Echoes of the City by Lars Saabye Christensen

It is 1946, and Oslo is slowly emerging from a period of crippling austerity. Tiny shifts in fortune and small, almost imperceptible acts of kindness can change the fates of many.

At the centre of Echoes of the City are Maj and Ewald Kristoffersen and their son Jesper, their lives closely entwined and overlapping with their neighbours’ on Kirkeveien. When the butcher’s son Jostein is knocked down in a traffic accident and loses his hearing, Jesper promises to be his ears in the world. The arrival of a long-awaited telephone is a major event for Maj and Ewald, and meanwhile their neighbour, recently widowed Fru Vik, tentatively takes up with the owner of the bookshop near the cemetery. The bar at Hotel Bristol becomes a meeting place for all of them – for Ewald and his advertising colleagues, for Fru Vik and her suitor, to the piano playing of hapless Enzo Zanetti, an immigrant down on his luck, who enables Jesper to discover his true passion.

The minutes of local Red Cross meetings framing the narrative tell a story in themselves, and bear witness to the steady recovery of a community.

Echoes of the City is a curious book. It’s long and meandering, spanning approximately a five-year period in post-war Oslo. Each character’s storyline develops slowly, often touching on aspects of another character’s story, then migrating away again.

Christensen’s narrative styles fall broadly into three categories. First, as in the introduction to the book, a continuous and paragraph-less flow, often when he is taking us on a route through the streets of Oslo. Secondly, a more familiar style focusing on conversations between the characters. Thirdly, the minutes of the Red Cross meetings of which Maj is appointed as treasurer.

My main observation of Echoes of the City is that the plot moves slowly, requiring a more patient reading mindset than I would usually adopt. At times it can feel like not much is happening. However, when I reflected on this, that pace is more true to real life where things do not all happen quickly or dramatically or even all at once. The point of the book is to show the small, incremental developments over time as Oslo recovers from the Second World War. That in itself cannot happen in a hurry.

As for the characters, Christensen’s insight into the minds of his different characters is thoughtful and perceptive. From the mind of a seven-year-old boy to that of a widow in her sixties, he illustrates perfectly the moral quandaries that come the way of each character, their thoughts going back and forth between different solutions, concealing their situation from other characters, and outwardly presenting a curated version of their thoughts for fear of judgment.

The minutes of the Red Cross meetings become a constant at the end of each chapter. At first, they seemed incongruous to me but, like the rest of the plot, they show progress and recovery over the years. They could even be read as a short book in themselves, reflecting the monthly priorities of that community within Oslo.

As an overall comment, I recommend patience and a knowledge of Oslo for Echoes of the City. However, when looking back on the book as a whole, it is possible to see that its meandering style is a plot device in itself, compelling us to reflect back on a period of years to see progress not as leaps and bounds but in tiny steps forward.