Detrás del armario, el hacha

Darkness in the fjords, in the streets, in the houses. The smell of gunpowder, footsteps in the night, voices, fear… Set during World War II, the stories collected in this volume—the first book by the great Torborg Nedreaas, and the one that brought her fame—evoke the anxiety of the Norwegian people in the face of the Nazi occupation: a state of exception that suspended daily life. We are faced with a profound testament to the human condition, conceived without the detachment of distance or the perspective of time, since they were written during the conflict and published in 1945, when the country had just been liberated. There are books full of truth capable of preserving a piece of the world intact within their pages. This is one of them. The individual fates of the protagonists portray shame, powerlessness, and uncertainty, as well as bewilderment, imposed silence, unspoken lies, and doubt. However, beyond the darkness, a tenacious yearning for freedom runs through these stories. They pulsate with a desire to live and a sincerity that lends a poignant power to texts as harsh as they are beautiful. The presence of the invaders awakens hatred, but also clandestine love stories and public displays of collaboration. Indeed, sometimes with stark realism, in several of her stories Nedreaas recounts the fate of women involved with the occupiers: young women who sell their favors to soldiers in exchange for material comfort or who find in them an illusory affection, while society violently rejects them. Rebellious, with a firm refusal to judge them, Nedreaas gave them a face and a voice in an era marked by hatred. A rebelliousness that unites her with other great writers of her time, since she belongs to a generation of fighters who knew how to rise from the ashes without reveling in misfortune to compose a kind of song to existence, that is, to the value of existing and surrendering to it.