Gaute Heivoll

Five Seasons

He is going to paint. When he retires he will finally have time.
For thirty-four years he has been a Train Conductor servicing
the train between Oslo and Stavanger, and he has travelled a
total distance equivalent of fifty-nine trips around the world.
But now he is heading home. To paint. To the garden. But the
year ahead will be completely different than he had imagined.
In the autumn of 2012, Gaute Heivoll sees the film footage
recorded by his grandfather in the spring and summer of 1978
for the first time. He watches his grandmother, his young parents,
and himself as a newborn boy. The most prominent in all
the footage is still the garden, which his grandparents nurtured
with love and care.
In Five Seasons, Heivoll has brought back a lost world with his
writing. Despite its small reach it appears in glory and richness.
It is a novel about fighting elk and badgers, about watering
flowers and about staying together. It is a novel about dying, a
novel about loving. And about the necessity of creating while
you still have the chance.