And I still sort of feel scientists are smarter," she says.As a child Maile devoured comic books and adventure stories, although she had no idea she was going to be a writer herself. "They ended up in California and then, trying to get back to English rule, headed for Canada driving sheep," explains Meloy A severe winter marooned them in Montana. The man died and his wife, Meloy's great-great-grandmother, remained. Meloy was raised in Helena, a small Montana town where it's hard not to run into someone you know on the street "I've always made eye contact. Elfin, with reddish hair and dark eyes, the writer looks younger than her 33 years. Maile (it rhymes with "Kylie") must inherit her features from her paternal Irish ancestors, a Catholic seamstress's daughter and a younger son of an Anglo-Irish Protestant who left Ireland in the 1880s.
The novel combines the sweep of a saga with the emotional intimacy of a short story as each generation grapples with the secrets and lies of the one before."Never to lie is to have no lock to your door," Elizabeth Bowen once wrote "Yes That's good," says Meloy nodding. Since being published a year ago Maile Meloy's Liars and Saints has sold around 75,000 copies in the UK. It was chosen as one of Richard & Judy's summer reads and has now made it on to the Orange Prize shortlist - the £30,000 winner will be announced on Tuesday. The ramifications of that one incident colour the next 50 years as illegitimate children are born, a girl dies young of cancer, family members test the ties that bind them and find their Catholic faith challenged. Philip Roth, one of its many admirers, called Liars and Saints an "impressive achievement" and praised the way it packs a punch despite its brevity. In this slim volume Meloy tells the moving story of the Santerre family through four generations It begins with a marriage. While Teddy's off flying fighter planes in the Second World War, his beautiful wife Yvette has her picture taken by a photographer who kisses her. So it is with the tragedies of Ibsen, the canvases of Munch, the most poignant of Grieg's songs and piano-studies.Norway's secession from Sweden was seen as a triumph for the labour and agrarian movements responsible since for so much that is distinctively Norwegian.
Of course the reality wasn't quite as tidy as is often now presented, and there have been subsequent strains between the two countries, above all during the Second World War. While there are aspects of Norway to cause concern - its obstinacy in continuing whaling against justified international outcry, certain elements in society (as in Britain) determined to use the ubiquitous national pride for purposes of paranoid exclusiveness - on the whole the famous egalitarianism, ethical awareness and passion for freedom are still palpable.Will the present vitality of Norwegian writing continue? Tore Rem of Oslo University, well-known literary critic and cultural commentator, fears the present obsession with modernisation - ie of commercial success as principal index - will result in significant erosions of the conditions under which serious writers have been so notably flourishing. Yet both these intellectuals represent a moral integrity it's hard to imagine going under easily, and while the country continues to honour in its public monuments the creations of free-ranging writers such as Lars Saabye Andersen, there are surely grounds for hope.. Shifts in the policy of publishing houses are detectable, paralleling shifts in values for academic institutions Merete Morken Andersen agrees. In Merete Morken Andersen's Oceans of Time (2002), a former husband and wife try to comprehend their daughter's suicide (which remains largely incomprehensible).
