This review first appeared in The Malahat Review.1
The poet and fiction writer Seán Virgo, an adoptive Canadian born to Anglo-Irish parents in Malta, has for years laboured over a body of work devoted to seemingly contrary ends. Resisting identification with any particular literary or cultural tradition (the exception, a 1983 collection Through the Eyes of a Cat: Irish Stories, proves the rule when the preface vows its author will “write no more Irish stories”), he nonetheless staunchly defends the local and tactile. The current volume, named for a valley in Norway, marks an impressive addition to this oeuvre. Mixing prose with terse recitative, Dibidalen aspires to a condition rare in today’s fiction—stony, bardic, yet also tenderly disconsolate.
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