Articles Available Online

Tor Ulven gave this interview, his last, a year and a half before he died, leaving behind a language that had never been seen before; a literature unheard The interview was done in collaboration with Cecilie Schram Hoel of Vagant over the course of an evening and night at the author’s home in Årvoll in Oslo We were greeted by a positive and friendly 40-year-old, who shared with us his knowledge as well as his illusion-free outlook on life After the fruits of our discussion were written up and edited, he received the demanding interview on a floppy disk and produced the final version himself   A poet and short prose writer, Tor Ulven (1953-1995) was a bright thinker who conveyed obscure ideas He also served as the criterion for a string of writers who first gained visibility in the mid-1980s In addition, he was one of the most successful essayists of his generation, whether his subject was literature, philosophy, music, or the visual arts In his essay ‘Side Notes on Leopardi’s Timelessness’ he puts it this way:   Art is and always will be the bait in a squirrel cage It can never satisfy that insatiable desire But neither can life … The secret of art perhaps lies partly in the fact that it reminds us, without us really knowing it, of the impossibility of satisfying that endless need, and that in this very impossibility there aches a bitter joy: we are severed from all that we could have had or could have been, yet we can still imagine it We know that we cannot step foot into that beautifully painted landscape and stay there   Nor can we step inside Tor Ulven’s world and remain there His writing – and here, his speech – is, then, rather a kind of antidote, an antibody against a false sense of comfort and simple solutions ‘There is no rest to be found through him,’ remarked one of his closest friends, writer Ole Robert Sunde in his speech at Ulven’s fortieth birthday, ‘and I could have imagined a higher degree of sensitivity, as if he has a