Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, “The Birds” — it is absolutely wonderful, the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages.

The careful translation from the Norwegian underscores Vesaas's rare sensitivity in recording Mattis's often insightful view of his world... A literary gem.

Although the author was born 1897, his books are far from old-fashioned and traditional... Tarjei Vesaas become a classic ... This novel gave me particular pleasure.

Tarjei Vesaas is the best and most interesting Norwegian writer after the Second World War. His language is so sensitive, so open to his characters' minds and the landscapes they inhabit, that it gives form to that space between – between people and other people, between people and nature – the space where our lives unfold.

Haunting tragedy in a Bergman landscape.

A masterpiece.

Mattis, the protagonist of … The Birds, surely deserves a place among the cadre of unforgettable characters in modern literature… Vesaas’s prose, spare and straightforward, soars with a poignancy of feeling… Mattis’s disability is the pivot upon which the novel unfolds and also serves to amplify the ways that “normal” people, too, are “handicapped.” Vesaas allows us see that without Mattis’s sensitivity, perceptivity, and honesty, we, too, are impaired, limited from living a full life.

The inexplicable thoughts that recur to Mattis will do so to readers as well, long after the book has ended.

An under-appreciated work of genius.

A powerful book, [The Birds] wounds you… Its complexity is rendered with the simplicity of poetic beauty that only a true poet such as Vesaas could pull off. I guarantee you, you will never recover.