The Hills Restaurant

“The Hills Restaurant” is, above all, an elegant, unexpected, deep, and subtle novel about the destruction of long-established structures. The main character works as a waiter in a legendary old restaurant in the center of Oslo, and he is very proud of it, doing his best to follow the century-and-a-half traditions. He has a gift for seeing, hearing, and analyzing everything. One world war passed behind the restaurant’s walls, then another—almost without changing the restaurant’s way of life, which the novel describes masterfully, with all the memorable details. Day after day, observing the guests, the hero is drawn—almost against his will—into the complicated relationships among them. Matias Faldbakken is not just a master of style; he masters the whole comic register—from farce to gentle irony. He knows how to push everything into absurdity, and his observer’s talent, his ability to enjoy details, creates a very strange atmosphere in the novel: stability and constancy turn out to be just as fragile as ignoring the rules.