A stunningly beautiful tale of family and island life. Melancholic, quiet, pensive.

Life on the tiny Norwegian island of Barrøy is hard. The island’s family lives in solitude, isolated from the rest of the world. Weathered by constant waves and storms, the island is hard, graceful and beautiful. Their island is both kingdom and prison. They love their island.

“Nobody can leave an island. An island is a cosmos in a nutshell, where the stars slumber in the grass beneath the snow. But occasionally someone tries. And on such a day a gentle easterly wind is blowing.”

Depression and love and hard-won maturity are their legacy. Their visitors are few and far between, but always have a profound effect on them, though to articulate it would be impossible. The gentle presence of magic that surrounds the island withholds and protects.

Wonderfully simple rhetoric is at work throughout. Concise and poignant metaphors and similes make the best possible use of language, and are a testament to Jacobsen’s exquisite skill. Jacobsen knows that one heart-stopping moment can encapsulate everything you need to know. The Unseen is a book that yearns to be understood.

“messages in bottles are mythical vehicles of yearning, hope and unfulfilled lives”

What is the meaning of this novel's enigmatic title? For me, "The Unseen" are the book's protagonists, the Barrøys, who own and live on one of the tiny, remote islands off the coast of Norway aptly named Barrøy. When the novel starts, the Barrøys are old Martin, his son Hans (who has recently assumed the mantle of "head of the family"), Hans's wife Maria, their toddler daughter Ingrid and Hans's sister Barbro who is "not quite there". "The Unseen" follows the fate of the Barrøys over roughly three decades. This might make it sound like a "family saga" or even an updated "Nordic saga", except that, instead of epic battles against gods and monsters, we witness the Barrøys' daily challenges as they toil to eke out a living from the island's soil and the surrounding sea.

From hints throughout the book, we get the feel that the novel is set roughly a hundred years ago, but the story it relates has a feeling of timelessness, an eternity marked by the recurring seasons. The sun rises and sets. The years roll by. Storms rage, wreak havoc and recede. Children are born. So are lambs. Old men die. So do cows. There are brushes with death - the sea sustains life but it can also take it away. The surrounding world tries to stake its claim over the island, as when there is an insistence that Barrøy be put on the milk route, or when the price of Barrøy's produce is determined by the fickle rules of supply and demand of the mainland. But Barrøy lives on in splendid isolation as a new generation of Barrøys proudly continues the family traditions.

The novel's language, as rendered in the joint translation by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, is poetic yet lean and blunt. There are plenty of pages of nature writing, but nowhere does it become florid or overly sentimental. Use of dialogue is spare, which is a good thing as the thick dialect of the islanders is conveyed in an obtuse form of English (I wonder if it is an invented form of speech or based on an actual one).

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that The Unseen became a bestseller in Jacobsen's native Norway. It's a striking novel, but no page-turner. Its beauty is as austere as light refracted through a glacier. And just as memorable.

This is a beautifully written book about life on a tiny Norwegian island at the turn of the 20th century. It charts the lives of a small family at a gentle, moderate pace which reflects the annual cycles of their existence. It seems at first quite slow and uneventful, but then the reader is drawn into the characters and the ebb and flow of their lives, The key to this book is the wonderful rhythm of language and season and the insistence that nothing is insuperable if they listen to a mixture of common sense and the nature around them. I was thoroughly engaged in the characters and their strange minimal communication with each other and the outside world. I was moved by their fortitude and resilience on their isolated farm and how they learned to adapt to challenging events and survive the changing circumstances.. A lovely, absorbing read about a simpler time.

Unfortunately this was not a book for me, I appreciated that the dialogues were to simulate a dialect, but this made them incredibly hard to read (English is my second language).
The story is about a small island and the small family that lives there; the episode I recall most vividly is about the convicts who arrives at the island and, even in a short time, he is able to steal the feeling of safety from the family.
Overall in my opinion is quite too long and in the end sometimes quite boring.

An immersive story about the lives of a close Norwegian family as they cope with growing-up, ageing, work, tragedy and the vicissitudes of the weather on their sparse life.  Contemplative and humane.  You will put the book down feeling like a family member and have an odd longing to visit the island.
 
The story, translated from Norwegian, follows fisherman/farmer Hans Barroy and his family over a number of years.  Hans lives with his father (Martin), wife (Maria), daughter (Ingrid) and sister (Barbro) on the eponymous isle of Barroy.
 
I was unsure what to expect when starting this book and suspected that the bucolic existence could be marred by some form of violent tragedy.  This isn't that type of book, however, but I soon fell into the peaks and troughs of their lives.
 
Jacobsen writing is thoughtful and peaceful, I very much enjoyed the state of calm that I felt when reading.  At first nothing much seems to happen but then I realised that plenty happens but it is simply the narrative that takes away some of the sharp edges of events, both good and bad.  You feel the happiness and suffering of the Barroys, but not in a shocking, melodramatic way.
 
The island and the sea are important parts of the book.   The island is under a kilometre from north to south and half a kilometre from east to west.  The seasons and the tides are massively important to the Barroys.  The sea brings treasure but also 'fragments of distant lives, testament to opulence, laxity, loss and carelessness, and misfortune which has befallen people they have never heard of and will never meet.'
 
The joy of the environment is obvious, as are its dangers
 
Jacobsen will sometimes focus on small or odd experiences.  For example, when Ingrid is taught why the 'carding' (cleaning) of Eider-down is important, or when a cat is carried away by an eagle.
 
The language of the Barroys is translated into a colloquial English which, in part, reads like Yorkshire dialect.  The meaning is never lost though.
 
The characters are thoroughly believable, all with their own particular strengths and foibles.  Ingrid starts in the book as an infant and, in some respects, grows into the most important and strong character in the book.  She is a survivor, it is a lifestyle that makes no allowance for the feint-hearted.
 
This is a book that takes you on a journey of years and engenders moods and an odd form of nostalgia in the reader. A book I would thoroughly recommend.

This is a portrait of one family's struggle to survive and keep their independence and sense of identity on a tiny Norwegian island Barroy at the beginning of the 20th century. The descriptions of the family, the island and the daily tasks necessary to survive are beautifully written and absorbing . Life is led by the seasons from bleak, cold winters with terrifying storms to sunny warm summers we follow the family from season to season as Ingrid the daughter of the house grows from a small child to young woman.

It took me a little while to settle into the slow moving rhythm of the story but especially the second half of the book the changes and challenges the family faced kept me turning the pages.

If you enjoy books with quick moving action this isn't the story for you, but it is a exquisitely written meditation on the life of one family, which captures sublimely the sense of place and time.

Thank you to net gallery and the publishers for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for a fair review.

A wonderful and bleak look into Norwegian farm life and the difficulties faced daily trying to adhere to modern life. There are plenty of tragedies in the Barroy family, but they seem to deal with the toil to the best of their abilities.

The translation may have obscured some of the dialogue, which seemed like it was set in Scotland rather than Scandinavia but the writing is sharp and descriptive without over cluttering the main plot.

The Unseen

By Roy Jacobsen, trans. Don Bartlett and Don Shaw

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This book has been shortlisted for the Man International Booker prize and was inspired by the time that the author spent on a small island;

'The novel was written on an island similar to Banøy off the northern Norwegian coast, where my family comes from, and where I partly grew up. I still spend three to four months a year in a house that I have built myself on this island, the best place for me to work, ever.' http://themanbookerprize.com/news/unseen-interview

The same interview tells us that;

'The book is a modern portrait of a lifestyle that is long gone, a family living on a small island in the northern part of Norway, living on what they can catch and hunt and find in the sea. A gargantuesque drama – Man vs Nature – as seen through the eyes of a little girl coming of age who eventually – as her parents die – is obliged to take charge, become the master of the island, on whom everyone else depends.. '

This book traces the lives of an isolated family; their births, their marriages, their goals and ambitions, their individual achievements and tragedies, and their deaths. It traces their attempts to build new structures on their island, battling against nature and taking them generations to accomplish.



This book is an atmospheric look at life on a small island and the people who live on it. It traces their struggles with the natural world. It explores the changes occurring in society, their effects on this family, their attempts to adapt and the things that they lose in their attempts to adapt. They fight to get a regular boat service to their island. They must pay the prize - a lighthouse which will destroy their isolated lives and turn self sufficient individuals into tied, dependent, wage earners.

This is a quiet book about a quiet island. It is slow paced, occasionally dragging, mirroring the often slow and boring life of the island. If you like fast paced stories, filled with high stakes dramas, then this book is not for you. However, if you like picturesque stories, set in rural settings, then you will like this book.

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At first I found this rather depressing, a hardworking little family eking out a living on an inhospitable island close to the Arctic Circle - relentless grind, trudging around windswept hillsides and rocky shores, caring for farm animals, fishing in dangerous waters, trying to grow crops against the odds - with little support or contact with others. In their individual ways, they all dream of different lives. Apart from the seasons, it seems nothing ever happens. Then I realised this is the point - nothing changes until it does, then everything changes. When a series of calamities strikes, their existence is so precarious it seems inevitable that they will fall apart. But these are resourceful people, children grow up quickly to take on responsibilities way beyond their years and a new family configuration is forged with different dreams for their future. So what starts as a depressing story turns into an upbeat celebration of home and companionship. I liked it very much and would recommend.

The Unseen is on the Man Booker Prize shortlist and attracted my attention because I like to read books about other countries & cultures.

Set on a fictional island called Barrøy just off the coast of the mainland of Norway, it focuses on the family who lives there, also called Barrøy. There is Martin the grandfather still grieving the loss of his wife and struggling to come to terms with the shift of power as he becomes weaker and his son stronger. Hans, son of Martin is a sailor-cum-farmer who wants to make the island and their life better. Maria, his wife is distant and silent, with dreams of her own. Ingrid the daughter is confused, growing up unsure if her life should be as a girl helping her mother in the kitchen and knitting, or out helping her father & grandfather with the nets and fishing. Finally, there's Barbro, sister of Hans who can't move from the island over due to some kind of disability which prevents her from reading or learning as fast as the others.

The novel is beautifully written and interesting. While nothing exactly dramatic happened in the book, well, depending on how you look at it. There is a calm serenity to the everyday life of the islanders. From the way they never exactly fit in with the mainlanders, to the way they struggle on lending, struggling through brutal winters and terribly dry summers. Sometimes the biggest drama is things like Hans not wanting a lighthouse to be built on the island.

The intricacies of daily life are what make this novel truly fascinating. It's no surprise it has been shortlisted for the prize.

The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen emerged as a strong favourite among the Man Booker International Prize shadow panel very early on and it certainly looks as though I really have saved the very best until last. The Norwegian novel is notable for being the only longlisted title to have two translators: Don Shaw and Don Bartlett. Set on the fictional island of Barrøy off the coast of Norway, the reader is introduced to three generations of the sole family who live there including Hans, his wife Maria, father Martin, sister Barbro and daughter Ingrid. Hans wants to build a quay to connect the island to the mainland while Ingrid must contend with the challenges of further change as she grows up.

Both ‘The Unseen’ and ‘Fish Have No Feet’ have very similar settings based in Scandinavian fishing communities but they are also both quite different in style. Despite being set in the early twentieth century, ‘The Unseen’ has a relatively timeless quality and addresses the momentous events alongside the mundane with assured ease. The prose is quietly dramatic, capturing the isolation of the island and how daily life is driven almost entirely by the weather. I was particularly impressed by the way in which the local dialect was rendered into something completely original while still being comprehensible in the English translation – a very difficult thing to pull off successfully, in my view.

‘The Unseen’ very much deserves its place on the shortlist and is probably my favourite book on the longlist. However, we shall have to wait until Wednesday 14th June to find out which book wins the overall prize…