October-December 2017: The Nordic Countries

Hello and welcome to the final quarterly theme for 2017, focusing on the Nordic Countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, as well as their associated territories (the Åland Islands, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland).

My name is Andrew, I follow the group closely and it inspires my reading. I tend not to post much, but that is about to change in a major way :) I apologize for the delay in getting this thread up, but I am excited to devote a quarter to this region -- it has long been an area of interest for me, although I am no expert by any means. However, I will provide as much input and insight as I can, and look forward to your thoughts and comments as we explore together.

This theme will be an ongoing work in progress; I'll be adding more content throughout the quarter, and over the next few days especially. As it's easiest to split up the region on national lines, I'll have posts below for each of the individual countries + the territories, that is to say:

• Danish literature
• Norwegian literature
• Swedish literature
• Finnish literature
• Icelandic literature
• Faroese literature, etc.

And over the course of the coming weeks, I plan to take a closer look at some other specific topics related to this quarter's theme, including:

• Children's literature from the Nordic region
• Select works of poetry and drama
• The phenomenon of Nordic crime fiction
• Literary prizes and in particular, the Nobel Prize for Literature
• Literature of the indigenous Sami people
• Aspects of Nordic culture
• Select works of non-fiction

Plus -- profiles of various authors, reviews of specific books I've read, and other stuff besides. I especially look forward to all of your contributions and hearing about what you're reading...the discussions are always informative and intriguing. And please don't hesitate to correct me if I misstate anything as we go along, in particular if you happen to be from the Nordic region :)

A quick word about terminology: the terms "Scandinavia" and "Nordic countries" are often used casually in English, that is to say interchangeably, to refer to the region. However, technically Scandinavia refers only to Denmark, Norway and Sweden, whereas the Nordic countries include these three plus Iceland and Finland as well. I won't take anyone to task for using "Scandinavia" or "Scandinavian" in our discussions but when referring to the whole region I'll use "Nordic" to avoid any confusion.

One thing I've come to appreciate already in doing research in advance of this quarter, is just how much there is to explore....although the combined population of the five countries is under 27 million, they individually and collectively punch above their weight on the world literary scene. Most major works have made their way into English translation, and when profiling authors I will highlight those books which are available in English. That said, this is Reading Globally and please do post comments on works you've read in the original, or in another language, even if the book in question is not yet available in English.

Edit - Denmark

Edit - Norway

Edit - Sweden

FINLAND

Long ruled by its neighbours, first Sweden and later Russia (as an autonomous Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire), Finland gained its independence in December 1917 amid the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. A brief but bloody civil war followed in 1918, and during World War II Finland fought the Soviet Union after being invaded in the Winter War (1939-40), and then again in the Continuation War (1941-44) in a bid to recapture lost territory. After reaching an armistice with the Soviets, Finland fought the Lapland War (1944-45) against retreating Nazi German forces in northern Finland.

During the Cold War Finland remained officially neutral, and had links with the West as well as a strategic relationship with the USSR. The country modernized its economy and saw rapid economic growth, eventually creating a comprehensive welfare state in the 1970s.

Today, Finland is a modern, prosperous nation of 5.5 million people, and like its Nordic neighbours ranks near the top of a number of human development indicators.

Finnish literature

Finland has two official languages -- Finnish (spoken by 89% of the population) and Swedish (5%). However despite being the majority language, literature in Finnish really only dates from the 19th century, with the publication of the Kalevala, a collection of folk poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot, which became a symbol of a nascent Finnish nationalism and is today considered to be the national epic of Finland. The first novel in Finnish was Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers) by Aleksis Kivi in 1870.

A lot of fiction written in Finnish doesn't make it into English, although the boom in Nordic crime fiction has maybe helped give a boost to translation overall. Those fluent in Swedish or German will usually have a greater selection of translated works to choose from, but there are nonetheless lots of books by Finnish authors out there in English, if you hunt around a bit.

Here is a list, by no means exhaustive, of writers from Finland worth checking out:

Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804-1877): National poet of Finland; wrote in Swedish
Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872): Author of "Seven Brothers", the first novel in Finnish
Minna Canth (1844-1897): Playwright and activist for women's rights
Juhani Aho (1861-1921): Novelist and short story writer
Otto Manninen (1872-1950): Poet and contemporary of Eino Leino; translated several classics of world literature into Finnish
Eino Leino (1878-1926): Probably the most well-known and influential Finnish-language poet
Frans Eemil Sillanpää (1888-1964): Won 1939 Nobel Prize for Literature
Edith Södergran (1892-1923): Poet; wrote in Swedish
Toivo Pekkanen (1902-1957): Novelist and short story writer; master of the social epic
Pentti Haanpää (1905-1955): Prose author known for his powerful portrayals of ordinary people
Mika Waltari (1908-1979): Prolific writer best known for historical novels, such as Sinuhe egyptiläinen (The Egyptian)
Elvi Sinervo (1912-1986): Novelist and poet
Tove Jansson (1914-2001): Known for her "Moomin" series of children's books, but also several adult novels; wrote in Swedish
Väinö Linna (1920-1992): Famous for his war novel "The Unknown Soldier" and the "Under the North Star" trilogy
Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921-1995): Poet, playwright and novelist; also translated works from several languages into Finnish
Marja-Liisa Vartio (1924-1966): Poet and prose writer, best known for the novel "The Parson's Widow"
Henrik Tikkanen (1924-1984): Author and journalist known for his series of memoirs
Bo Carpelan (1926-2011): Poet and author, winner of 1977 Nordic Council Prize; wrote in Swedish

Edit - Iceland

Edit - Faroes, etc

Edit 2

Edit 3

In case you fear that you're alone in this reading quarter, I've set aside three books for this quarter - one each from Finland, Iceland, and Sweden. I don't, however, promise to finish all before the end.

I was hesitating because I wasn't sure whether we were all OK to start posting here, but I, too have several books from my tbr pile that I hope to get to this quarter (not that that plan worked very well last quarter): the second volume of Kristin Lavransdatter, which I've had on loan from a friend for far too long; Röde Orm, a historical novel about the Viking Age that is supposed to be very good; a science fiction novel by Tor Åge Bringsværd (I loved his Minotauros, which I read in German; his work doesn't seem to have been translated into English), and an anthology of Finnish writing.

I rhink I had meant to save Carl-Johann Vallgren's baroquely titled (at least in English) The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred for this quarter also, but at some point in the last several months I forgot. It's an odd book, but the writing is gorgeous and provides a lot of food for thought; it reminded me a bit of Patrick Süskind's Perfume. (Oddly, the titles used in other languages -- including, I think, the original Swedish -- are considerably more prosaic and less of a mouthful.)

I'm also joining. As I'm Swedish I naturally read quite a bit of Swedish and Nordic literature but I thought I would use this theme as a motivation to read some unread classics from my bookshelf starting with Gösta Berling's saga and the Poetic Edda.

If you are still looking for some Nordic literature it may help to look for the Nordic Council prize http://www.norden.org/en/nordic-council/nordic-council-prizes/nordisk-raads-litt... . Every year novels from the Nordic countries (2 nominations each) and from Greenland, the Faroe islands, Sapmi and Åland (1 nomination each) are nominated and a winner is selected. Both the winners and nominations are usually interesting. There is also a similar prize for children's literature. There is also a Nordic crime award, the Glass key award https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Key_award

Finding sami literature in English might be challanging so I though I should give some recommendations, although I'm by no means an expert. I know that at least Nils-Aslak Valkeapää has been translated. Niillas Holmberg and Inger-Mari Aikio also have some poetry in English. If you read a Scandinavian language the selection is of course greater. Music is much easier to find and with Bob Dylan winning the Nobel price in literature I guess it is sort of fair... Artists such as Mari Boine, Frode Fjellheim, Sofia Jannok, Niillas Holmberg, Maxida Märak, Jon Henrik Fjällgren and Kitok (just a semi-random sample from various genres) are all available on youtube. Also, if you have the opportunity to see the recent movie Sami Blood do.

I'm happy to give my personal recommendations for various genres if anyone have trouble to find anything inspiring. I have also written a short list with some recommendations for Swedish authors if anyone is interested: https://ireadthatinabook.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/123/

Thank you, >13 alvaret:, for the link to the Nordic Prize. It's sad that publishers do such a poor job of translating Nordic literature. I can find lots of mystery and thriller books by Nordic authors, but few in literature. Per Petersson is an exception because he's quite popular in the U.S.

>14 whymaggiemay: What kind of literature are you looking for? I might have a few suggestions although they would of course be biased by my own taste.

I'm learning Swedish, Norwegian and Danish but nowhere near skilled enough to tackle serious literature; however, I might jump in with some kiddie stuff. I have a few books by Astrid Lindgren and Maria Gripe in Swedish.

Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking was the first "real" book I read on my own, aged six. Serendipitously yet almost fatefully a major formative influence. :)

Have you read Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren yet? That's a children's book that lend itself to some interesting discussions.

No, besides Pippi I've only read, as a kid, the one about a boy called Rasmus (Erasmus?)

I've got Ronja Rövardotter with me.

Ronja is also an excellent choice, I think you'll like her.

I’ve still got the third volume of Kristin Lavransdatter on the TBR shelf, and I want to read something by William Heinesen. Otherwise, I’m open to ideas coming out of this thread...

>16 LolaWalser: Are you learning them all at once? If so, is it confusing?

If you're reading children's literature, another author from the region who wrote for children as well as adults is Tove Jansson with her Moomin books, which can also be considered political commentary. She also fits in well with the last quarter, writing in Swedish in Finland.

>12 spiphany: I say this every chance I get, but The Long Ships is one of my favourite novels and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. I was limited to reading it in English, but the translation flowed really well, like listening to a saga.

>21 SassyLassy:

Are you learning them all at once? If so, is it confusing?

Yes--I staggered them, so I'm most advanced in Swedish, then Norwegian, Danish last, and yes, it's confusing. However, that makes me concentrate even more, and the similarities are at the same time helping with getting ahead.

It's not an unfamiliar situation, for example when I began learning Spanish in high school my Italian interfered a lot, but eventually they settled into their respective niches, so I'm hoping the same will happen to the Skandi-salad.

I have some Tove Jansson's books, including the Moomin comics, but all only in English.

Picked up the other day a book by an Icelandic writer no one seems to list on LT (that particular title, unless it's uncombined): The thief of time by Steinunn Sigurðardóttir. Unknown to me.

Since we're talking about children's books, besides Ronja the Robber's Daughter (an old friend of mine), Selma Lagerlöf's Nils Holgersson comes to mind. Basically, a naughty boy is shrunk down to the size of a thumb and goes on a tour of Sweden on the back of a goose. The story draws a fair amount on folklore and legend, so some of the vocabulary might be archaic/obscure (I read it in German translation at a time when my reading skills in that language were advanced but not effortless, if that helps gauge the difficulty at all).

Is anyone familiar with Tonke Dragt? I have a soft spot for good adult-friendly children's fantasy and was intrigued by some of the reviews of The Letter for the King.

>23 spiphany: Never heard of but sounds like something I'd like to read (although the author is Dutch). Have you read The Shamer's Daughter by Lene Kaaberbøl (Denmark)? It's a few years since I read it but I remember them as excellent adult friendly children's fantasy in the classical sense.

Nils Holgersson is a real classic, Project Gutenberg has an English translation if anyone is interested (and several other translations too). https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10935

Astrid Lindgren has written three books that could count as fantasy, apart from Ronia they are Brothers Lionheart and Mio, my Son. Tove Jansson's Moomin serie could arguably also count as fantasy but in many ways I find it very realistic.

>23 spiphany: I was read snippets of The Letter for the King in elementary school (in German) and begged my parents until we got it. I very much enjoyed it (and to a slightly lesser degree) the sequel. I haven't read it recently as an adult, but think it would probably hold up quite well.

>24 alvaret: Sigh. There I go mixing up my "Germanic languages spoken north-ish of Germany that start with a D" again. I really ought to have managed to sort that out by now. (I hope that doesn't sound flippant. My cultural and historical and even linguistic knowledge is more nuanced, but apparently this is how my brain insists on storing the language names.)

Kaaberbøl has also been on my mental list of writers who sound interesting. And Maria Turtschaninoff (Finland-Swedish)--her Maresi appeared in the bookstores here recently and sounds like another intriguing children's/adult crossover fantasy.

I've got Nils. Didn't know about the miniaturisation, sounds great.

No one has mentioned Jon Kalman Stefansson's Heaven and Hell, so I will.

I loved Heaven and Hell and am planning on reading the second in the series The Sorrow of Angels for this challenge.

Making a start in the Faroes:

I visited the Faroe Islands with a couple of friends in 1995, and found them a very strange and fascinating place indeed. On the way home (none of this new-fangled aeroplane stuff: we took the ferry between Aberdeen and Tórshavn, so there was plenty of time), I read a moderately serious overview of the islands' culture, history and topography, The Faroe Islands by Liv Kjørsvik Schei and Gunnie Moberg, and marked the pages about a number of Faroese writers I was meaning to read, in particular William Heinesen. But that's all that came of it, partly because I couldn't find any of his work in translation (The black cauldron was the only one to have been issued in English at that time). This theme read seems to be a good opportunity to make up for that...

With hindsight, Heinesen probably wasn't the most obvious author to pick anyway - what captured my imagination was the spectacular scenery and the tiny, remote communities in the smaller islands, but Heinesen was most interested in people, especially in the small-town dynamics of society in Tórshavn. He doesn't really do landscape.

The lost musicians (1950; English 2006) by William Heinesen (Faroes, 1900-1991) translated by W. Glyn Jones (UK, Denmark, 1928-2014)

 

William Heinesen was a prominent Faroese poet, novelist and painter (during his lifetime, he supported himself mostly by selling pictures). His most famous work is probably the novel Det gode håb (1964). He chose to write in Danish, the language he was made to learn at school, rather than Faroese, which he spoke in daily life (Faroese was introduced in schools in 1938 and only became the official language, jointly with Danish, in 1948). For this reason, he publicly ruled himself out when it was rumoured that he was in the running for a Nobel - he felt that if the prize went to a Faroese writer, it should be to one who wrote in the local language.

Glyn Jones was professor of Scandinavian literature at UEA and put a lot of effort into bringing his friend Heinesen to the attention of the English-speaking world, eventually translating most of the novels himself.

The lost musicians was apparently mostly written during the Second World War, when the Faroes were effectively a self-governing British protectorate, cut off from German-occupied Denmark, and many Faroese lost their lives serving in the Royal Navy or supplying Britain with fish. But it's set during the more cheerful times of Heinesen's childhood before the First World War.

A little group of unconventional characters get together regularly in a basement in a dodgy neighbourhood of Tórshavn to play string quartets, sing, discuss poetry, and have a few drinks (or a lot of drinks) with their friends. Most of them are relatively impoverished and live from crisis to crisis by doing various odd jobs - one is a ferryman, another sets type on the newspaper, another teaches and hangs wallpaper, etc. - but they are united by their belief that the things that matter most in life are friendship, love, and aesthetic pleasure, in particular expressed through music.

Set against them is the bank-manager Ankersen, a former drunkard himself, who has accepted Jesus into his life and is driven to share the Good News and sweep away the sinfulness he sees all around him. He founds - and then disagrees with and splits off from - his own nonconformist sect, and with the best possible intentions, he becomes directly or indirectly responsible for smashing up the lives of the musicians and their friends.

This is a theme for a novel that you can easily imagine Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Gottfried Keller, or Sinclair Lewis tackling, in their different ways - Heinesen is a bit different, though, because for him the emphasis is always on the sheer fun his characters are having, and even what would for anyone else be the most tragic moments entirely fail to take themselves seriously. The movement of the plot is left to take care of itself and the focus is always on incident. There is no political agenda, only a human one - Heinesen presumably wants us to see the danger of good intentions that fail to take account of the individuals they are dealing with, but his main point seems to be that the joy of music and poetry is something that ultimately triumphs, even in the worst situations: definitely something that needed to be said in the 1940s.

I just finished Poetic Edda (sometimes called the Elder Edda) which I've been reading on and off for the last year. It consists of a collection of epical poems first written down on Iceland in the 13th century and tells the stories of Norse Gods and heroes (including Sigurd). It is hardly something to read from cover to cover in one setting but I found it mostly very readable. There is however quite some variations in the style of the poems and from some of them only a fragment remains so not everything was equally interesting. It is one of the key classical texts in Norse literature and has had a broad influence (including Wagner and Tolkien) and there were a few proverbs I recognized but didn't know the source of before. Overall I really enjoyed it.

If you want to try just a piece of it I would recommend Völuspá (Prophecy of the Völva) which is reasonably brief, covers (at least in passing) much of the mythological framework and generally is one of the best parts (and probably the most famous). There are some free versions (out of copyright translations) available online but the ones I've seen lack much of the lyrical qualities I found in my Swedish translation so a more modern version might be better. I would also recommend a text with footnotes as people and things are sometimes called by synonyms which are often hard to interpret.

Three more shortish novels, choices that were helped by the suggestions in Sjón's recent Guardian piece: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/11/top-10-modern-nordic-books

Under the glacier (1968) by Halldór Laxness (Iceland, 1902–1998), translated by Magnus Magnusson

   

Halldor Laxness has a pretty good claim to being the best-known Icelandic writer since Snorri, thanks in particular to his wonderful 1930s agri-epic Independent people (which everyone should read) and his 1955 Nobel prize.

Under the glacier is a splendidly eccentric novel that doesn't fit into any particular pigeonhole, except perhaps for a generalised sixties feel of "anything goes". A naive young man is sent by his bishop to report on the state of the church community in a remote parish on the slopes of the famous Snæfellsjökull volcano in the far West of Iceland. Not coincidentally, the crater of Snæfellsjökull is where the explorers in Jules Verne's Journey to the centre of the Earth descended below ground. It is clearly a place conducive to all kinds of strangeness.

It turns out that the pastor supports himself mostly by shoeing horses and repairing primus stoves; that his wife - who may or may not be a mythical creature - has been missing for 35 years; that no services have been held in living memory and the church is nailed up, its fittings mostly used for firewood; that a mysterious wealthy outsider has had a bungalow built on part of the churchyard; and that there is at least a strong rumour that bodies have been buried in the glacier rather than in the cemetery.

Definitely all very odd, and you won't be much clearer about what is going on at the end than you were at the beginning, but great fun, and plenty to make you think about what we mean by religious belief and the nature of objective observation. In odd ways, it reminded me of Thomas Bernhard's first novel, Frost, published five years earlier - but Laxness is a lot less wordy than Bernhard!

Moonstone: the boy who never was (2016) by Sjón (Iceland, 1962 - ) translated by Victoria Cribb

   

Sjón (Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson) is a colourful figure, known for as much his collaborations with Icelandic musician Björk as for his novels and poetry.

Moonstone is another rather odd novel - the central character, Máni Steinn, is a gay teenager in Reykjavik around the end of the First World War, obsessed with cinema and with a young woman called "Sóla G—" who rides an Indian motorcycle and is the double of a woman he has seen in a film. The story brings in the devastating Spanish 'flu epidemic, leprosy, independence from Denmark, and a few celebrated figures from the early history of experimental film. Nothing very profound, but engagingly quirky.

Mirror, shoulder, signal (2016) by Dorthe Nors (Denmark, 1970 - ) translated by Misha Hoekstra

   

Dorthe Nors is mostly known for her short fiction - amongst other things, she was the first Danish author to get a story published in the New Yorker.

As the title rather suggests, Mirror, shoulder, signal is about learning to drive - the central character, Sonja, is a fortyish single woman from the depths of rural Jutland who feels somewhat adrift in the urban rush of Copenhagen. She earns her living as the Danish translator of the popular but appallingly violent Swedish crime novels of Gösta Svensson, which are starting to disgust her; the driving lessons with gossipy, motherly instructor Jytte are getting her nowhere; she doesn't want to reveal that she may be unfit to drive anyway as she suffers from dizzy spells as a result of a hereditary balance problem. And she misses the contact she used to have with her sister Kate.

This should be a grim and miserable sort of novel, but it's actually very funny, and the ending is delightfully offbeat. Maybe there isn't quite enough story to support a full-scale novel (even a relatively short one like this), but that doesn't really matter, as Sonja is such an endearing character. And there are plenty of engaging jokes about the clichés of Nordic Noir...

Regarding Finland, this year I read Väinö Linna's epic "Under the North Star" trilogy which encompasses Finnish history from the mid-1800s through World War 2 and is considered a classic of Finnish literature. During my visit to Finland I was assured that these books accurately portray Finnish character, culture and history. The books follow a family of tenant farmers through three generations of class struggle and war, but also describe their lives--through joy and sorrow--in a personal and very affecting way. All in all, one of the most memorable reading experiences of any kind that I've had in a long, long time. The characters will stay with me.

>30 thorold: I read Heinesen's Tower at the Edge of the World many years ago. I'm rather embarrassed to say that I can't remember very much about it at all, but I do recall it being rather more dreamy-nostalgic than what you're describing, so perhaps that might be a somewhat better fit for getting a Faroese landscape fix. I read Heðin Brú's Old Man and His Sons last quarter, but he, too was more interested in observing people than the landscape, which comes across as more harsh and rugged than anything else.

>31 alvaret: That reminds me, sometime last year I read a modern novel by Einar Kárason that I found to be an interesting modern take on the society of the Icelandic sagas. He tells the story of the war/feud of the Sturlung clan -- so of course we get an appearance by Snorri Sturluson, who in addition to authoring the Prose Edda and Heimskringla, was also a politician and lawspeaker and right in the middle of the turbulent civil war in Iceland, something that I hadn't realized. To tell this story, Einar Kárason adopts a much more modern narrative style than the sagas, one that is almost journalistic, in which each chapter is told from the perspective of one of the characters. I found it took a little getting used to, as the constant switches of voice can be rather jarring, but ultimately this technique was quite effective and he captures the atmosphere of the age quite convincingly. It's not available in English (I read the first part of the story, titled Feindesland, in German, and it looks like there is a Danish translation also).

>34 spiphany: Never heard of but will keep my eyes open. The local library doesn't seem to have that particular novel but some of his others so I might start there, thank you!

>32 thorold:
I am a big fan of Sjon. here are 2 reviews I did: Of these 2 books I would consider From Mouth of the Whale to be his masterpiece.

FROM MOUTH OF THE WHALE
BY SJON

An Icelandic tale that takes place in the mid 1600’s. This is the story of one Jonas Palmason who lives an extraordinary life of tragedy, magic, torture and travail. His innate knowledge of the natural world gives him unique insight into the very essence of the natural order of life.

Herbs, animals, how all living things are both connected and separate and how god’s hand created all, Jonas’ deep faith helps him to survive the superstitions of his fellow man who exile him to a barren island accompanied only by a shipwrecked tiny mouse.

He retells much of his life’s journey, his marriage, his children some of whom died and the wonder of it all: life, land and sea, plant and creature, Jonas has a special wisdom that understands how it all works.

This is a unique tale, a fable and more, that leaves the reader hauntingly mesmerized, not quite knowing what he has just read but thankful that he did.

The Whispering Muse
a short novel its most intriguing aspect being the protagonist's theory that Nordic culture had succeeded because of its higher consumption of fish. Additionally, the tale takes place on a small merchant ship with excellent guest quarters and its luminaries are entertained nightly at the Captain's table by a ship's mate who tells tales of Jason and the Argonauts.

an entertaining novella that falls short of the writer's masterpiece, From The Mouth of the Whale.
Sjon is a magical writer.

>36 berthirsch: I have got The whispering muse - in Dutch - out of the library, but then I saw that Scribd also have it in English, so I'll probably read that shortly.

Following up the suggestion from >13 alvaret: to look up winners of the Nordic Council Prize, I found myself back in Denmark again (although this particular book turned out to be set mostly in West Africa and London):

The god of chance (2011, English 2013) by Kirsten Thorup (Denmark, 1942- ), translated by Janet Garton (UK, 1944- )

  

Kirsten Thorup is a distinguished Danish writer, originally from Funen, who won the Nordic Council Prize in 2017. She's best-known for her Jonna tetralogy (1977-1987).

Janet Garton is Emeritus Professor of European literature at UEA (I seem to be coming across a lot of people from Norwich lately) and is one of the founders of Norvik Press, an independent publisher of English translations of contemporary Nordic literature, also based at UEA. (Interview in Publishing perspectives here: http://publishingperspectives.com/2016/09/norvik-press/)

I was intrigued by the idea of this book - Ana, a hard-nosed career-woman from Copenhagen, on holiday at a beach-resort in Gambia (because that happened to be what the travel-agent was able to offer her at short notice), meets a local teenager, Mariama, and somehow comes to see her as the missing half of her own personality. She helps Mariama to come to Europe, and, naturally enough, things don't go the way she hopes. It's a complicated and sophisticated book in many ways, with a lot of different layers of imagery, pulling out social and psychological ideas about African and European cultures, families and individualism, role of women, colonialism, multiculturalism, destiny vs. chance, and a lot more.

But I didn't enjoy it as much as much as I hoped: the writing seemed to let the rest of the structure down. Garton talks about Thorup's "deceptively straightforward everyday language", but in the translation, at least, it often read more like the work of an incompetent beginner - which it obviously isn't. I felt that there was a flatness and lack of humour about the text, and we were forever being explicitly told characters' thoughts and motivations ('"X," said N, thinking Y'). That's something you can certainly do occasionally in a novel, but when you do it consistently for all the characters in every dialogue, it becomes more than a little wearing. More like reading an academic report than a novel.

When I looked up Norvik Press to write the review of the Thorup book (>37 thorold:), a dim memory stirred in the back of my mind, and eventually I worked out that I still had a Norvik book (bought in 2010!) on my TBR pile:

Naboth's Stone (1981, English 1989) by Sara Lidman (Sweden, 1923-2004), translated by Joan Tate (UK, 1922-2000)

  

Sara Lidman was a very well-known Swedish writer (winner of the Nordic Council Prize in 1980) and a prominent campaigner for left-wing and environmental causes. I read her early novel The rain bird some years ago - my secondhand copy of the translation in that case rather wonderfully turned out to be a gift from the author to a British teacher she'd stayed with in Nairobi, and there was a letter tucked into the dust-jacket in which Lidman enthuses to her friend about Under Milk Wood, Lorca, and Robert Musil. She's particularly taken with Polly Garter, commenting that what Cait "takes 300 years to tell" (presumably in Leftover life to kill), Dylan captures in one short song.

No artefacts in this book, though: I must have bought it new.

The 17-year-old Joan Tate was on what should have been a three-week holiday in Sweden when World War II broke out: she was trapped there for four years and not only learnt the language while she was there, but went to college and qualified as a gym teacher and physiotherapist. She later became a novelist in her own right and one of the best-known English translators from Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, with more than 200 books to her credit (obituary here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/jul/07/guardianobituaries.books).

Naboth's Stone is the middle book in a sequence of historical novels dealing with the impact of the railway on the remote and thinly-populated inland regions of northern Sweden (Lidman grew up in Västerbotten herself). We are somewhere in the 1880s, and the ambitious Didrik is Chairman of the council in the raw settlement of Little Crane Water. He is eager to see the community develop: the imminent construction of the railway is the key to that, and he is determined to make sure that it will be routed through Little Crane Water. Didrik and his neighbours are only the second generation of farmers in the area, the economy is still largely one of subsistence farming, and the only way the settlers can get their hands on cash is by selling their trees (and/or their labour) to the big timber companies from the coast. As Didrik comes to see in the course of the book, the timber companies are exploiting their capitalist advantage remorselessly, doing irreparable damage to the forests, and giving farmers far less than the market value of their timber.

But this isn't just a political novel - most of the story is to do with Didrik's relationship with his wife Anna-Stava, with his elderly parents, with the mysterious wet-nurse who turns up when Anna-Stava isn't able to feed their son, and with Didrik's absent foster-brother Naboth. All of which feed into our understanding of how the community works, what its values are, and how it makes rough-and-ready arrangements for looking after people who can't support themselves (widows and orphans are taken into the farmers' extended families, but treated as unpaid servants).

Lidman's text, which is full of broken sentences, dialect, and bits of biblical/liturgical language, was obviously a nightmare for the translator. Tate makes a pretty good job of it on the whole, but there are some odd choices here and there. The generic dialect she uses seems to be a mixture of Scots, Northern English and rural Shropshire - there's probably no good answer when translating dialect, and I'm sure it would have been a mistake to pin it down to somewhere specific, but the mixture does sound a bit artificial sometimes, and lacks internal consistency. In the religious language, she has a tendency to re-translate the Swedish rather than use corresponding passages from the AV, which must have saved valuable time, but undermines the effect of the familiarity of the language that Lidman was presumably trying to get.

I found this a very interesting book - a sort of communist Swedish Middlemarch, perhaps...

>38 thorold: Sara Lidman is usually counted among the Swedish working class authors. Working class authors are of course nothing particularly Swedish (Väinö Linna, mentioned above, is e.g. a Finnish example) but there was a strong trend of working class literature in Sweden during the 20th century and many of the best known and loved Swedish authors come from this tradition. Vilhelm Moberg, Moa Martinsson, Harry Martinson, Eyvind Johnson, Ivar Lo-Johansson, Sara Lidman, Per Anders Fogelström and many others are usually mentioned. More recently Susanna Alakoski, Åsa Linderborg and Elsie Johansson have all written novels that could be considered part of this tradition.

Among these I would personally recommend Vilhelm Moberg’s series The Emigrants (Utvandrarna), about the Swedish emigration to America, and Per Anders Fogelström’s City of My dreams (Mina drömmars stad), about working-class people in Stockholm, as good starting points.

>39 alvaret: Yes, Moberg is on my list!

In the meantime, I've been pining for the fjords, once again with the help of alvaret's link to the Nordic Council Prize. Perhaps this is the first book of those I've read so far that qualifies for the stereotype of "Nordic gloom and doom":

Trilogie (2014; German 2016) by Jon Fosse (Norway, 1959 - ), German translation by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel (Germany, 1959- )

 

The title of this novel, for which Fosse was awarded the Nordic Council Prize in 2015, seems to be a kind of joke - it's actually a sequence of three rather compact novellas: Andvake (Sleepless), Olavs draumar (Olav’s Dreams) and Kveldsvævd (Weariness), which together come to something like the length of a standard single-volume novel. Andvake was originally published separately in 2008, and it was a couple of years later that Fosse decided to add the remaining two parts to the story.

All three parts deal with a young couple, Alida and Asle, who run away from the fishing village where they grew up when Alida becomes pregnant. In the first part, they are walking through the rainy streets of Bergen looking for a place to stay - with obvious biblical overtones, the townspeople insist that there is no room in the inn, but eventually they find a place for Alida to bring her son into the world. In the second part, Asle, now called Olav, goes through a nightmarish experience in the town on his own, and we get a new view of what happened in the first part. In the third part, we shift to the viewpoint of Alida, as seen - or imagined - by her daughter, Alise, in old age.

All three parts are written in a distinctive, poetic style, with strong echoes of the Bible (and presumably of medieval Norse texts). There also a seems to be a link to the structure of traditional Norwegian fiddle music - we're alerted to look for this because Asle and his father and son are all fiddle players. Fosse normally writes in long run-on sentences with minimal punctuation, but here and there he switches to short punchy sentences where the full stops stick out like drum beats. There's a lot of repetition, too, with phrases that come back again and again, adding to the dreamlike, meditative feel of the text established by the prevalent imagery of sleep, tiredness and dreaming.

The background to the book is one of rural poverty without a safety net. The world is tough, lives are cheap, but life goes on, fish have to be caught, and the consolations of religion seem to be irrelevant. We never get more than hints as to which century we might be in, and the hints are often contradictory - sometimes it feels like the late 19th century (as seen by Ibsen and Munch), sometimes we could be in the middle ages. Bergen is clearly still a fairly small town, without much contact with the wider world, and is always referred to by the archaic name Bjørgvin.

Not a cheerful book, by any means, but one that does interesting things with form and language: definitely something it would be interesting to read in the original. Especially if I knew more about the context!

(I read this one in German, as that was what I was able to borrow, but there is also an English translation, published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2016)

Discussion of Trilogien on the Nordic Council site: http://www.norden.org/en/nordic-council/nordic-council-prizes/nordisk-raads-litt...

Some more Danish Short Fiction (Aidt spent her early childhood in Greenland, but she writes in Danish):

Baboon (2006; English 2014) by Naja Marie Aidt (Greenland, Denmark, 1963- ) translated by Denise Newman (USA)

 

This collection of short, wild, disturbing and often deeply ambiguous stories won Aidt the 2008 Nordic Council Prize. She plays around with the boundaries of reality and fantasy, so that characters often find themselves living out their darkest fears or most perverted desires in a frighteningly realistic setting. The mostly very short forms allow her to keep us guessing until the last page (sometimes beyond it) about the characters - is the narrator supposed to be male or female? which country are we in? are they married to each other or to someone else? whose are the children? is it all just a nightmare?

Very interesting, powerful and original writing, but not a book you would want to read just before going to bed. And it might well put you off blackcurrant jam for a long time...

I'm starting to feel as though I'm the only one here actually reading any Nordic books :-)

Anyway, on to what will probably go down for me as the oddest book of the year, another from Sjón's Guardian "top ten" of modern Nordic novels:

Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller (1966, translation 2017) by Guðbergur Bergsson (Iceland, Spain, 1932- ) translated by Lytton Smith (UK, USA, 1982 - )

  

Guðbergur Bergsson has been publishing novels, poems, and stories since the early sixties; he studied in Barcelona and is one of the leading translators from Spanish into Icelandic. He was awarded the Nordic Council Prize in 2004.

Lytton Smith is a poet as well as a translator, and teaches at SUNY.

Tómas Jónsson is a retired bank-clerk living in a basement flat in Reykjavik, part of which he has been obliged to let out to a young family (who have in turn sub-let a room to a young man who plays the guitar...). He has taken a strong dislike to Iceland, the rest of the world, other people (especially, but not exclusively, old people, children, Icelanders, foreigners, and women), himself, and literature, and has decided to get his revenge on all of them by writing a bestseller, which he does, in a pile of 17 school composition books. We get 400 gloriously random and inconsistent pages, where he can switch around freely between memories, descriptions of his current life as an invalid, reflections on this and that, anecdotes, parodies of Great Works of Icelandic Literature, sexual fantasies, and much else. Apart from the anecdotes and parodies, he rarely sticks to the same topic for more than a few lines, and indeed often gets side-tracked before even reaching the end of the sentence he's writing. (And from time to time his transcriber has to tell us that some crucial piece of information is illegible in the original manuscript, so we're left hanging.) Most of the time, we aren't given quite enough information to be sure whether Tómas means us to take something as a real event in his life or as a dream or fantasy.

I found reading this a very mixed experience - some parts were absolutely hilarious, some all-but unintelligible. And it is in the nature of Tómas as a narrator that he keeps coming back to certain topics and (when he's not contradicting himself) he repeats himself a bit too often.

A problem with the book is that Tómas's constant misogyny and his fantasies (at least we hope they're just fantasies) about attacking women aren't as funny as they may have been fifty years ago. We're obviously meant to see that they reflect what a failure he is as a human being and laugh at him for trying to use these stories to impress us as readers, but a little of that sort of thing goes a long way, and Tómas doesn't do anything in small doses.

Tómas (or rather Guðbergur) has obviously read his Joyce and Beckett, and knows that a bestseller has to offend the sensitive reader to get the right sort of publicity - Tómas tells us in loving detail about his chamber-pot and how he fills it and empties it, and we hear a remarkable amount about Icelandic excretion customs. We also hear a great deal about Tómas's penis (which notoriously has its own passport). Guðbergur must have known about the weird and wonderful things that were going on in Spanish literature in the fifties and sixties (Cortázar, Goytisolo, etc.) of course, and he's obviously borrowing ideas from them about how to smash apart the conventions of narrative structure. I particularly enjoyed the way he destabilises the text in the last few pages - the transcriber starts to tell us about how he found the composition books and typed them up, but what we are expecting to be a realistic narrative establishing the history of the text mysteriously drifts off into an allegorical nightmare set in the North Atlantic, so we're no surer than we were before how we come to be reading the book...

With a book like this, which doesn't follow any known rules of narrative logic and obeys or ignores the conventions of language and typography at the author's whim, you have to trust the translator implicitly: there's little we can do to check what he's doing without learning Icelandic ourselves. Most of the time Lytton Smith seems to do a remarkably good job of turning the book into lively and varied English text, so I think we probably can trust him (besides, this must have been a labour of love: I can't imagine that there's any significant money to be made translating obscure 1960s texts for small presses). But I did have a few little quibbles - silly things that should have been caught at the proofreading stage, like famous "false friends" (you don't earn "rent" on a savings account in English), or placenames outside Iceland that are left in the Icelandic form (e.g. "Kílarskurðinn canal" instead of Kiel Canal). Most confusing was the use of the word "pensioners" for the people who ate with Tómas every day in some sort of canteen (Smith calls it a "refectory", which is OK too). From the context it's obvious that the people who eat there are in their lunch break from work, and definitely not retired! I suppose the Icelandic word that gets translated as "pensioners" must have been something parallel to French "pensionnaires", i.e. paying guests, nothing to do with the English sense of people who receive a retirement pension. Language does sometimes have a way of turning round and biting you, doesn't it?

>42 thorold: Not entirely alone, although I'm hardly reading globally, not even leaving Sweden, with my next one; Korparna (the ravens) by Tomas Bannerhed (translations to English and German exist but I read it in Swedish).

Korparna won a well-known Swedish literature award (Augustpriset) in 2011 and is a book that has been lingering on my bookshelf for far too long. It follows a boy about 12-years old and his family on a small Swedish farm in the 1970s. The father tries to push his unwilling son to eventually take over the unprofitable farm but he (the father) is slowly descending into despair and mental illness. It is claustrophobic and bleak but not desperately so, the son finds a space to breath in the forest and among birds and this gives the reader some breathing space too. The nature is really a character in itself in this novel, from the unforgiving peatland soils of the farms to the forest, lakes and birds where the son escapes. This is a region I know very well and the landscape felt absolutely true. I liked it a lot!

>42 thorold: I'm starting to feel as though I'm the only one here actually reading any Nordic books :-)

Following alvaret's excellent and very useful suggestions in >39 alvaret:, I read Stockholm: City of Dreams, and enjoyed it immensely. There's something of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist about it - but it's shorter and more of a page-turner. It's extremely bleak in its descriptions of poverty and alcoholism, but you definitely root for the characters. I'll have to get hold of the second book, because I really want to know what happens to Lotten. This is exactly the sort of novel that my late mum loved. I would have lent her the first one in the series, she would have bought the next 4 all at once, and shared them with me... So, I'll definitely go back to Per Anders Fogelström, but right now, I'm starting Place of the Heart, by Steinunn Sigurdardottir.

>43 alvaret: >44 Dilara86:
All three of those sound interesting - I’m taking note. Maybe especially Steinunn, since I’m on a bit of an Icelandic run at the moment. But I’ve still got another Heinesen book on the TBR pile...

>42 thorold: I'm starting to feel as though I'm the only one here actually reading any Nordic books :-)

On the plus side, you are single-handedly responsible for blowing my book budget out of the water. And an impulse purchase of a book of contemporary northern short stories called The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat.

And about two wasted hours planning a fantasy vacation to the Faroe Islands, so thanks a lot for that.

>46 southernbooklady: fantasy vacation to the Faroe Island
soundtrack by Carl Nielsen?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Imaginary_Trip_to_the_Faroe_Islands

>44 Dilara86: I'm glad you liked it! My mother made sure all her children got a copy of it...

For those who sometimes watch British TV (or those who are curious about how little the British know about Nordic writing...), you might be amused to know that yesterday's instalment of University Challenge, a second-round match between two Cambridge colleges, featured a question on Norwegian literature. The three parts of the question were about Karl Ove Knausgård ("Noseguard", as Paxo calls him), Sophie's World, and Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way - the students didn't get any of the answers right. Interesting to see that none of the three has come up yet on this thread - probably the first two because we all know about them already and the third because it's not especially literary?

>Or perhaps because 330 new Norwegian adult fiction titles were published in 2015 alone and we have only 50 posts in this thread so far?

>50 alvaret: A fair point! Although the numbers might come out a bit differently if you only count the ones that make it into English translation.

I have started reading The emigrants, which looks interesting so far, but this historical novel caught my eye in the library yesterday, and I ended up finishing it before bedtime (don't ask when bedtime was...):

The royal physician's visit (1999; English 2001) by Per Olov Enquist (Sweden, 1934- ), translated by Tiina Nunnally (USA, 1952- )

  

Per Olov Enquist is a well-known Swedish journalist and novelist, who has won all the usual prizes at some point in his long career. In the 80s and 90s he was married to a Danish dramatist and lived mostly in Denmark.

Tiina Nunnally is responsible for many high-profile translations of Nordic works into English, perhaps most famously the highly-praised new translation of Kristin Lavransdatter (1997-2000).

The life of the unfortunate Christian VII of Denmark (1749-1808) has long excited the curiosity of writers of all complexions, from Goethe to Dario Fo, although - despite the fact that one of the main characters was British - it doesn't seem to have been done very often in English yet (The lost queen (1969), by Norah Lofts is the only English version mentioned in the list on Wikipedia).

As Enquist tells it, the central characters are Christian himself, an intermittently lucid, mentally-disturbed young man who has become king at the age of 16 and been married shortly thereafter to an even younger English princess in whom he has no interest whatsoever; the queen, who is making up for a very sheltered upbringing by discovering the sexual power she can exert in her new role; Struensee, the idealistic young German physician (keen reader of Holberg and Rousseau) who accidentally finds himself in a position to deputise for the king, both in the queen's bed and in attempting to drag the backward and corrupt kingdom of Denmark kicking and screaming into the 18th century; and - naturally - an éminence grise, Guldberg, who is scheming against all of them. And equally naturally, it all ends in tears, as Enquist is clearly expecting it to.

Enquist is particularly interested in the opposition between the open, optimistic, and politically-naive Struensee and the secretive, vengeful and moralistic Guldberg, as expressed in the ways that both of them establish bonds with the confused and frightened Christian and react in their different ways to the potent sexuality (Enquist clearly insists on there being potent sexuality, even if that's not something you normally associate with Hannoverians...) of Caroline Matilda. This all gets tied in clever ways into the political currents of late 18th century Europe - the lofty ideals of the Enlightenment philosophes compromised by their association with people like Catherine of Russia and Frederick of Prussia, the cynical aristocrats who run Denmark for their own benefit and are happy to have a powerless king, the peasants whom nobody really cares about in practice...

Entertaining and well-written, but maybe a bit too predictable.

Slightly off-topic, but I’ve just been to a concert where they played Niels Gade’s “Hamlet” overture. There were also quite a few Hamlet references in the Enquist book (in the film A royal affair, based on a different novel about Christian VII, they even have the king attending a performance of the play, in German). That made me wonder a bit about what the Danish attitude to the Melancholy Dane really is. How does it feel when the most famous work of literature about your country is a play written by someone who never visited it, based on supposed historical events that only seem to have the sketchiest basis in real life?

(It also made me realise that insofar as I ever thought about Niels Gade at all, I must have been pronouncing his name quite wrongly. Not Gah-de, but something more like Gay-the.)

And another quickie - it caught my eye in my Scribd recommendations. At first I thought from the plot-summary that it was the Icelandic road-trip novel >44 Dilara86: mentions above (Place of the heart), but it wasn't. Still fun, anyway, and I think I'll look out for more from Auður.

Butterflies in November (2004; English 2013) by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (Iceland, 1958- ) translated by Brian FitzGibbon (Ireland, Iceland, 1960- )

  

Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir is an art historian at the University of Reykjavik, with a number of successful novels to her credit. Apart from Butterflies, only one other has been translated to English so far, but the others are available in French.

Irish-born Brian FitzGibbon is a freelance commercial (and literary, apparently!) translator, based in Reykjavik.

The narrator, who's a freelance translator and proofreader, decides it's time to make a change in her life after her husband walks out on her but then, irritatingly, keeps turning up again. And she has a bit of unfinished business to deal with in the eastern village where her grandmother used to live. However, just when she's announced that she's off to the East, her best friend Auður has to go into hospital, and she finds herself - notwithstanding protestations that she doesn't know the first thing about children and doesn't know sign-language - looking after Auður's four-year-old son, Tumi, who has serious hearing problems. The two of them set off down Highway No.1 in the depths of an unseasonably warm Icelandic November, negotiating hazards including floods, landslides, Estonian choirs, roadkill and available single men, and by the time they get to the prefabricated summer cottage that the narrator has won in a charity lottery, the woman and the child have somehow found each other and started working as a team.

It's a quirky book, often very funny indeed, but always rather jumpy and unresolved, full of unnamed characters who seem to overlap a little with each other, switching between present, past and dreams, and just at the point where we might have been expecting a joined-up ending, we get a compilation of recipes for all the food consumed in the course of the book (up to and including "undrinkable coffee"). And a knitting pattern. The "recipes" of course are not just recipes, but give us various hints from which we have to try to work out a resolution to the story ourselves. Or at least we could, if those hints only joined up somehow...

>54 thorold: That's interesting... Place of the Heart is about a road trip to Eastern Iceland, where the main character has unfinished business...
In this novel, the friend drives the mother - Harpa - and her wayward daughter Edda (and you might also argue from the number of conversations they have, that Harpa's dead mother is also with them), to an Eastern village where they might be able to escape bad influences and find out whether Harpa's father is also her biological father. It's a novel about (female) friendship, identity, belonging, and parent-child relationship. And also about the Icelandic landscape and the people who live there. As the short, dark-skinned mother of a former teenager (apparently, being 5'2 makes you a dwarf O_o), it spoke to me on so many levels. I just wish Sigurdardottir (or more precisely, Harpa, our narrator) didn't go on and on about how dark and un-Icelandic Harpa was. She allegedly looks like a mulatto because her biological father is half-jewish, half-French, as if those two things were mutually exclusive and Sephardic Jews didn't just look European.

Yesterday, I finished Niviaq Korneliussen's novel Homo Sapienne, first written in Greenlandic, then in Danish, and translated from Danish into French for a small Canadian publisher called La Peuplade. This was my first book by a Greenlandic author, and I cannot remember where I found out about it. I had previously read Imaqa by Flemming Jensen, a Danish teacher who settled in Greenland and married a local woman, but that was it. This is a contemporary novel, about gender, sexual orientation, identity and the malaise of Greenlandic youths. Some of the dialogue took the form of text messages, and the prose was peppered with English, especially four-letter words, to the point where it felt contrived. (You know how young children relish saying rude words when they know they'll get a reaction? That's what it reminded me of.) Seeing the world through the eyes of young Greenlandic lesbians, trans and gay people was interesting, but ultimately, their angst felt shallow and dare I say - juvenile. I didn't hate the novel, but it didn't grab me. But then, I'm not the intended target. The author is definitely worth exploring, though. There's a New Yorker article about her.

>55 Dilara86: I suppose East is the obvious direction if you're going on a road-trip from Reykjavik. Driving East means following the South coast, so we've got both of those cardinal points covered, and we've also been to the West with Under the glacier, so I suppose we now just have to find something set in the North of Iceland. :-)

Digging around in Common Knowledge, it looks as though some of Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's crime stories might be set up there (the only one I've read was set in Reykjavik, though).

All this Icelandic influence is obviously getting under my skin - I picked up another novel by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir in the library yesterday, and I realised afterwards that, completely without working it out consciously, I'd gone straight to the "A" for "Auður" section, and that's exactly where the librarians had put her.

>56 thorold: I suppose we now just have to find something set in the North of Iceland. :-)

I found one if Yrsa Sigurðardóttir doesn't fit : Snowblind by Ragnar Jonasson. It's a novel set in Siglufjörður, Iceland's northernmost town. I'm not a fan of crime fiction generally, but I might make an exception for this one, especially since it's available from my local(ish) library.
If anyone has a recommendation for a non-crime novel set in Northern Iceland, or any other underrepresented part of the Nordic countries, I'm all ears.

>57 Dilara86: set in Northern Iceland

In the worst case, we could always take Seamus Heaney and change one letter....

>58 thorold: That would work. And Beowulf is virtually Nordic anyway ;-)

After a short hiatus devoted to a Swiss science-fiction doorstop (set on a frozen planet - so not a huge departure), I'm starting on The Old Man and His Sons by Heðin Brú, which I bought second-hand online. The 1970 hardback arrived rattling in a thin, oversized plastic mailing bag. I'm surprised - and relieved - it wasn't in pieces.
The author comes from the Faroe Islands, halfway between the Shetlands and Iceland. they're an autonomous region belonging to Denmark. He writes in Faroese. The Old Man and His Sons was translated into English by John F. West, who also penned an interesting introduction about Faroese literature.

I've been working away on my pile for this quarter, but somehow haven't been motivated to write about the books I have finished -- although I actually quite enjoyed them:
Ker Shus is a science fiction novel by Tor Åge Bringsværd (Norway); it's set in a future post-apocalyptic world inhabited by animal-human hybrids created long ago by humanity. There are three main cultures, those of the cat-people, dog-people, and rat-people, and the story follows the wanderings of our protagonist (a throw-back who has neither fur or tail) that take him to an abandoned city where he learns about the history of his world. The anthropological world-building is decent: there are some obvious criticisms of certain developments in Western society (slavery/exploitation by industry, instrumentalization of science, capitalism that sacrifices ethics in the name of profit and/or power), but I found the animal framework refreshing in that the societies he creates aren't degenerated forms of specific human societies. The narrator's (and presumably the author's) sympathies clearly lie with his cat people, who have a somewhat romanticized "primitive" hunter-gatherer society, but the world isn't black and white. A content summary isn't really adequate to capture the essence of this short novel, which is the author's particular writing style: a melancholy, dreamlike, fragmented narrative full of incredible imagery. It reminded me a lot of the previous work of his that I'd read (Minotauros), although I didn't find it quite as compelling. I read this in German; it doesn't seem to be available in English.

Maresi by Maria Turtschaninoff (Finland) is a young-adult/crossover fantasy set on an island convent dedicated to the Great Mother in her three forms (we would say: Maiden, Woman, Crone); when their everyday life is disturbed by an invasion from the world outside, Maresi, the novice who narrates the tale, must come to terms with her own terrifying gift. Some reviewers have compared this to Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, and I think this is accurate -- it deals with many of the same themes: destiny, death, religious service and the choice of a contemplative life or a life of action -- although I didn't find it quite as philosophically deep or thought-provoking. But it's a pleasurable and comforting (and quick) read; I finished it in a little more than an evening.

I also started Vikinga blot ("Viking Blood") by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg (Sweden), in a German translation. I didn't have terribly high expectations for it to begin with and wanted to read it before Röde Orm since I suspected it wouldn't be able to compare favorably. It started off better than I had feared, but I've gradually lost interest and I'm not sure I'll finish it. The author is trained in archaeology and in terms of the historical facts the novel mostly seems accurate, but the attitudes and worldviews of the people feels all wrong (too modern) and the characters fail to convince.

I've been saving Röde Orm and part 2 of Kristin Lavransdatter as a treat to read over the Christmas holiday (does anyone else do this?)

I've been reading some of Dan Andersson's poetry. Dan Andersson (1988-1920) is another Swedish working class author, mostly known for his poetry describing life, people and nature in rural north Sweden.

The nature is very important to many in the Nordic countries, more so I believe than in much of the rest of the western world. These are sparsely populated areas were urbanisation came relatively late. We have lots of nature and various "right to roam" traditions makes it accessible. Many families have a cabin of some sort, sometimes very simple (electricity and running water are not guaranteed). The strong bond to nature is often seen in the nordic literature were nature may be an agent in the stories, not just a background. Korparna which I read earlier >43 alvaret: is an example. Dan Andersson's melancholy poetry captures this relation between people and nature.

These poems are probably hard to find in translations but some of them have been brilliantly set to music. I really recommend listening to these ones!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqprTarn2Os
http://runeberg.org/kolvakt/12.html (Swedish text)
Translation: http://johnirons.blogspot.no/2011/11/real-evergreen-poem-by-swedish-writer.html

I don't have a translation for this one but it is a Christmas song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXjCQzxuUjE
http://runeberg.org/daefter/09.html (Swedish)

And another one, about longing for home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l29MN9nANpA

Anyone planning to read Brothers Lionheart by the way? Sweden's most loved author (Astrid Lindgren obviously, she's even on one of our banknotes...). It is her most controversial novel and one of her most popular ones. It's one of my absolute favourites (yes, it is a children's book) so I'd just like to share it.

Sorry to intrude as I'm lurker not contributor but >61 alvaret: As I can't thank you on your profile page I'm thanking you here for those links, especially the one to the John Irons site which I've enjoyed browsing and have bookmarked for more browsing. Cheers.

>62 alvaret: I loved The Brothers Lionheart, which I first read as a child as an excerpt in Cricket Magazine. (Mom had a subscription for us kids). But you are right, it is a strange and dark story -- which didn't faze me as a kid, but did unsettle me when I reread it as an adult.

Norway hasn't had a nobel prize winner since Knut Hamsun, the genious writer who turned nazi during WWII. Also, there are two other nobel laureates: Sigrid Undseth, who wrote about the middle ages, and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, a mediocre writer who got the prize for political reasons.

The most famous writer living today is propably crime writer Jo Nesbo
Other very good writers include Roy Jacobsen, Ingvar Ambjørnsen, Per Petterson (out stealing horses) , Lars Saabye Christensen etc etc.

Speaking of Lindgren, I somehow missed the publication of her war diaries (only happened to notice the Croatian translation the other day): A World Gone Mad: The Diaries of Astrid Lindgren 1939-45.

Ronja must wait until the next year, had too much to carry this time even without packing books (and of course I'm lugging a mini-library back), instead I think I'll read some Ibsen. Haven't looked at some of his plays since high school.

>63 bluepiano: Lurkers are always welcome! I'm glad you enjoyed the links!

>64 southernbooklady: It is strange how much Brothers Lionheart has changed when you read it as an adult. I remember reading it as an exciting adventure story but there are all these heavy topics underneath, definitely unsettling, especially when you expect a children story. It feels a bit odd that the best book I've ever read about death is primarily aimed at nine year olds but I've yet to find its equal.

>66 LolaWalser: I must admit that I still haven't read her war diaries but I plan to borrow them from a family member as soon as possible.

This next one was a mistake - probably a good book in the original, but it just didn't work for me in translation. I would say "at least I've read one Finnish book now," but I think I should make the effort to find something more translatable.

Mr Darwin's gardener (2009; English 2013) by Kristina Carlson (Finland, 1949- ) translated by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah

  

Finnish journalist and novelist Kristina Carlson had her big breakthrough with her second novel, Maan ääreen (translated into German, but not English, apparently) in 1999. She also writes very popular children's books as Mari Lampinen.

Fleur and Emily Jeremiah are a British-Finnish mother and daughter team who have translated many Finnish literary works, separately and together.

This is probably a classic example of a book that shouldn't have been translated. Setting a historical novel in a foreign country is often a good idea, because it allows you to avoid getting caught up on silly points of linguistic and cultural detail ("...he couldn't have used that word in 1879") and concentrate on the story and the ideas you're trying to communicate. Instead of being a novel about a specific place at a specific time, it becomes a novel about how small communities work, how ideas about religion and science are taken up by uneducated people, and so on. But then you translate it into English, and it becomes a novel about the village of Downe in Kent, set between November 1879 and Spring 1881. English literature is full of descriptions of village communities in the south-east of England; everyone from Dickens, Kipling and H.G. Wells to George Orwell and H.E. Bates has contributed to giving English readers a very specific idea of how society functions in such a place, and how we should expect people from different classes and backgrounds to talk. It probably isn't a completely realistic idea, and we certainly mix up notions from different places and periods, but of course it doesn't bear any relationship to the very stylised, abstract version of village life we get from Carlson, where class-relationships are only hinted at and there's no differentiation between the way characters from different levels of society speak (to each other, or to the reader) except in the choice of images they use.

Of course, this - coupled with the fact that Carlson has obviously done her research quite carefully - makes an English reader over-attentive to places where people act or speak in ways that just aren't right for that place and time. In the opening pages a woman is doing her ironing on a Sunday - it's never mentioned again, but in a real English village that would have been discussed and held against her for the next forty years. A few pages on, a sermon in church urges that "we must warn our fellow men of the rocks of sin, and shine more brightly than the lamps of the wise virgins. Like the Eddystone Lighthouse" - but the Eddystone lighthouse had fallen down and was being rebuilt in 1879 (are we supposed to know that and see the irony?). A bit further on we are told that "Lewis sent Margaret into a spin" - nothing wrong with using an aeronautical image when your nearest neighbour is Biggin Hill aerodrome, but you should at least wait until after the invention of powered flight. And lots more little things like that.

That also makes you wonder a bit what Downe was really like in 1879. These days it's only just outside London, and even then it can't have been much more than half an hour away from central London by train, and it must already have been in the process of being taken over by rich men's villas and golf clubs. And people from Downe would certainly have gone off to work in London. But no "outsider" figures crop up except Darwin, who is offstage, presumably writing his little book on earthworms. For all the contact we have with the outside world, we might just as well be somewhere in the depths of Hardy's Wessex (or in rural Finland...).

Of course, this isn't what we're supposed to be thinking about. Carlson wants us to reflect on the whole Victorian dilemma about science and religion from a different viewpoint, not the usual top-down London intellectual view. Fair enough, but Edmund Gosse has already got that covered pretty well, so I don't know if she really adds anything.

Peirene tell us that we should be comparing the book with Under Milk Wood. Again, fair enough, although perhaps it's a slightly unfortunate comparison when the only Welshman in the book doesn't seem to display any evidence of his nationality at all. As Dylan Thomas does, Carlson creates the village by letting the villagers speak directly to the audience, but a novel is a very different medium from a radio play, where we had Richard Burton to mediate between us and the unadorned text.

Just finished The story of Gösta Berling by Selma Lagerlöf. Selma Lagerlöf is also the author of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils discussed at >23 spiphany: and the first woman to win the Nobel prize in literature.

The story of Gösta Berling was her first published novel (in 1891) and consists of a series of loosely connected stories set in Värmland (west Sweden) during the 1820s. Following a pact with the devil a group of lazy upper-class drunkards take control of an estate which they promptly mismanage causing disturbances (and multiple broken hearts) throughout the region. However, I found the main plot to be secondary, the real interest for me lay in the rich tapestry of stories of the lives affected during this year of disturbances. Together the stories created a loving portrait of the region. Each chapter is a partly independent story, covering various people and episodes and sometimes including supernatural elements from the local folklore. And what a story-teller she is! I've got a beautiful old copy of this book which has been lingering on my bookshelf for too long (it's size and fragility made it somewhat daunting) so I'm really glad that I finally found took the time to read it!

An English translation can be found at Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56158

>69 alvaret: I read Gösta Berling a couple of years ago when we did the Nobel theme - I really enjoyed it too.

>70 thorold: I went back and read the Nobel themed thread, some interesting discussions there, thank you for pointing it out!

>69 alvaret: and >70 thorold: The story of Gösta Berling duly downloaded. The timing was perfect: I didn't want to buy anything, I haven't been able to borrow Snowblind from the Library yet (the online interlibrary loan system isn't working at the moment), and I'm keeping Kristin Lavransdatter for the holiday.

>59 Dilara86: I finished The Old Man and his Sons a while ago, but forgot to post. That was a stressful read. Life is hard, people are poor, unlucky, and occasionally very stupid. And mistakes can have terrible consequences. It's a tale of hardship, humourously told. We root for the old man, his wife, and his dimwitted younger son, as they try to make enough money to clear their whale-meat debt and avoid having their cottage repossessed.

I just finished Lyse vårnetter (original: Giđa ijat čuovgadat) by Nils-Aslak Valkeapää which I read in a Norwegian translation. It is the first book in the trilogy Trekways of the Wind. Nils-Aslak Valkeapää is an important poet, musician and artist and so far the only Sami winner of the Nordic Council Literature Award. Reviewing poetry in translation is a bit awkward but I'm hoping this translation more or less makes the original justice. The poems had a lightness and clarity which I appreciated and range from quiet nature observations to sharp commentary on the oppression of the Sami culture. They are illustrated by the author. It has been translated into English (as Trekways of the Wind) but I suspect it might be hard to find but I really recommend it if you do!

A few people already mentioned this one - I thought I might as well read it as well, and found it very entertaining.

The long ships (Röde Orm, 1941 & 1945; English 1954) by Frans G Bengtsson (Sweden, 1894-1954), translated by Michael Meyer

  

Frans Bengtsson was a Swedish essayist and biographer - Röde Orm was his only work of fiction.

This wonderfully entertaining Viking epic is written in a very distinctive, dry style, with lots of action and dialogue and no analysis or moral, obviously in conscious imitation of the style of the Sagas, but also rather reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott at his best. We are encouraged to take the characters at face value, and enter into the surprisingly foreign moral world of the Norse warriors, where violence is always a more powerful argument than law or custom, property belongs to anyone strong enough to keep it, and human life is cheap. Bengtsson follows these ideas through to their logical conclusions and shows us how a society like that could - just about - function. Sometimes we have to admire the strength and determination of the warriors who manage to make their presence felt over most of the known world; sometimes it becomes so bizarre that we just have to laugh (rather like the opening of Asterix and the Vikings, where we are shown the practical problems that arise when no-one knows the meaning of fear - kids who won't eat their porridge, ships that keep colliding because no-one gives way, etc.).

>74 thorold: I loved that book! It is full of a kind of irrepressible sarcastic humor. That awful priest! It's a sort of amazing combination of patriotism and parody.

Did you know that despite being a runaway bestseller in its own country, it was decades before it made its way into Europe because the author refused to allow it to be translated into Norwegian while Norway was under Nazi occupation?

My Christmas book shopping for myself included a couple of titles mentioned by others in this thread, so I'll definitely be needing next quarter to catch up on reading. I also got Carsten Jensen's We, the Drowned, which I've been seeing come up in various places on LT, but in spite of the fact that I knew it was set in the North Sea/Baltic area, for some reason it hadn't registered that the author is in fact Danish. It's a doorstopper of a book that weighs in at nearly 700 pages, but so far seems to be a fairly quick read, if not always a pleasant one.

Oh, and since it seems particularly appropriate for this quarter, I hope everyone is enjoying an Icelandic-style Jólabókaflóð (Christmas book flood) this year.

>76 spiphany: I truly loved We, the Drowned.

>76 spiphany: Thank you for mentioning the word jólabókaflóð. I'm definitely going to use it in the future!

I finished The story of Gösta Berling by Selma Lagerlöf (Pauline Bancroft Flach's translation) - downloaded from Project Gutenberg. I don't have much to add to >69 alvaret:. It felt very Victorian, with self-sacrificing maidens, men led astray, and in the end, redemption. I liked the magical realism elements to the story, and the evocative, sensitive writing.

>76 spiphany: Another big fan of We, the Drowned here.

Just finished Knut Hamsun's Wayfarers and hope to get in a review. In the meantime, here is a previous one of mine for We, the Drowned. At least it keeps it with the theme.

DENMARK



We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen, translated from the Danish by Charlotte Barslund with Emma Ryder
first published as Vi, De Druknede in 2006

Quite some time ago, I lived in a port that was visited annually by the remnants of the Portuguese White Fleet, a group of fishing vessels built for the age of sail, but modified for motors. The whole town looked forward to the arrival of these beauties. I've lived a good part of my life in another port, which annually observes Battle of the Atlantic Sunday to honour both combatants of the armed forces, and the so called non combatants who made up the Merchant Navy, who together formed the convoys supplying Allied Europe during World War II. The golden age of sail and the Atlantic convoys bookend the time span of We, The Drowned. Although the port in this case was Marstal, Denmark, all true ports have the same feel, so I felt right at home reading it.

The book opens in 1848, with a skirmish between Denmark and Schleswig Holstein. Laurids Madsen "...went up to heaven and came down again because of his boots." These boots will take on a mythical quality over generations for the seafaring people of Marstal. One of the ways this sense of myth is generated is by the frequent use of a first person plural narration, but the "we" telling the story is not the adults of Marstal, who might think they know it all; rather it is a succession of young boys who do much of the narration, with their necessarily imperfect knowledge of events, new ones gradually replacing those who grow up.

These boys know the world is the sea, that when they grow up Marstal will be the place to which they will return after each voyage if they are lucky, but that the sea will be their life. Marstal is for women, children, and seamen who have survived long enough to earn a berth on shore. The boys know some of them will drown, know their apprenticeship will be awful, but as small boys, they can't wait for the adventure of it all.

Much of the book revolves around Albert Madsen, four years old when his papa tru failed to return. Albert became one of Marstal's most successful citizens and his voyages were legendary. Then there were the stories about him and Captain Cook, a topic no one dared mention in his presence. On a voyage serving under one of fiction's most evil captains, Albert had time to reflect on what the sea means. His description is like no other:

There comes a time in the life of a sailor when he no longer belongs ashore. It's then that he surrenders to the Pacific, where no land blocks the eye, where sky and ocean mirror each other until above and below have lost their meaning, and the Milky Way looks like the spume of a breaking wave and the globe itself rolls like a boat in the midst of the sinking and heaving surf of that starry sky, and even the sun is nothing but a tiny glowing dot of phosphorescence on the sea of the night.

As time goes by, Jensen replaces Albert with another young boy, the hellion Anton Hay. Even as the seagoing cycle repeats itself though, it changes inexorably. Sail is replaced with steam, steam with coal. The rhythm of the sailing life with its winter furloughs is replaced by year round commerce, as ships powered by engines are better able to withstand winter storms than those powered by sail. Wars come, one after another, and seafaring becomes something to be survived, there is nothing else involved in it.

Not everyone in Marstal is caught up by the sea. Just a mile or two inland are the farmers, seen as conservative and unimaginative by those who venture far from land. Farmers' boys and sailors' boys maintain their distance at school and at play. Then there are the women. Left alone with the children, sometimes for years on end, not knowing if their men will return, not all of them believe in the sea as a way to make a living. One of them believes she can actually wreak vengeance on it, a conviction that could be fatal to the town.

Told with a transparent love of ships and voyages, often with humour, We, The Drowned is at the same time an elegy to the age of sail, the men who sailed, and the ports they visited, no matter how desperate. Maritime freight commerce may be a huge industry today, but the way of life of shipwrights and sailors, of whole communities bound together for a common purpose, is gone. We, The Drowned is their resurrection.

_____________________________________
Small children and sailing ships in Marstal in 1912, the town looking as Albert would have known it



Convoy in the North Atlantic in WWII, ships as far as you can see

Well, my library seems to be synced up with you all. I purchased a couple of books that had been mentioned in this thread and now I'm getting recommendations for Gösta Berling (which I had already noted as sounding interesting...).

*****

Squeaking in one last book before the end of the year, I finished We, the Drowned just before midnight on this side of the Pond. During the last section, which takes place on a ship in WWII under a sky hailing bombs, the constant stream of exploding fireworks outside my window created an uncomfortable sensation of really being under bombardment.

Based on the title and the use of "we" narration, I had been expecting something rather different -- a story told by the collective voices of those who had drowned over the centuries, accounts of their lives and experiences and deaths. But the "we" is an impersonal we, that of the chronicler, and the stories this narrator tells are, by and large, the stories of those who live instead of dying at sea.

Apart from that minor quibble, however, I enjoyed the novel and its portrait of a community that is at once provincial and yet in the middle of the major events of the twentieth century through its great ships that travel the world. It's an interesting perspective to view the last years of the colonial era and two world wars. Jensen's portrayals of the characters and the forces that shape their actions and decisions are convincing: it is a world dominated by men, or rather, by their absence, and by the sea and it's unpredictability; the ties between people are formed by the logic of beatings and brutality, by the discipline of the ship, but also by fellowship, by loss, yearning, and sometimes simply the need to survive.

*****

In December I also finished Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo (Finland). The plot is fairly simple: a photographer spontaneously rescues a young troll being tormented by teenagers outside his building and discovers that keeping a wild creature in his apartment is challenging in ways he had never expected. Not only does he have no idea what trolls eat or what their habits are, the troll, it turns out, has a certain sensual-erotic effect that complicates both his personal and professional life. This book is all about the atmosphere: our protagonist's difficult relationship with his former boyfriend and his current employer, and also his strangely intense bond with his "pet". The novel is based on the premise that creatures from folklore have been discovered to actually exist, and interlaced between the chapters of the story are various documents -- excerpts from (real) works of literature, fictional scientific treatises, etc. -- recounting aspects of troll lore. I found the novel both oddly compelling and disturbing. The troll is tangled up with human sexual desire and power in ways that are ethically quite problematic, but we see everything from the perspective of the characters, who feel without really reflecting on or understanding what is happening to them.

As I was summarizing my year on my blog I made brief reviews of my favorite books this year, including two books by Nordic authors which I haven't reviewed here before (because I read them earlier this year).

The Love Story of the Century (Århundradets kärlekssaga) by Märta Tikkanen.
Why haven’t I read Märta Tikkanen before? I knew it was a Finnish classic (written in Swedish) about a passionate but deeply dysfunctional marriage but I somehow never got around to read it before now. It is both beautiful and thought-provoking and makes some very sharp observations about love and relationships. It’s written as poetry so I’m not sure if there is an English translation that does it justice but it’s probably the best book I read in 2017.

Berlin Poplars (Berlinerpoplene) by Anne Ragde.
Anne Ragde is another new author for me and another instant favorite. This novel about a dysfunctional Norwegian family was a best-seller upon publication but for some reason I never got around to read it before now. It was great! The characters are slightly cliched but given sufficient depth and written with a warmth and a humor which made them very memorable. It has been translated into English and I really recommend it!

This is one suggested by >39 alvaret: - I didn't quite manage to read it in Q4, but took it with me over the holidays on my Kobo. It was fun to notice that the Swedish part of this book takes place in almost the same region as The long ships, which was written at about the same time. Whatever else we may have learnt during the course of this theme read, at least I now know where Småland and Blekinge are!

The Emigrants (1949; English 1951) by Vilhelm Moberg (Sweden, 1898-1973), translated by Gustav Lannestock

  

Moberg was a prominent Swedish working-class writer, an autodidact who grew up on a small farm in Småland and made his name as a radical journalist, playwright and novelist who was ready to oppose all forms of authority (church, police, monarchy, Nazi Germany, ...) on behalf of ordinary people.

The tetralogy The Emigrant Novels, of which this is the first book, tells the story of an extended family of farmers from Småland who emigrate to Minnesota in the 1850s. It was a major project which kept Moberg busy from 1945 to 1959, including some seven years of research in the US (he went back to Sweden for good in 1955, disgusted with McCarthyism and American religious conservatism). From the start, one of Moberg's main aims was to inform Swedish-Americans about how and why their ancestors came to the US, and he worked closely together with his American translator Gustav Lannestock, so that the English versions appeared soon after the Swedish originals.

In this first volume, we meet the main characters, Karl-Oskar and his wife Kristina, who are trying to make a living farming on a few acres of poor land that is barely adequate to feed their family and pay the interest on their inherited debts, even in a good year. Needless to say, there are no good years in this book. Karl-Oskar's younger brother is a labourer on a more prosperous farm, where he is forced to submit to sustained physical abuse - the servant law gives labourers essentially no rights against their masters. And Karl-Oskar's uncle is a radical non-conformist preacher repeatedly punished by the priest and the law for following his "heretical" beliefs. For all of them, together with a few other local outcasts (a single mother forced to earn a living as a prostitute, a married man unable to divorce his detested wife, ...), the idea of selling up and going to America seems very attractive.

But, of course, it isn't as easy as all that - physically or psychologically - to leave everything you know and set off over the edge of the map, even if there is rumoured to be a promised land there. Moberg tells us a lot about the hardships of the journey, first by cart over the border from Småland into Blekinge to get to the port of embarkation, then over the sea to New York on a small sailing ship, where we have to endure the usual quota of storms, doubts and diseases, and some attrition of the emigrant group.

Moberg is very strong on indignation and social realism, and paints a convincing picture of what the life of his characters must have been like (obviously not so very different from the conditions in which he himself grew up 50 years later). But I didn't find it very easy to engage sympathetically with the characters - they all seemed to be more case-studies than real individuals. And the narrative march of deprivation and disaster was a bit too inevitable - it isn't easy to keep up your attention when you are always 95% certain of what is about to go wrong. So this is a worthwhile read, rather than an entertaining one. I'm not sure if I still have the courage to follow Karl-Oskar and Kristina through the many accidents and disappointments that are obviously going to face them over the course of the next three volumes.

Pelle the Conqueror: Childhood by Martin Andersen Nexø, translated by Jesse Muir

This was a chance find: I was searching for Danish, Norwegian and Swedish books on Project Gutenberg for the Nordic Countries quarter, and there it was. I found other novels that I will get round to reading too, but this was the only one whose title rang a bell, because of the film, no doubt.
Written at the turn of the 20th century, Pelle the Conqueror: Chilhood (subtitled Boyhood in another translation) is the first book in the Pelle the Conqueror quadrilogy. This is the story of Pelle, a poor Swedish boy, and his father Lasse. After the death of Pelle’s mother destitution drives them to emigrate to Bornholm, an island off the coast of Sweden that belongs to Denmark, to work on a farm. Conditions are harsh, and the law of the jungle prevails for boys and for men (women might take pity on you, though), which makes it difficult for Lasse, who’s past his prime, and for little Pelle. There’s quite a lot of violence in the book – between boys, between men, and towards animals.
It’s all quite depressing: the poverty’s relentless and there’s a lot of drudgery, set off against the farm owner’s comfortable lifestyle. Our heros have next to no agency, they sleep in the stables with the cows, and the food is terrible (old herrings and porridge or potatoes for every meal). However, Pelle is a plucky, bright young boy, so I’m pretty sure (hope!) things will look up for him in the next book.
This is a good example of a Victorian/Edwardian working-class novel.



By the way, these are the books I downloaded from Project Gutenberg:
Tales of two Countries by Alexander Lange Kielland
'Round the yule-log: Christmas in Norway by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (This one is just a short story)
East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, Jørgen Engebretsen Moe and Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen
What Happened to Inger Johanne, as Told by Herself by Dikken Zwilgmeyer
One of Life's Slaves by Jonas Lie
Strife and Peace by Fredrika Bremer
Ovind: A Story of Country Life in Norway by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson

Does anyone have any advice about which are forgettable, and which are must-reads?

>82 thorold: You could always go for the musical instead, it is wildly popular but perhaps not happier... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzsUxUhBCtE (the best known of the songs with one of Sweden's best musical artists)
I actually haven't read the Emigrants since I was in school so I'm not sure what I would think of it know but it's one of those works which cultural significance is larger than their literary significance. In proportion to inhabitants Sweden had the third highest American emigration during the 19th century (only Ireland and Norway had higher emigration rates) so it was a significant period in Swedish history. To me it's both a reminder of how far Sweden has come in the last 100-150 years and of the fact that once the economic migrants were us. it's also part of mine and many others family history, several of my relative emigrated and we still have contact with some of them. I should reread it and see what I think of it today.

>83 Dilara86: If you enjoy fairy tales you should definitely read East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Asbjørnsen and Moe are basically the "brothers Grimm of Norway" and collected various Norwegian fairy tales, many of them very good. If you are not interested in fairy tales you can skip them.

I have read and quite enjoyed some short stories by Jonas Lie, the ones I read were mostly tall fisherman's tales but I don't know the one you found. If you want to try one of his short stories first you could try The Fisherman and the Draug which is a decent ghost story http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13508/13508-h/13508-h.htm

I haven't read any of the others but Alexander Lange Kielland, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Jonas Lie are counted among the great Norwegian authors and Bjørnson even got a Nobel prize but I'm not sure how well they have aged. They are probably worth trying at least. I would personally be most interested in reading the book by Fredrika Bremer as she is a generally cool person but I've never actually read anything by her.

>84 alvaret: Hmmm. Obviously you have to see a musical on stage to know how well it works (and I’m probably not a good judge - I found Les Mis rather tedious). There are some memorable songs in it, certainly, and Andersson is very good at what he does, but listening to the album I had the feeling that a lot of it was inspired pastiche. I kept spotting bits of everything from Brahms and Grieg to Ives and Bernstein, not to mention ABBA and Rogers & Hammerstein...

I’d be interested to hear what you think of the book if you do re-read it - I’m sure the personal connection with the subject-matter makes a big difference.

>85 thorold: I would think that most musicals are inspired pastiche, I suspect that's why they are so easy to like. I mostly mentioned it because I find it amusing that someone came up with the idea to make a musical of such a book, much like Les Mis it's got a story that doesn't appear very musical-friendly until someone goes ahead and does it.

I'm currently doing a classics challenge and have included both the Emigrants and A Time on Earth by Moberg on my list so I should reread it within the next few years. I'll try to remember to write hear when I do.

>84 alvaret: Thank you! I followed your link and downloaded Weird Tales from Northern Seas. I hadn't heard of Fredrika Bremer before finding her name on the Gutenberg list, which is a shame as she spearheaded the feminist movement in Sweden in the 19th century. I'm pretty sure the works I found on Gutenberg (Strife and Peace and Hemmet) are not her masterpieces, but they'll have to do... As an aside, I don't know what her writing style is in the original Swedish, but my God, the Victorian English translation is florid!

>89 rocketjk: I'm not sure what you mean by "atmospheric," so perhaps I'm misunderstanding. The "Under the North Star" trilogy is very much down to earth. We, the Drowned would be the more atmospheric of the two works, as I understand the term, anyway. At any rate, both, in my experience, provide fantastic, memorable reading experiences, whatever additional adjective you may choose to apply! Cheers!

I read this book during the January - March 2018 Travelling the TBR Road quarter, as a catch-up for this quarter, but only managed to review it now. Crossposted from my Club Read 2018 thread:



Paradise Reclaimed by Halldór Laxness translated from the Icelandic by Magnus Magnusson in 1962 and translation revised by him in 2002
first published as Paradísarheimt in 1960
finished reading March 14, 2018

Paradise Reclaimed was a strange read. Having read two pre Nobel prize books by Halldór Laxness, Independent People and Iceland's Bell, Paradise Reclaimed left me somewhat perplexed. Had Laxness lost his touch after winning the award? Was he writing of a world with which he was less familiar?

The hero, Steinar of Hlíðar, at first seemed a fairly typical nineteenth century small farmer with his sheep and meadows. Although poor, he kept his farm far better than any in the neighbourhood, and his dry stone dykes and walls were wonders to behold. At first the reader sees this as a quirk in his personality, only to realize it is the first hint that Steinar can fall prey to obsession.

In 1874, Steinar went off to the one thousandth anniversary celebrations of the first settlement in Iceland, attended by no less a personage than the Danish king. There two major events happened which would shape his entire future. Steinar gave King Kristian Wilhelmsson his dazzling white colt, the fairy pony so loved by his children. Then, out walking, he encounter a man gagged and tied to a boulder. Upon freeing him, Steinar discovered the man was Bishop Pjóðrekur, an Icelandic Mormon living in Utah.

Through numerous adventures, Steinar travelled to Denmark and on to the Territory of Utah, leaving behind his wife and children while he sought the Promised Land. Part Candide, part Quixote, always innocent and simple, Steinar made a life for himself while back in Iceland his family's life was destroyed.

Laxness displays his usual humour and satire here, creating in Steinar a sort of folk hero. However, the Utah sections did not always work for me. I didn't know if it was because I don't know enough about Mormons to appreciate Laxness's comments, or if I was beginning to find it too far fetched. It's been five and a half months since I finished the novel. For some time I was unsure about it, and so unable to write about it. Going back over it now though, it strikes me in a far better light than it did originally, especially now that the title makes a certain sense to me.

I wouldn't recommend this as an introduction to Laxness, but it does give a sense of his skill. In her introduction, Jane Smiley says"While it doesn't seem to have the sweep and general applicability of the larger works, it functions like a parable or folktale, not operating out of basic verisimilitude, but out of material that is not understandable by reason, only through belief." Steinar was based on the story of Eirikur Bruni, a real nineteenth century Icelander who travelled to Spanish Fork, Utah, to be with other Mormons who had been expelled from Iceland because of their faith. As Smiley says, Bruni provided the raw material. "Laxness's job was to make sense of it and find meaning in it, and the meaning he found was in the exploration of innocence." In that, the novel definitely succeeds.

_______________________

I had previously read that Iceland was strictly Lutheran, and had not known of the Icelandic Mormons and their expulsion and travels to Utah. Apparently Spanish Fork was the first permanent Icelandic settlement in the US, and Icelandic Days are still celebrated there to coincide with Iceland's national day celebrations.

Aphrodite et vieilles dentelles (Potensgivarna) by Karin Brunk Holmqvist, translated by Carine Bruy





Writer’s gender: Female
Writer’s nationality: Swedish
Original language: Swedish
Translated into: French
Location: Borrby, Sweden


Aphrodite et vieilles dentelles (ie, “Aphrodite and old lace”) is the French title of Karin Brunk Holmqvist’s first novel, called Potensgivarna in the original Swedish.
Tilda and Elida Svensson are two stereotypical old maids in their eighties. They live dull lives in their parents’ old house, they make jam, they go to bed early, they’re terribly frugal and take pains to avoid being the butt of gossip. One day, they notice that when animals eat their neighbour Alvar Klemens’s plants, they become very frisky indeed. This might be due to the fact that Alvar dumps the grounds from his special-recipe alcoholic coffee around his plants… The two virginal spinsters decide to sell that special coffee* as an aphrodisiac only available by mail-order through a postal box, so as to protect their reputation. With the money they’ll be making, they might be able to have a flushing toilet installed in their house instead of their freezing outside toilet. Meanwhile, their younger brother Rutger is having marital problems. Well, you probably guessed where this is going… It was funny and undemanding, but not without clichés. The French translation was a bit clunky.

* In case you’re curious, the recipe seems simple enough: just add a drop of Angostura and some vodka to the water used in the coffeemaker. Don’t hesitate to report back if you try it ;)

Here's a pretty late entry, but I thought it might be of interest:

John Freeman, LitHub, 10/15/2019: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Norwegian Literature (Almost).

Addendum -- another link to LitHub:

Elizabeth DeNoma, LitHub 10/17/2019: Nordic Noir, Beloved Trolls, Dark Absurdity, and More : Elizabeth DeNoma Recommends a Dozen Great Books from Scandinavia. These all appear to be quite recent publications, though the Lagerlof title may be somewhat older.

Johannes Jensen, The Fall of the King
I had never heard of Johannes Jensen outside of seeing his name as a Nobel Prize winner. In the course of picking something to read, I learned that in 1999, two leading Danish newspapers, independently of each other, both named this the best Danish book of the 20th century! Now, having now read it, I am completely baffled: why on earth isn’t Jensen better known? The book is about the fall of a king as well as about many people whose life stories Jensen weaves together brilliantly. But in some ways, every person and every story of those people is incidental. The book is not so much about the characters as it is about Denmark under King Christian II in the early 16th century. Warning: unless you know something about Denmark’s conquest of Sweden in that period or the Stockholm Bloodbath of 1520, do yourself a favor and read a little in Wikipedia first. I became confused trying to follow the story given how Jensen presents it. But the book is brilliant. The writing is sometimes straightforward narrative, sometimes lyrical description, sometimes metaphysical musing. Some scenes are so vivid that I had to stop reading to let myself calm down a bit. What a gifted writer!