This winter has been very much about contrasts. Light and dark, sickness and health, for and against, loneliness and community and also the greatest of all contrasts that we know with life and death, for all of humanity in our society and in our personal lives.

This book is about this greatest contrast – life and death. The flow of Espedal's words is as breathless as a torrent.

I'm writing the AND very consciously, because we can't recognize any state without the opposite contrast, and everything is just grey and lukewarm without the swings to both extremes.

So: AFFRONTONS LA VIE ET PLONGEONS AVEC PASSION DANS TOUS LES HAUTS ET LES BAS // LET'S FACE LIFE AND THROW OURSELVES INTO ALL THE UPS AND DOWNS WITH PASSION

I read the book in January 2022 in the midst of preparing our musical theatre production and in the middle of this dark season surrounded by the deaths of close and distant acquaintances. It's a strange book; but it doesn't let me go, sometimes the sentences seem so simple and banal that you want to throw it in the corner and then it pulls you back into the grey bell skies of winter. To experience the flow of language, it really helps to know Norwegian.

Susanne Maier-Staufen, Mainz, 13 February 2022