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| Read the Interview with Helene Uri Here |
Just out from the University of Minnesota Press
Inspired by Helene Uri’s own journey into her family’s ancestry, Clearing Out,
an emotionally resonant novel by one of Norway’s most celebrated
authors, tells two intertwining stories. A novelist, named Helene, is
living in Oslo with her husband and children and contemplating her new
protagonist, Ellinor Smidt—a language researcher, divorced and in her
late thirties, with a doctorate but no steady job.
An unexpected call from a distant relative reveals that Helene’s grandfather, Nicolai Nilsen, was the son of a coastal (sjø)
Sami fisherman—something no one in her family ever talked about.
Uncertain how to weave this new knowledge into who she believes she is,
Helene continues to write her novel, in which her heroine Ellinor
travels to Finnmark in the far north to study the dying languages of the
Sami families there. What Ellinor finds among the Sami people she meets
is a culture little known in her own world; she discovers history
richer and more alluring than rumor and a connection charged with
mystery and promise.
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