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May 27, 2017
Kadri: "I wouldn't mind recovering the contents of the box." "What's in it?" Gjon asks. "Things Senka collected from Kosovo. Things we don't want remembered. It's time to forgive and forget, you see. Not to wake sleeping beasts." (157) In Norwegian by NIght many beasts awaken, many fraught memories return to haunt the novel's protagonists. Enver, a Kosovan nationalist and slaughterer of Serbs, returns to hunt down Senka, the woman he'd raped and had a child by. Twenty years after its end, the Yugoslav conflict returns to disrupt peaceful Norway. Happy romantic relationships face ugly ethnic tensions believed to be dead and buried. And the novel's hero, Donny loses hold of reality in the grip of memories of the death of his son, Saul, in Vietnam, a death he feels partially responsible for. Donny desperately needs to protect the orphaned Paul as a displaced and bloody act of redemption.