'What you’ve got to understand is that meaning can be found in meaninglessness, and that these meaningless words hold all that you need to know.'

Every moment, we are moving forward on a collision course with death. Everyone and everything ‘will eventually disappear on it’s own, not partially, not selectively, but completely and all inclusively disappear,’ a grim fact that we must all come to terms with. Tor Ulven’s only novel, Replacement, addresses the difficult facts of life, not only that we must all come to an end, but that we must make peace with the time spent while alive. Ulven pits the reader toward the feeling of sorrow felt looking back at a life that is ‘ empty of all the basic necessities, or, to put it another way, it’s full, full of everything but the one thing it should be full of’. Embracing and garnishing the human condition in a robe of intensely emotive figurative language, Ulven dives into the dark recesses of troubled consciousness and resurfaces with pearls of wisdom and hope.

Often cited as one of Norway’s greatest poets, Tor Ulven (1953-1995) left behind an impressive poetic body of work. Replacement, written just two years before Ulven’s suicide, is difficult to analyze without tripping up into an Intentional Fallacy as the narrative probes the hard issues of life, death, and acceptance of our fate. However, the ultimate, hopeful conclusion of the novel transcends Ulven’s own tragic conclusion, and it is his career as a poet that is unshakeable from the readers mind as they light upon each breathtaking combination of words. Written through short fragments of consciousness orchestrated together to express a full, condensed lifespan, Replacement reads much like a collection of prose poems collected together by a common narrative thread. Any paragraph could be broken up into a traditional poetic form (I highly recommend feeding the desire to do so within the margins, this book is pure poetry) with every idea being illuminated through brilliant poetic language and long, flowing metaphors that run wild, branching out, evolving and flowering into an expression of thought much greater than the original idea. He exploits small details of life, unpacking a vast horizon of meaning and imagery from each thought. There are seemingly endless examples:

’perhaps that’s the best of all stages when you’re falling in love, the stage, that is, where everything is still a cascade of unrealized potential, like when you’re standing outside an enormous amusement park of silence (just the distant sound of an orchestra tuning their instruments from somewhere beyond the trees) and you close your eyes and sigh in expectation, standing there before the main gate, where lightbulbs gleam brightly against the dark before you go inside, where the few attractions will just become noisier and noisier, more and more vulgar, as the jostling crowd grows even larger, the hawkers bolder, the entertainment simpler….until your reaction becomes a nightmare, as though these fancy, traditional firework displays were going off inside a prison cell… Finally, the gleaming lightbulbs and the fantastic displays go out, one by one, until the miraculous wonderland lies empty and abandoned, and the leaves begin to fall, suddenly it’s autumn, then the frost comes, it’s winter now, it’s snowing, the amusement park is buried in snow, covered in darkness and buried in snow, until the snow is the only thing left gleaming.’

Each fantastic image resonates with an impression of life’s progress towards some inevitable conclusion. As the novel progresses down the lifeline, the reader experiences a consciousness forever grappling with the implications of death. Each stage of life is marked by a reflection on what lies beyond the wall of death with an accruing acceptance of our fate. Initially, what the character believes in is pushed aside by thoughts of what the character rejects, finding ideas of predeterminism to be offensive (‘life, strictly speaking, was just a superfluous, symptomatic demonstration of what had already been decided and would remain so from eternity to eternity; in which case, you think, earthly life might as well be declared null and void.’), and completely dismissing the notion of a soul, at least in the sense of heaven and hell. ‘[T]he most absurd, most meaningless thing a person can dream up is that there is an immortal soul and that soul can go to hell’, he thinks, terrified by the notion that someone he loves would be made to endure eternal torment. Ulven pushes towards a cyclical lifeline as opposed to a linear one - circles, wheels and pond ripples being a major motif upon which the narrative builds – and constructs the novel in such a fashion that the first few pages and final few pages meet up, with the events of youth and late life being a strange thematic reflection of each other. One of the earliest scenes on the lifeline is of a late-night lovers rendezvous in which he steals away in the night down winding roads, whereas the elderly man near the conclusion embarks on an epic (by elderly standards) walk down the road to call an old lover on a payphone.

The cyclical nature causes past and present to bleed together, much like watching a drop of ice cream on a bike wheel eventually turn into a blur as the rotation speeds up: ‘the spots of ice cream documented the wheel’s circumference, though each spot grew smaller and fainter with each rotation, smaller and fainter, until at last there was only a grayish white smudge, then nothing.' Past, present and future, and the many binaries found in the book, are carefully blended in the novel, through phrases like ‘the grave as a cradle’, 'ringing silence'¹ or his expression of having a nostalgia for the future. Ulven enjoys exposes the ironies in our lives, mocking existence. Such as the way the young, with a seemingly inextinguishable number of days to burn through, destructively seek the future, while the old are painfully aware of their limited heartbeats and reflect back on the past. It is this irony that makes life so heartbreaking and cruel. Take the youthful perspective:

’[T]hose are the people who are going to build their hopes in the Future; a future, oddly enough, that they regard in nostalgic terms, because it’s something they yearn for, they yearn and yearn, it’s something they’re actively working to produce, in a pleasant, large, though not overly large, happiness factory…therefore there’s no point in looking back, there’s just a compost heap of bygone days, days which to them are nothing but junk, rubbish, shit, good for nothing but fertilizing the ground from which their glorious future will spring.’

Compared to the elderly panic at looking back:

’It’s not the thought of death. No, that’s not the reason you ache in the springtime…it’s not an ache either, but a sorrow, a stab of worry…over life unlived; not the anger and angst about the fact that in the near future you won’t be experiencing anything at all (your fear of death actually decreases as you get older), but the nagging feeling that you haven’t experienced enough, that you’ve never really lived life, and even worse, that it’s to late to experience anything more, that the experiences you’ve had weren’t the experience you were meant to have, that somewhere along the way you took a wrong turn, and now it’s too late and as a result your life has in one sense been wasted.’

The ache of a life mislead is shown as the great existential dilemma, greater even than the acceptance of our own demise. The great question then is, what now? He both urges us to use our time wisely, but also asks if the emptiness we feel, the sorrow, can be filled even after our time for experience and adventure has gone by. The true tragedy is that every experience we have, every moment of life, is gone by the time it reaches us. The second an event occurs, it is gone, lost forever from the present, only to be looked back upon in our collected past. We cannot choose the events that befall us, only the paths that take us there. ‘the extraordinary implications a few chance words can have, how a brief succession of syllables can become the slender strand of spider web holding up a whole theater, a theater, namely, with an empty stage, where soon you’ll both appear, each from your own wing, pause, and look each other in the eye’. In a sense, life is an elaborate game of chance; each moment is a spin of the roulette wheel. Gambling imagery frequents each key moment in the novels timeline, reminding us we are victims to chance. Or, if time is circular, are we actually predetermined? Can we change our destinies? Or is that the beauty in life, how we spin forever, like the ice cream spot, onward into oblivion. The most peaceful, or ‘tranquil’ to use Ulven’s terminology, moments in the novel are scenes of silence in a world blanketed in snow. The moments we remember most are the ones that ‘appeared out of the nothingness of falling snow’, that standout from the blur of reality. These are the things to cling to; these are the moments we live for.

It is debatable if the novel follows one man through his life, or multiple characters linked through vague similarities. Being unable to pin the reflections and memories onto one, solid character allows the ideas to take on a universal quality as opposed to a more focused, singular one. The ideas are able to seep into all of us, and the way Ulven switches from initially addressing a ‘he’ to a ‘you’, allows him to address both the character and reader at the same time. The subtle method of the prose correcting itself, or commenting upon itself (especially with regard to word choice), gives the impression that the book may be just as much about words as it is about life. The creation process is wedded with the motion of the present. Being able to make sense out of the collection of memories, to put them into poetic fashion, may be the method of accepting the past and the future. Ulven reminds us how great meaning can be found in meaninglessness.

Tor Ulven has created a powerful work on the human condition, addressing loneliness, regret, yearning, and the inevitable death we all face. While the novel is short, a whole lifetime of ideas and musings is tightly packed in sweeping prose. Starting off a bit slow, Replacement quickly builds into a moving reflection on the fears that plague us all, and the mindsets we must take, the acceptance we must reach, if we want to shatter our fears and live fully free. While taking the reader down several dark paths, this novel reaches a conclusion that is as bittersweet as it is hopeful. Ulven offers philosophical conundrums that have been tackled before, but rarely in such shimmering prose.
4/5

¹ Ulven plays with several binaries in this novel, with light and noise being a symbol of life, whereas death is symbolized by darkness and silence. He makes great use of these symbols, such as during the scene where the elderly man feels sorrow for life gone wrong, he is confined to a bed and the light switch is out of his reach.

‘creek beds being cut soundlessly into the surface of her face by an endless spring flowing right beneath her skin, as if time were a perpetual trickle of groundwater, or rather as if the old face with its thousand wrinkles had been there from the beginning, complete down to the smallest detail, as if it had simply been hidden beneath the deceptive mask of youth...'

To quote Stig Saeterbakken, "No symbols where none intended. In Ulven's texts, all phenomena, whether dead or alive, have the same meaning, the same weight, if you will. Everything is equally real, equally meaningful, or just the opposite: equally meaningless. It's Ulven's strategy for placing himself on the same level as his surroundings. He's always equally precise, equally accurate, no matter what catches his eye or occupies his thoughts. In short, this linguistic precision represents in itself an embrace of the world. To describe this hand, this heart, this rock, this grass, this leaf in the grass, these dew drops on this leaf in this grass in this garden, to precisely express the existence of it all, is the true literary feat."

Having a hard time digging into this one. Some beautiful passages, but I think I'm more excited about so many other books on my to-read shelf and am not putting the proper work in.