Novel
Meeting at the Milestone
Møte ved milepelen
Sigurd Hoel · 1947
Synopsis
During the occupation, the narrator, a lonely man who is never named, lets the resistance turn his house in Oslo into a hiding place for fugitives on their way to Sweden. A visitor tells him about Hans Berg, a former fellow student who has become a Nazi, whose book traces back his unhappy life. Then he is sent to a small town where a clandestine group is betrayed time after time: there he meets people from his own past and must look for the informer, as well as for his own share of guilt.
Context
The novel appeared in 1947 from Gyldendal, while the country was trying its collaborators; it is seen as a contribution to the debate on those trials, which asked why Nazism had attracted some and not others, and as a book of guilt and responsibility. Britannica reads in it an attempt to trace the compulsive tyranny of Nazism back to the constraints of childhood. It was translated at once into several languages; into English, by Evelyn Ramsden in 1951, then by Sverre Lyngstad.
Who it is for
A novel of investigation and conscience, translated twice into English but never into French, for readers who want to understand collaboration under the German occupation.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the most important works of Norwegian literature of the occupation.
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