The Wells
Hans Herbjørnsrud
“When in the winter of 1976, I left college in Sagaheim to take over the family farm here in Heddal, I had in my possession a skeleton and an anatomy book.” Thus opens the longest of the stories in The Wells. Just before he leaves college, our narrator is told of an unpublished poem, “Cain and Abel”, by the great 19th century Norwegian author Wergeland; a poem with a prophetic ending which looks far into the millennia, a poem that has understood too much. The powerful hold this poem has over his imagination forces him to search for the truth of its creation and its ending. But the challenges do not only lie within the poem; but within reality itself, where conflicts between brothers and between farmer and poet take disturbing new turns. “The Skeleton and the Anatomy Book”, a major short story in the collection.
