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Note: Winner of the Norwegian Critics Award in 1950. "Torborg Nedreaas (1906-1987), is a Bergen writer who ranks among the most popular and widely read Norwegian novelists of the 20th century. She adopted a feminist approach long before feminism was re-discovered about 1970. She hated Fascism and oppression, and in her short stories she defended the young girls who were despised for consorting with German soldiers. In the novel Av måneskinn gror det ingenting (Nothing grows out of moonlight, 1947), shows how blind love leads a young girl into degradation and despair. Her main work, however, is a series of short stories and novels about a girl growing up in Bergen in the years around the First World War, in a middle-class family situated between luxury homes on the one hand and poor tenement houses on the other. The titles are Trylleglasset (The magic glass, 1950), Stoppested (Stopping places, 1953), Musikk fra en blå brønn (Music from a blue well, 1960) and Ved neste nymåne (At the next new moon, 1971)." Torborg Nedreaas død Torborg Nedreaas, som døde igår, ble født i Bergen i 1906. Vår litterære medarbeider Iver Tore Svenning gir her en kort vurdering av hennes livsverk. Om man skal la Alf Larsens ord stå til troende, var - er - Torborg Nedreaas noe av det største norsk litteratur har å vise for seg i vårt århundre. For ham - og flere andre - sto, og står, hun som vårt sekels fremste kvinnelige forfatter i Norge. Sigrid Undset ikke unntatt. Når Torborg Nedreaas nu har satt sine siste, rettfremme ord på papir, kan det være grunn til å ta slike ord frem, til å pusse litt støv av dem. Ikke for å foreta noen mannjevning, men for å utfordre den litterære hukommelse og vurderingslyst. I en tid som øyensynlig - reduserer boken til en sesongartikkel, med en gjennomsnittlig levetid som en popplates, kan det være grunner gode nok til å minne om at det fortsatt finnes bøker som overlever en vinternatt.Og til dem hører ganske mange av dem Torborg Nedreaas kom til å skrive. Torborg Nedreaas begynte tidlig å skrive. En rekke noveller til ukepressen - de beste av dem samlet i utvalgsbindet "Før det ringer tredje gang" (1945) - og hun visste av erfaring hva det koster av arbeide "å kunne skrive" . I en tale på sin syttiårsdag (1976) kom hun inn på en annen omkostning: "For ensomheten har jeg lært å kjenne, slik at jeg uten overdrivelse kan si at det har gått på livet løs. " Det gikk vitterlig "på livet løs" mer enn en gang, for Torborg Nedreaas hørte til de forfattere som brukte ordet for også å få andre til å innse livets forpliktelse til sannhet og menneskelighet, til noe så forslitt som kjærlighet på det egentligste plan. Denne troen på noe imperativt lyser idag som en regnbue over hennes livsverk. Nei, lett hadde hun det egentlig aldri. Minst - kanskje - med seg selv. At hun i stedet for å skrive salgbart, kunne få inntekter av å oppdrette siameserkatter, skal ikke nettopp legges henne til last! Til mer enn last la man til gjengjeld hennes politiske standpunkt og aktivitet. Hun sto fast i en tydelig venstreposisjon av rødeste sort, og trivdes med det. Tidlig ble hun også en hjørnesten i kampen mot NATO. At hennes forfatterskap kunne lide under det, rent kunstnerisk, illustrerte romanen "De varme hendene" (1952) . Da hadde hun imidlertid hatt sitt kunstneriske gjennombrudd. Det skjedde allerede med den egentlige debutboken "Bak skapet står øksen" (1945) og den følgende novelleboken "Trylleglasset" (1950) , den første av "Herdisbøkene" , som også skaffet henne kritikerprisen. I eftertid kom Torborg Nedreaas til særlig å bli stående som forfatter av bøkene om Herdis, barnet som efterhvert modner til ungpike og kvinne. Bøker preget av ømhet, men også styrke og klarsyn. Et stykke langt på vei selvopplevet kulturhistorie - og som sådant en god delforklaring på hennes politiske radikalisme - men også et lidenskapelig forsvar for barnesinnets ukrenkelighet, for drømmen, for full menneskelig integritet i forholdet mellom kjønnene. Kvinnesak? Anvendt psykologi? Enhver får finne sine svar, i de efterfølgende bøker "Stoppested" (noveller, 1953) og de to Herdisromanene "Musikk fra en blå brønn" (1960) og "Ved neste nymåne" (1971) . Mindre oppmerksomhet fortjener heller ikke romanen "Av måneskinn gror det ingenting" (1947) og novellebindet "Den siste polka" (1965) . Året efter denne utkom forøvrig "Noveller i utvalg" , mens 1982 var året både for "Samlede Verker" og de blandede tekster i "Vintervår. " Alt Torborg Nedreaas skrev, kom til å ligge innenfor vår realistiske berettertradisjon og preges - ikke minst - av tro på ordet som noe annet og mer enn ytringsmiddel. I et dikt ( "Jeg er ordet" ) fra 1950 heter det bl.a. : "Jeg er ordet! Men vokt deg - jeg krever din sjel. " Torborg Nedreaas hørte til de ikke mange som våget å gi det som ble krevet av henne. Uten prutningsmonn. Copyright Aftenposten A/S The following is from Terry Arendal, Norway via e-mail ewa_alexandra@c2i.net “You asked about whether Toborg was a pianist, yes she was, but the Concert was not a professional concert but just the same showed she could play well enough to dare a town concert and be praised for it. But she was by then a qualified music teacher she gave up being music teacher when she got married. Think it might have been Porsgrunn Kommunistikk Ungdoms Forbund but it could just as well have been Porsgrunn Kommunial Ungdoms Forbund one being the communist youth organization and the other the town youth orchestra do wonder a bit as my Thor Sundby had to flee to Sweden during the war and he was Conservative in his politics, similar fate for an old Communist I knew in Finmark he was forced to flee in a boat in mid winter to Murmansk in Russia. Which meant Terry had to start looking. Ach your cousin lived an interesting life, beware of music teachers. So we begin; forgive if I hiccup now and then in translation from Norsk bokmål into English Never thought I'd be doing so much so quickly. Torborg Nedreass was born 13 November 1906 in Fana near Bergen and grew up in Møhlenpris district in the cente of Bergen. A district very like that described in the books about Herdis. Torborg was a qualified music teacher and it wasn't till well into adult life that she had her debut as a writer of books. her debut being in 1945 with two novel collections "Behind the Cupboard stands the axe" and "Before it rings the third times". The later being in the main a collection of short stories and novelets written for weekly magazines before the war. This writing may well have helped her escape from an unhappy marriage. she says "I began to write just, at the end of my marriage. It was that that gave me courage to leave". But back in time again, when she was a teenager she lived three years in Copenhagen with her mother and stepfather/ she said she always suspected it was to escape taxes. Her step father wanted her to study, but she just wanted to play piano and often practiced up to seven hours at a time. Later she did have a sort of debut in Skien (Skien and Porsgrunn are neighboring cities in Telemark.) to good critic (you have poster). At this time though she was a student at Art and Crafts school [Kunst og håndverkskolen] and took lessons in drawing. Again I must go back in time and to Bergen. Torborg remarks on her time at school and her first stories: "In fifth class, I was twelve years old and I invented stories that began with weekly magazine form, but ended with suicide. It was girls who should have babies, and who were deserted and casted themselves out from sixth floor. I became more and more occupied with these histories, but did with them in the end but there was seldom a happy ending. Man all to often believe small girls will have happy endings. They were enormously popular, my histories, You understand; the others forgot to mob me, and they forgot to tease me about my red hair or call me "Tuborg" (a Danish beer) and the like. I was suddenly popular and that also a pleasing thing" [Festskriftet s100]. About her writing for the weekly magazines she says " And so I wrote each time I got a so called good idea. But after that I began to write stranger and stranger things and thought no:-that there is something no weekly magazine will have". She married had two children and marriage ended de facto before Second World War began. During the war she and her children lived with her mother at Stord as she was forced to go into hiding to escape the Nazis. She seems to have been with the resistance!!! But she was also in hiding because of her family had some Jewish roots. When asked why she was a Communist she replied" Those I met who had anything to do with the resistance they were communists, It was not come away from. Well there were others and some gave me newspapers and such, but they who had a reason for that , they were communists. And so I took the consequence for that in the end -first after the war was over, and a good while after that. She was expelled from the Norwegian Communist Party in 1949 but continued to regard her self as a communist. She had during the war sold her sewing machine and had also to row out fishing, winter so good some summer, to keep her small family fed. as well as write her stories published by Halvorsen and Larsen. If some one later had asked Torborg Nedreaas why she wrote she would not have said that it was just for the money. She says “that I write is in the beginning is written for my self, because I bring to light things I never knew(-) I write to come to the bottom of things I would not willing tell you, but I would tell me something (page 105). Think this is a good place to break Torborg now begins as an author, sadly both her sons her dead before the seventies, as I told you before in the sixties from traffic accidents Part 2 follows tomorrow I hope It is pretty obvious that Torborg seems to have reached her productive peak around 1960 as after that there is very little. but she had then written Music from a blue well, which was on the whole about being a teenager and young woman in Bergen during the period of the first world war. Again Herdis is the heroine. Like Torborg, Herdis has a Jewish grandfather. Her father speculates in shares on the exchange. Drives her mother into forcing a divorce to marry a rich drunkard. Torborg manages though to include all of the then society's types and classes. One notices a tendence to strong women who look after their own lives(just like herself). The book was highly praised see the reviews sent earlier. From then on Torborg has more than enough private problems with both her sons traffic accidents, and their following. She published the "last polka" in 1965 which reflected a good deal of the turmoil in her private life. In 1971 she published with the" next new moon," which in some ways is a continuation of music from a blue well. Herdis is now independent, and has been to Copenhagen. To understand her relationship to NRK one has to remember that NRK was an absolute monopoly, both in radio and from 1960 TV apart from the border regions which could get Swedish TV or the south coast which could get Danish TV some lucky folk even could receive English TV. What ever she said in any of her programmes was received in the thousand homes. So any thing to extreme was quickly pounced on. re clipping from Morganbladet. It was a very strange affair, things could be said in newspapers that couldn’t be said on the air. People like the previous WHO leader were very much against the break up of this monopoly, she went so far as to try to ban the import of parabol dishes. So I guess in a the more open society we have post Gro, with a multitude of channels, Torborg perhaps would not have stood out as the extremist left winger she sometimes is painted. She really wasn't it was more the closed society she lived in. You can get more information by contacting the parish (sogne) she is buried in www.kirken.no <http://www.kirken.no> Hope this is OKregardsTerry Arendal Norway ” Taken from her biography at http://www.aftenposten.no/alex/litterat/forfatte/nedreaas.htm This photo was sent to me by a Norwegian woman named Terry Arendal at the e-mail ewa_alexandra@c2i.net. She helped research this line for me and it turned out that her child studied Torberg and she still had old school books about her where this is fro This photo was sent to me by a Norwegian woman named Terry Arendal at the e-mail ewa_alexandra@c2i.net. She helped research this line for me and it turned out that her child studied Torberg and she still had old school books about her where this is fro This photo was sent to me by a Norwegian woman named Terry Arendal at the e-mail ewa_alexandra@c2i.net. She helped research this line for me and it turned out that her child studied Torberg and she still had old school books about her where this is fro
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