The Case of the Caprice of Lost Time
Winner of the Transfuge Prize 2023 (France), Rune Christiansen offers an atmospheric classic crime novel with The Case of the Caprice of Lost Time crafted as a psychological literary text.. With themes of identity, middle age, belonging, relationships and marriage, Christiansen’s novel will appeal to readers of poetic literary fiction as well as crime novels.
Two months following her mother’s death, Norma travels to visit her father, Torsten, who has settled in a large summer house on an island. Norma’s life is in tumult as she works through the days following her mother’s death and her own impending divorce. She has left her daughter with her father and ventured to her father’s island. Upon arrival to the island, Norma catches sight of a lone horse rider under a twisted tree up on the hill crest. So begins mystique and suspense of who this character is dwelling within the periphery.
Rune Christiansen, born in 1963, is one of Norway’s most influential contemporary literary writers, with a career spanning poetry, fiction, essays and literary translation. He made his debut in 1986 with Hvor toget forlater havet (Where the Train Leaves the Sea) and has since published more than twenty books, including twelve poetry collections and a substantial body of fiction. His novels include Krysantemum (2009), The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman’s Life (2014), Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest (2017), and The Case of the Caprice of Lost Time (2021).
His writing has been recognized with numerous Norwegian and international honours, including the Dobloug Prize, the Brage Prize, and the Gyldendal Prize, while The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman’s Life won the 2014 Brage Prize and The Case of the Caprice of Lost Timereceived the 2023 Prix Transfuge for Best Foreign Novel. In 2019, Christiansen was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. A professor of creative writing, he has also translated poets including Frank Kuppner, Alain Bosquet, and Edmond Jabès, bringing his interests in language and translation into dialogue with his own literary practice. Christiansen has described literature as a ‘transient room’ in which oblivion and recognition illuminate one another.
Kari Dickson is a Norwegian-Scots literary translator whose work brings contemporary Norwegian literature into English across a wide range of forms, including fiction, poetry, theatre, children’s literature, and nonfiction. Her translations include Christiansen’s Fanny and the Mystery in the Grieving Forest and The Loneliness in Lydia Erneman’s Life, as well as Mona Høvring’s Because Venus Crossed an Alpine Violet on the Day That I Was Born, co-translated with Rachel Rankin. Dickson’s literary practice is grounded in an attentiveness to the texture and movement of language, particularly important when translating writers such as Christiansen, whose prose often occupies the space between narrative and lyricism. Alongside her translation work, she has taught Norwegian language, literature, and translation at the University of Edinburgh and has worked with the British Centre for Literary Translation and the National Centre for Writing. Based in Edinburgh, Dickson occupies the vital space between languages and literary cultures, allowing Norwegian writers to cross into English without losing the strangeness, intimacy, and musicality of their original voices. Her translations of Christiansen are therefore not merely acts of linguistic conversion but forms of literary mediation, extending the reach of one of Norway’s distinctive contemporary writers to readers beyond Scandinavia.
The tone is set earlier in the novel when a younger Norma visits a fortune teller. “You will be ill for the greater part of your life but will get better when you are old. She let go of my hand and nodded in confirmation, indifferent but serious.” The reader is left suspended in wondering how this sickness will play out. An illness of the body, or an illness of the mind.“But I have to say, it was largely true.” And so, we wait.
A daughter’s longing for her mother, despite the complexity and humanness of this relationship, Christiansen pulls us in. “Mother. Norma wanted to say it out loud in the sharp summer sun. Not her name. Mother. The word that bound them together. She remembered something that had struck her, almost shocked her, during the funeral. That she would gradually forget her. That her mother’s face would slowly lose its visibility. Dying was perhaps a release, like pushing all opposition to one side.” Christiansen delicately folds in the complexity of mortality, while encapsulating the immense feelings of longing for a parent gone. In these moments of vulnerability, this was where I could meet these characters.
“That night, Norma dreamed that her mother was suddenly standing in front of her in a small railway station, in a waiting room where the walls were painted in pistachio-green gloss. Her mother, thin in a colourless dress, was holding her hand up to her mouth and blood dripped from between her fingers down onto the fine fabric. Forgive me, Norma, she said, her mouth full of darkness. Forgive me that everything has fallen apart, that everything in me that wanted to protect you has broken. And then, as though to render it all harmless, she added: "It's boring crossing over to the other side, believe me, it’s a dull crossing.”
This scene was profound for me, the commentary on crossing, the idea of the mundanity of it. An image of a mother waiting on the other side. The knowledge that mother holds that could inform the other.
The plot turns and I cannot reveal too much in order not to spoil the novel. Despite the turn of events and realities that Norma finds herself in, I cherished the silver lining of optimism that became the backbone of this character. “We are humans, she thought, and we sully our lives with all these wretched interludes. But wretchedness evaporates as quickly as it arises. And love., it will come back, won’t it? Surely love can never disappear, it’s not that fragile. It will return and take its full place.”
Thank you to Rune Christiansen, Kari Dickson, Bookhug Press and River Street Writing for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.
