Echoes of the City – Oslo by Lars Saabye Christensen

What a unique read. Echoes of the city is many things – a tale of one city, a series of stories of those who live there and a snapshot of history and human emotion.

It also works extremely well as a guide book! There’s so many mentions of street names, city landmarks and statues to note moments in history etc that you could literally walk around the city with this book in your hand and discover much more than you normally would.

The characters who live at Kirkeveien are delightful characters to meet in a novel. It’s just after WW2 and we get to meet them gradually, all of them with fascinating stories and their hopes and dreams. It’s through their stories that we really start to explore and discover the real face of Oslo as the city moves from wartime into peacetime.

This is when the structure of the book really comes into its own. It’s uniquely set out with chapters on characters interspersed with notes and minutes from the Norwegian Red Cross. This is the organization which has played a major role in the city in helping developing it and mapping it out. Through the Red Cross, we see how the city has changed, is changing now and adapting to the changing times. Then when we meet the characters again, we see how the city and the people, the people and the city live side by side, and how the stories of one intertwine with those of the other.

This really is a unique and insightful read. A novel that’s hard to categorise as it carves out its own niche. First of a trilogy that I am very much looking forward to revisiting.