trilogy is set during Norway’s World War II occupation by Germany, telescoping the national predicament through the narrow lens of a solitary woman’s experience.

Seasons, representing both change and constancy, are again Jacobsen’s central organizing principle, this time covering not generations but one year. A decade after The Unseen(2020) ended, most inhabitants of Barrøy, an island in a remote archipelago, have scattered. Only Ingrid, now 35, remains to follow an isolated, hand-to-mouth routine. Jacobsen built the earlier novel upon an accumulation of small daily moments, but Norway’s German occupation offers more conventional drama. Germans are stationed on the main island, a hard boat ride away but within Ingrid’s sight. In late autumn she is jolted when bodies in tattered, unrecognizable uniforms mysteriously turn up on Barrøy. One is barely alive. Ingrid nurses him and they become lovers in an intense idyll that can’t last. Days after he escapes (with her help), she awakens in a faraway hospital room with no memory of what happened in the days since their farewell. With her doctor’s help, she recovers shards of memory about a visit from a German officer and local police chief searching for her soldier, who was probably a Russian POW; but she resists remembering too much. Back on Barrøy by early winter, she is joined by her aunt Barbro, who intuits that Ingrid is pregnant. As more memories return, Ingrid worries the father might be one of the men who visited, but what happened with them is discussed only obliquely. This is minimalist fiction with a protagonist of impressive competence—traveling home on a whaler filled with ragged evacuees from Finland and Lapland, Ingrid takes charge of their care, then helps them settle on the main island—but with little interest in revealing herself. And yet Ingrid is a kind of magnet. Her doctor is attracted to her “intuitive” intelligence, as are the whaler’s captain and several youthful evacuees who move to the island to fish and help Ingrid build a new house. Before long, Barrøy's former inhabitants also begin to trickle home, creating new dramas and possibilities.

Disarmingly plainspoken narration brings into sharp relief both individuals and a world in wartime crisis.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940174843523
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Series:	Barrøy , #2
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The fish came first. Man is merely a persistent guest. The foreman came in and asked if any of the girls could split, there had been an unexpected influx of cod. Ingrid looked up from the barrel of herring and directed her gaze towards the quay, where dancing snowflakes melted into the black wood- work. She wiped her hands on her apron, followed him into the salting room and went over to the splitting bench and a tub of gutted fish. They looked at each other. He nodded at the knife lying there, it resembled a small axe.

She pulled a two-foot long cod from the rinsing tub and placed it on the bench, slit its throat, flipped up the gill cover and sliced through the ribs from the neck down to the belly and out to the tail, severed the backbone at the anus, cut through all the ribs on the right-hand side too, ripped out the spine as if she were undoing a rusty zip, and held it aloft in her left hand; the fish on the bloodstained bench looked like a white wing, waiting to be rinsed and stacked in layers, before being salted and turned and dried and washed and piled and sold, as the ivory-white gold that has sustained life on this scraggy coast for the eight hundred years that have passed since the place was first chronicled.

“Let’s have a keek a’ th’ spine.”

Ingrid switched it to her right hand to conceal the cut between her thumb and index finger. “Clien as a whistle.”

He added that she could stay for as long as it took, you could never be sure in the autumn . . .

“But get s’m gloves on tha.”

Ingrid looked down at her blood mingling with that of the fish and forming a drop that fell to the floor, as he turned his back and squelched over to the office on his rubber soles.

Ingrid longed to be gone, to be back on Barrøy, but no-one can be alone on an island and this autumn neither man nor beast was there, Barrøy lay deserted and abandoned, it hadn’t even been visible since the end of October, but she couldn’t be here on the main island either.

She split fish for ten hours a day, kept her distance from two salters and after a week couldn’t sleep at night in the damp, chilly cooper’s loft, where she lay with Nelly and two young girls from the mainland who were here because of the war. They pretended not to cry themselves to sleep, they gutted herring, boned them and salted them in barrels, added brine and drank ersatz coffee, salted and slept and washed themselves every other evening in cold water, their hair once a week, in cold water too, rust red beneath a starry firmament of glistening herring scales, and Ingrid split cod like a man.

In the middle of the second week one of the salters left and Nelly was sent to work with Ingrid. The following day was stormy and the fishing boats sought shelter in the islands. They didn’t come in the next day either and when eventually they managed on the third morning to tack through the snow they didn’t have a single fish in their holds.

But many people were waiting for them, a whole village was there to welcome men returning alive, once again. Then more bad weather, confined to harbour with idle fishing gear, catches that were of no value except perhaps for making guano, it depended on so much, especially the market prices in a different world from this; the sorted fish were tail-tied and hung, and the autumn’s bizarre adventure was over.

Ingrid and Nelly turned over the salted fish, discarded the bad ones, ensuring that those at the bottom of the old pile were at the top of the new one. Now it was the end of the herring season, and the mainland girls were given notice, they received their meagre wages, picked the fish scales from each other’s faces, washed each other’s hair in cold water, dried and combed it, taking care to ensure their hairbands were straight before they left on the steamboat laughing and wearing clothes no-one had seen before.

With the same steamer came a letter – from Ingrid’s aunt, Barbro, who was in hospital – set down on paper by a nurse whose handwriting was like a doctor’s, a scrawl which Ingrid was able to read but did not understand. Her aunt wasn’t coming up north because her upper femur was not knitting and because she couldn’t get a lift . . . she would be back in good time for Christmas, she said twice, Barbro was fifty-nine and Ingrid thirty-five, that evening she soon fell asleep and had no dreams.

She also woke early and lay listening to the wind clawing at the slate roof and the sea gurgling and lashing between the posts beneath the quay and Nelly’s breathing, Nelly’s sleep was human, it was the only thing here that was as it should be, the sound of Nelly sleeping, night after night, now she couldn’t stand it anymore.

Ingrid got up, washed in the galvanised bucket, packed her suitcase, didn’t eat or make any coffee, carried her stinking work clothes down to the place behind the canning factory where the Germans burned rubbish, and tossed them into the oil drum, staring at the flames until people began to assemble on the quay, it was snowing lightly.

She went back and brewed some coffee of sorts, poured a cup and placed it on the chair by the bedhead next to Nelly, who still lay there looking like a serene corpse, waited for the reflection on the wall to tell her that the foreman had also arrived, that day was now dawning, though it was still dark, then got to her feet, went down to the office with her suitcase and said she wanted to settle up.

a single fish in their holds.

ght him on the hop, he couldn’t do without her, fish would be coming in that evening, he was sure of that, she was both necessary and surplus to requirements, the paymaster’s usual convoluted trickery, but Ingrid was from an island, the sky was her roof and walls, so she repeated that she wanted her money now, and waited patiently for all the drawers to be opened and closed, all the papers to be shuffled, the ambivalent sighs over the time sheet and the equally laborious counting of the dog-eared banknotes, as though it were an insult to ask for your wages, as though on payday it were the master who was to be pitied, not the slave.

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