REVIEW | Psalm at Journey's End by Erik Fosnes Hansen

AUTHOR: Erik Fosnes Hansen

TRANSLATOR: JOan tate

GENRE: FICTION

ISBN: 0156005271

RELEASE DATE: 1990

edition release date: Oct 16, 1997

PAGES: 384 PAGES

WRITTEN LANGUAGE: Norwegian

EDITION LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

This is a fictional story about Titanic but from the perspective of the motley band on board. It’s more about the life stories of the musicians and how they came together, but it’s not a retelling of the lives of the actual musicians. Although the author did a lot of research, the characters are all fictional. I read this book with a local Nordic book club for books by Norwegian authors.

The story is mainly divided into 6 parts, each part is focusing on one musician, showing us how they became a musician and why they came to work on the Titanic. There are a lot of common themes running through the stories. The musician’s life paths are full of uncertainty, music in their life is more of a wayfinder that helped them navigate their life journey rather than a job. Many details about how musicians work is apparently very accurate. We have a book club member who is a musician and she finds so many of her colleagues in this book, so she enjoyed this book a lot.

Personally, I liked the first two stories in the book, but the writing quickly became repetitive as I read further. Each musician is struggling with different kinds of misfortune and longing for belonging and recognization. However, the structure of each person’s story is basically the same, so it’s very easy to get tired of the stories and lose focus.

Another thing that bothered me is the amount of romance in this book. It’s not a romance novel by any means, but the amount of romance that happened and influenced the characters feels so excessive, it unnatural, and certainly unnecessary. I think this feeling was also caused by the repetitive plot development in each person’s story.

If you go into this book wanting to read a Titanic retelling, this book is not for you. Although they eventually were all on Titanic, their stories could happen anywhere, and the setting doesn’t matter. I don’t know if it’s because I was prepared for the inevitably tragic in the end, or I didn’t care about the characters enough, or even if the characters already went through so many misfortune, the ending of the book feels lacking for me. I was expecting more emotional feelings, but unfortunately not it was not the case.

However, if you want to read about musicians’ lives and their works, and what inspires their music careers, this may be a very good book to read, since our musician book club member felt very relatable in the story and liked it quite a lot. (That’s a good thing about book clubs, you always find new perspectives!)