White Shadow by Roy Jacobsen

0 deserts her, and her father succumbs to religious charlatans. Married as a teen to a man twice her age, Nancy watches her husband get drunk every night. When he dies in an accident at a tuna-packing plant, she wonders if she’ll be granted “a moment alone with the 2,500 cans containing my deceased husband.” When disease attacks her uterus, she calls herself “Nancy Cancer” as treatment leaves her “skeletal, mutilated, barren.” Lloret invokes Exodus, Revelation, and other books of the Bible, and Nancy herself calls to mind Job. She’s beset by adversity; she refuses to quit. A nuanced character study, this book is also an indictment of misogynists and their enablers. Lloret occasionally relieves the tension with instances of fleeting beauty. In one, Nancy recalls the “collective intimacy” shared by bargoers listening to “a Peruvian waltz, or something even sadder.” Years later, she still favors downbeat songs. Some days, they’re her only solace. Kevin Canfield New York Roy Jacobsen White Shadow Trans. Don Bartlett & Don Shaw. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2020. 264 pages. WITH EVERY SENTENCE in his new novel, Roy Jacobsen shows how his characters carve their morality out of the dried driftwood found on the small islands of war-ravaged Norway. White Shadow is yet another masterpiece by Jacobsen, who continues in this short novel to track the vicissitudes of the life of his young heroine Ingrid Barrøy, first introduced in 2020 in Unseen. Jacobsen has rigorously reduced the family cast of the previous novel to narrow in solely on Ingrid, now thirty-five years old, who is trying to make a living (rather than living her own life) during the last years of German occupation. Just a single drop of sentimentality could have drowned Jacobsen’s entire enterprise as it rests on a simple framework made of a m m In between the hand-offs of the diary, Rushdy tours Oman, negotiating his way through the dark, byzantine ancient and modern past, which is glossed over by glitzy buildings or tourist sites. Ibrahim keeps the pacing taut throughout the novel between the 1992 chapters and Warda’s diary, although the excerpts of the diary are the real treasure because they offer insight into what happened to the DLF. Ex-rebels from the group come out of the woodwork in 1992 but offer little to the narrator because they are afraid of government surveillance. His cousin Fathy encourages him to go to Salalah, near the site of the Dhofar Rebellion. There, he meets Warda’s brother-in-law, Abu Ammar, who gives almost nothing away about what happened to Warda and his brother, Dahmish. More importantly, Rushdy meets Warda’s daughter, Waad, who in her twenties looks astonishingly like her mother. She is the head of a woman’s center in Mirbat, the site of a failed DLF guerilla operation. Later, when he is invited to spend the night at the house of Warda’s brother-in-law, he makes love to Waad when she appears in his bedroom —the scene a rare example of a lapse in plausibility in the novel. We never really learn how Warda dies, but she lived long enough to give birth to a daughter, Waad, which means “promise” in Arabic. She was probably executed or died in prison. After Rushdy reads the last fragment of Warda’s diary, he realizes that he didn’t love Warda after all. He didn’t really know her—it was pure infatuation. Is nostalgia for the past like infatuation with a person? Is this really based on a true examination of the complex realities of history? The DLF “bloomed” in a certain moment, like Warda, the revolutionary rose, but the DLF and Warda were crushed by Sultan Qaboos and his foreign allies (the British, Iranians, and Saudis) whose priorities were economic interests and oil, rather than equity and justice. The DLF were not angels, either. Whatever their noble ideals in the beginning, the DLF were morally compromised by their commitment to violence. Yaarib, Warda’s brother, also a member of the group, threw his hat in with Qaboos’s government and betrayed his sister because he saw the way the wind...

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