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I was about a year late to the Tante Ulrikkes vei party, but having spent that year reading pieces about how good this book was, I was very happy to find that it lived up to the expectations I had been given of it.
Tante Ulrikkes vei is told through emails and recordings sent to a researcher by two boys with immigrant backgrounds who are growing up in the Eastern part of Oslo, in an area where a high density of the population have an immigrant background. The boys share stories from their lives, including experiences and challenges they had when growing up. The two boys are the same age, and live on the same street, but their lives are very different, and take different turns over the five years the story is told over.
I don’t know much about the author, but given that he grew up in the area where the two boys from the novel are growing up, I think it’s safe to assume that it’s heavily based on first or second-hand experience. There is something predictably, and sadly, eye-opening about how societal stigma and racism makes this book much less relatable than a book about someone growing up in the same country I grew up in, in the same city that I currently live in, should be. That said, this isn’t a book about stigma or racism other than it being an inevitable backdrop to the stories that are taking place. A few historical events take place during the course of the five years in which this book is set, and it’s interesting to see how they change the dynamics of what’s going on. It had me thinking back to the time and events mentioned in this book, grasping for my own memories and thoughts about them, and the similarities, but mostly differences, between how I saw them and how the characters in this book see them.
Even when setting aside everything that makes this book interesting, Tante Ulrikkes Vei is a great coming of age novel in it’s own right, and strikes all the notes a good coming of age novel should strike. The emotions and situations felt real, I cared about the characters, and always wanted to keep reading to find out what would happen to them next. As a debut novel, it’s remarkable, and I expect that the book will, deservedly, continue to be regarded as a classic within contemporary Norwegian literature.