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This article analyzes Nordahl Grieg’s Skibet gaar videre (1924) as a maritime novel from the age of steamships. It explains the novel’s “maritime world picture” (Søren Frank) as a kind of disenchantment connected to the steamship. In addition, it analyzes the novel’s moments of re-enchantment that are connected to sailing ships and sea animals. The article is structured around several genre-typical chronotopes of sea adventure narrative, which help to explain the young Grieg’s aesthetic and ideological relations to the novel of the sea.

Abstract This article argues that Merethe Lindstrøm’s 2011 novel Dager i stillhetens historie portrays a collapse of the familial memory transmission structures that are normally involved in the making of postmemory, as defined by Marianne Hirsch. My analysis of the novel describes how it represents traumatic memories related to the Holocaust and how it portrays the struggle of listening to traumatic memories. Further, I describe the character Simon’s retreat into the isolation of silence as an engagement with traumatic loss and an attempt to reconnect with his former identity and lost family. Lastly, I draw on Hirsch’s analysis of the role of photographs in familial memory transfer to analyze passages in the novel that show what I call the breakdown of postmemory.