Loslassen

Loslassen, or letting go, is not presented as a simple release from attachment. It is the difficult choice between holding on, following someone into danger, and allowing separation to stand. The idea gathers force around Harry Hole, whose fear of drawing Kaja Solness into his despair meets her insistence that she can choose to stay; around a mother who cannot relinquish Lene Galtung; and, finally, around Harry’s decision to release Lene’s body into an abyss. Each instance asks what love demands, but none makes the answer easy.

Love as refusal and rescue

When Kaja tells Harry that she will go with him even if his life descends into darkness, she refuses to treat separation as the only responsible form of love. Harry describes the state he fears as emptiness: like the period immediately after the avalanche, alone in the same hut, but himself absent. The comparison gives his withdrawal a precise shape. He is not merely warning Kaja that he may be unhappy; he fears becoming unreachable even while she is beside him.

Kaja answers from their shared history. She found him and brought him out once, and believes she could do the same again. Her offer is not abstract reassurance but a claim grounded in an earlier rescue. Harry resists it, asking what would happen if he did not want to be brought back. His question exposes the limit of another person’s devotion: Kaja can accompany him, but she cannot choose recovery for him.

The exchange turns when Harry acknowledges that Kaja is enough. Her hand in his, followed by her promise to follow him to the end of the world, coincides with a physical loosening in him. A long-held tension gives way; his inward pain becomes warmth and peace. Yet the release does not settle into a simple promise of safety. He also remembers having wished for the same surrender amid the mountain snowstorm. The scene therefore lets relief and danger occupy the same moment: yielding to intimacy loosens his grip on despair, while his desire to let go still carries the possibility of disappearance.

A mother’s bond with Lene

A woman’s account of her relationship with Lene gives the concept another, more painful form. She recalls warning Lene not to repeat her mistake by falling for a man merely because his attention made her feel beautiful. The imagined transformation in another person’s gaze could feel like magic, she explains, and become a reason to stay until the bitter end. The warning makes attachment perilous not because affection is false, but because the need to recover that feeling can keep someone bound to a destructive relationship.

Her own connection to Lene cannot be reduced to the role she says she played in producing an heir for Galtung. She breastfed and fed the child, changed her diapers, slept beside her, taught her to speak, and raised her. She knew that this intimacy would not last forever and that she would one day have to let Lene go. Asked whether she did, she answers bitterly that a mother may never manage it, while a daughter can. Lene despises her for what she did and for what she is; now, in the mother’s view, Lene is repeating the very pattern she had warned against by following the wrong man.

The contrast between mother and daughter makes letting go unequal. The mother experiences the bond as something she cannot simply put aside; Lene can separate herself from her, but that separation becomes contempt and inheritance at once. Outside the house, Harry turns the question over alongside the image of Odd Utmo carrying a photograph of his son while fleeing. The image does not resolve whether a parent can release a child, or what carrying a picture means for that bond. It instead brings the question back to Harry: whether he, too, can let go.

The body released, the truth withheld

At the volcano, letting go becomes a physical and ethical act. Kaja has already dragged Tony Leike’s corpse by the jacket collar and belt and rolled it over the crater’s edge. Harry does not stop her. When she looks toward Lene’s body, however, he shakes his head. He weighs practical considerations against morality, diplomatic consequences against a mother’s possibility of visiting a grave, and truth against a lie that might make life easier. He then lifts Lene’s body, nearly buckles under its weight, and stands at the precipice with his eyes closed. For a moment he feels the pull of the abyss and sways; then he releases her. When he opens his eyes, she has become a point, soon hidden by smoke.

The scene connects physical release with the relinquishing of a claim to certainty. Harry’s decision does not produce a truthful public account. The explanation will be that Lene disappeared in Congo: no trace, no body, and no official closure. That version also avoids an internal investigation into a police shooting and awkward international complications. It leaves Lene officially missing and allows the apparent search for Leike to continue. The lie has practical and political consequences, but the narration also makes clear what it withholds: a grave her mother might visit and an acknowledged ending to the case.

Harry’s hesitation prevents the act from reading as effortless resolution. The weight of Lene’s body almost brings him down; the possibility of the abyss draws him toward it before he lets her go. His choice is consequently both an acceptance of separation and a deliberate decision about what others will be allowed to know. The official story releases the authorities from the immediate consequences of the truth, while leaving the personal loss unresolved.

Leaving without mastering loss

Later conversations show that Harry has not reached a settled state of acceptance. In an exchange interrupted by the announcement of boarding for a flight to Amsterdam, he agrees that he should have done something, only to be told that it is too late. He suggests trying to be better next time and asks that Oleg be given that message. The exchange leaves both regret and the possibility of future effort intact: the past cannot be changed, but the wish to act differently has not been dismissed.

His conversation with Kaja makes their separation more explicit. He tells her that he is leaving the next day, and she concludes that she and their relationship were not enough. Harry agrees that they were not enough for either of them. When she asks whether the departure is about Rakel, he says that it is, and explains that Rakel does not want him as he is now: he must repair himself and become whole again. Kaja points to his visible scars, but he clarifies that these are not the wounds he means. The distinction locates his desired change inwardly, beyond what another person can mend by staying beside him.

Kaja says she will not bring him back again; Harry accepts that she may not succeed. Her final response—that she will—keeps their bond open without cancelling his decision to leave. The exchange does not turn her earlier promise to follow him into a cure, nor does it make departure proof that she was unimportant. Instead, it shows two people recognizing the limits of rescue while continuing to care for one another. Across these scenes, Loslassen names no single moral rule. It may mean refusing to abandon someone, accepting that a daughter can leave, releasing a dead body, concealing the truth, or departing from a relationship that cannot make Harry whole. The novel leaves those forms of release in tension, with attachment persisting even where holding on is no longer possible.