Scando Lit: search

Reading a bit about Hjalmar Söderberg (Doctor Glas) and it sounds great to me. Don't know any Scandinavian authors apart from a couple of playwrights that everyone knows about. And Knut Hamsun.

So tell me.

par lagerkvist

http://media.us.macmillan.com/jackets/500H/9780374521356.jpg

ha, I've seen Barabbas the film. The Dwarf sounds much more appealing.

'Novels where dwarfs play a significant part' is one of my many ILB thread ideas I'll never post. xp

I've been meaning to start this thread becaue I've been doing some reading of Scando (or more properly Nordic I suppose given I've been including Iceland and Finland). So much blankness and righteous misery. A couple of things from the top of my head:

I really, really like Torgny Lindgren, to the point I'm disappointed that I've read everything translated into English (so far). My faves are probably "Sweetness" (total dysfunctionality in the snow-covered Swedish boonies) and "Light" (diary of a rabbit-plague year) and "In Praise of Truth" is a rare pop-ist novel I think. Of all the Nordic books I've read, Lindgrens are the most likely to make me laugh in the middle of the grimness.

"Independent People" is the best Halldor Laxness novel, by a mile.

"Not Before Sundown" by Johanna Sinisalo: trollrotica. Nice.

I've been treating myself to some more historical bits and bobs, I've particularly enjoyed "The Visit of the Royal Physician" by Per Olov Enquist (I didn't enjoy the other thing of his I read recently, "The Story of Blanche and Marie", way too fussy), "Snow" by Ellen Matson (grisly wartime business, the cover says "reminded me of Breughel and Kafka" which is at least half right) "Barbara" by Jorgen-Frantz Jacobsen (muddy Faroese Napoleonic drama of domestic inevitability).

All the Moomin books, of course. But that's a bit different.

OMG "The Ice Palace" by Tarjei Vesaas is wonderful and totally heartbreaking, the apogee of clean Norwegian misery.

/bookmarks thread

Have got a small shelf full of ancient volumes of Strindberg's collected works that I've been meaning to get stuck into for about the last 20 years. Remember enjoying By The Open Sea when I read it as a teenager, but I was a miserable cuss back then tbh.

Always meant to get around to Stig Dagerman too, seems like an interesting but neglected writer. Existentialist bloke, wrote in the immediate post-WWII period.

Last scandi book I started was The Half-Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen, but I got pissed off with it halfway through and junked it. Kind of annoyed me in the same way that Paul Auster does, it all seemed a bit too contrived.

Not surprised at your non-completion -- one Christensen novel is called Beatles :-)

Thanks to everyone so far. Oh my poor reading list etc (are there no Danish authors apart from Peter Hoeg? The one country that hasn't come up so far).

Jens Peter Jacobsen springs to mind, haven't read any but I know that Rilke rated him. You're probably looking for something a bit more modern though.

Kierkegaard always good for a laugh too.

I've read "The Jade Cat" by Suzanne Brogger which is grand in a family-drama-across-multiple generations sort of way, not sure it's much up your street, Julio.

(...and is Danish and set in Copenhagen.)

You make a good point, though: it seems harder to find Danish stuff than other Nordic novels, I wonder why.

While I'm thinking about it, you might try "Funeral Music For Freemansons" by Lars Gustafsson of you want a dose of unremitting depression. The only book I can remember reading which depressed me more was "The Nature of Blood" by Caryl Phillips but he's not any kind of Scandinavian and so not relevant here.

"Jens Peter Jacobsen springs to mind, haven't read any but I know that Rilke rated him. You're probably looking for something a bit more modern though."

Not necessarily -- and on wiki I read that Schoenberg used a poem of his as inspiration for one of his works. That's interesting right there.

Got the Radetzky March on my list -- its a family saga xp

"Novel 11, Book 18" by Dag Solstad is a rare example of a novel leaving me with that "what just happened??" feeling. It's not that anything particularly extrarodinary happens in the book, or that nothing happens, it's a tale of small-town alienation, life-shaping choices and self-sabotage, but ... I don't know, it left me bewildered.

He's Norwegian, I think.

Re Moomins, Tove Jannson's adult stuff is wonderful--staret with 'The Summer Book' and go from there.

'Niels Lynn' by Jens Peter Jacobsen is pretty good. And as well as 'Doctor Glas', Hjalmar Soderbergh's 'The Serious Game' is also excellent. However, I did just read a collection of his short stories, and they didn't do a lot for me. But those two novels are great.

Pernille Rygg's first novel (she's Norwegian), 'The Butterfly Effect', was very enjoyable--full of Scandinavian depression, black humour and Norwegian death-metal Satanists, from memory.

And if you don't mind crime, the 10 Martin Beck novels by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall are fantastic--often thrilling, bleakly observant, and frequently very funny (though nobody EVER laughs).

I read Jan Kjaerstad's The Conqueror this summer but I kinda hated it

I've been trying to steer clear of literary detective fiction lately, I like it just fine but I figure I get enough of it without aiming myself towards it. But I remember enjoying "The Butterfly Effect" well enough. Now I can't find it to remind myself if it, oh well.

But why we're on the subject, there's the Arnaldur Indridason series of Reykjavik murder mysteries, they're pretty great. And I'm reminded that I read "Lang" by Kjell Westo, which I suppose is more of a thriller but fast! And Finnish.

Now there's a movie I'd see: 'The Fast & The Finnish'

On Sunday I promised xyzzzz__ an update to this thread, so here goes with the ones I have liked...

I've just read a couple of PC Jersild novels:
(1) "Children's Island" (1976) is a triffic story of a 10 year old boy who bunks off going to summer camp and instead hangs around Stockholm getting into scrapes etc. He's terrified of puberty, which makes people do ridiculous things like starting to hang around with GURLS.
(2) "A Living Soul" (1980) is not a book I'd have considered reading except I bought it at the same time as "Children's Island": it's a tale told from the point of view of a disembodied brain in a tank of nutrients, and I found it surprisingly engaging.

"Called Home" (1983) by Agnar Thordarson is a war novel: the COD WAR. Love, volcano and flood in a remote community off Iceland. It's realist and formally unadventurous but convincingly freezing, in parts.

Did I tell you about "Adam's Diary" (1978) by Knut Faldbakken? I read this ages ago but don't see it upthread. The same story told three times from different angles, completely and grindingly hopeless. Rather good, as I recall.

Hans Scherfig - "Stolen Spring" (1940): "The Headmaster Ritual" in angry, angry novel form.

My wife's boss is Danish, and she very kindly lent me a big bag o'Nordic, largely Danish, lit which I've been working through, incl:

- the first two volumes of "Pelle The Conqueror" (1907) by Martin Anderson Nexo. A fellow in a bookshop saw this poking out of my pocket and asked me whether I'd seen the film. Predictably I hadn't even heard of the film, so maybe you all know more about this than I do. But yes, childhood and apprenticeship as a Swedish immigrant in rural late 19th / early 20th century Denmark, with all the grime that suggests.
- "The Liar" (1950) by Martin A Hansen: "But who am I to say, Rigmor? I don't know exactly what it will come to between you and me, but I'm afraid we'll have many bitter, sleepless nights..."
- "The Man Who Wanted To Be Guilty" (1973) by Henrik Stangerup: dude killed his wife and wants punishment, not help from the social services.
- "Havoc" (1930) by Tom Kristensen: the story of a man whose life falls to pieces because he unaccountably decides to make it fall to booze-drenched pieces in search of some kind of infinity. There's a grim inevitability about the whole thing and this is a brilliant book.

Um, that's enough for now I'm sure.

bookmarking this.
loving yr summaries, Tim!

Those all sound great! Time for a library crawl.

COD WAR made me laugh.

Thank you for the update, Tim, especially for filling in gaps on Danish fiction. Gotta hit my library with more ILL cards. Other Euro fiction is so much easier to find.

I read The Ice Palace and that's fantastic. It has that -- as Leonardo Sciascia called it -- pruned writing, which never dilutes but enhances the complexity of thought and feeling.

And if you don't mind crime, the 10 Martin Beck novels by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall are fantastic--often thrilling, bleakly observant, and frequently very funny (though nobody EVER laughs).

Anyone see the interview w/Sjowall on the Scandinavian noir doc on BBC4?

Just checking do you need to read them in order?

I think they all stand on their own, but the cumulative effect is really much best read in order--plus the various travails of Beck's private life would make sense that way.

i read all of those a couple years back, i felt like a lot of what they were 'about' got abandoned along the way. still found them compelling enough to finish, though. also the current editions spell out M A R T I N B E C K on the spines, which you can then try and re-arrange into anagrams like A BAT MERKIN

yes I read the Martin Becks out of order and the cumulative effect is lost, or muted but they are all compelling on their own.

I've also read all but one of Henning Mankell's crime series (Kurt Wallender) and they're equal to/inspired by the Becks. also enjoyed Mankell's odd historical novel Depths.

ALso intrigued to see that Wahloo's sci-fi novel, The Steel Spring, is getting reprinted next year in the US. I've wanted to read that for a while, so am pleased.

"i felt like a lot of what they were 'about' got abandoned along the way"

You mean the left wing stuff in them?

yeah. but i'm not entirely sure it's in practice 'left wing'; i don't know, the opening passage of the first one is about GODDAMN BUREAUCRACY.

i feel like maybe it'd be more charitable to claim they're more about being, i don't know, societally accountable.

they're good and they have a fixed end point. but i'm not sure they're any better than reading ten early maigrets or ten early ed mcbains, which they owe a lot to. or arnaldur indrithason, who owes a lot to them.

also, why is crime fiction so popular in translation?

there is so much good scando crime fiction imo. henning mankell, helen tursten, karin fossum, hakan nesser, jan costin wagner, mari jungstedt, ake edwardson, k.o. dahl, karin alvtegen, asa larsson, johan theorin, et al. it really seems like an endless well. i read and enjoyed a lot of the mankell books so much that i dug around bookstores and libraries and took chances on some of these authors and most of them are really excellent, more or less. i think there's something about the landscape and the countries and the climate that teases out some particularly compelling investigative thrillers. i haven't even mentioned indridason, who is as far as i can tell working on a quality level right alongside mankell, though the presentation of his hero and his hero's family in 'jar city' is so close to what mankell did in 'faceless killers' that i wonder if it was a direct homage (it seems a little bit on the nose in places, though i'm not complaining; the writing is tremendous and the mystery is a good one.)

thomp - I think the goal (at least from what i understood was their version of the left wing project) was to have a society be more societally accountable (people to be more engaged) but not with the fangled bureaucratic structures.

what is it w/these Scando cops?

Arnaldur Indridason - Jar City. fastpaced, compelling characters. does for Iceland what Mankell does for Sweden? I'm hooked. Arctic Chill & The Draining Lake on reserve.

Ake Edwardson - Sun and Shadow. disappointing. too many sketchy characters and the ending was too suddenly/neatly resolved for me.

just started Helene Tursten - The Corpse and Kjell Eriksson - The Princess of Burundi is next.

also read a couple more of the Amsterdam cops series by Janwillem Van der Wetering. not Scando I suppose but working similar emotional/psychological territory. Grijpstra & de Gier are weirder, spacier, more philosophical (and corrupt!) than the Swedish detectives. Outsider in Amsterdam and The Maine Massacres are especially good.

Helene Tursten - The Corpse

actual title: The Torso tho there is a corpse involved. v. good so far

No mention on ILX of Jo Nesbo? I'm just getting started with him

the Nesbo i read (Snowman) was bordered on ridiculous in places. not that i didn't enjoy it.

have also read the Martin Beck books one a month this year.

> also the current editions spell out M A R T I N B E C K on the spines, which you can then try and re-arrange into anagrams like A BAT MERKIN

lol, i did this. CATKIN BERM. KARMIC BENT. (wait, there's no C in A BAT MERKIN)

also, what tim said:
OMG "The Ice Palace" by Tarjei Vesaas is wonderful and totally heartbreaking, the apogee of clean Norwegian misery.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6060/6249923937_2cc34f0a6b.jpg

mine says BAT MERKIN C

oh oops

The best things I've read since I last updated:

"Children In Reindeer Woods" by Kristin Omarsdottir. Imagine the film "Leon" set in a poetic kind of Tellytubbyland. It's a bit like that. Icelandic, as you may have guessed from the author's name, and tremendous.

"Justice Undone" by Thor Vilhhalmsson - a procedural thriller with the discovery/reveal cut away, like looking at a portrait with the main subject blacked out, forcing you to concentrate on the background. The background is muddy and unforgiving, I really loved this book.

"Gregorius" by Bengt Ohlsson - this thread started with "Doctor Glas" and "Gregorius" is the same story told from the point of view of the villain / victim of the Soderberg classic. Every reader can be supposed to know the end of the story before even picking up the book, and it's impressive that this manages to still be so terribly sad but retain a strong sense that Gregorius is an unforgivable shit.

"Days With Diam" by Svend Age Madsen. Formal experimentation! A branching narrative which is surprisingly compelling. I've never read anything quite like it, especially nothing which still manages any kind of emotional effect. I ended up having to work a complex system of bookmarks and re-reading. Here's the contents page:
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7058/6975547081_57de746d88_z.jpg

One more, while I'm here: "Aliss At The Fire" by Jon Fosse. Almost a prose poem (the blurb puts him somewhere between Ibsen and Beckett which is probably right if a bit uninteresting) - this seems to me part of a little thread of books I've noticed which are kind of ghost-based, not in a spooky haunty way but in the way of bleak rural Nordic landscape containing all of its human history all at once - see also "Justice Undone" mentioned just above and (up to a limited point) "Sigismund" by Lars Gustafsson.

Really liked Aliss at the Fire

Days With Diam looks fascinating and a bit mad

I'm going to get hold of Knausgaard (sadly not voted for the bk club and try and post something on this here)

Jakob Ejersbo, anyone? Just saw the bks while browsing and hurrying to have a read but looks intriguing.

Yeah I also think I'm gonna check out Knausgaard after reading so much about him although I don't really see this appealing to me

i think 'scando' is a gross word.

is that how you guys talk in engaland?

yes :-(

I know it is cheating, cuz the unspoken assumption is we're talking about modern lit, but I have to put in a plug for my favorite Icelandic saga, Egil's Saga, about warrior-poet Egil Skalla-Grimsson.

Really like Icelandic sagas too and want to explore a bit more: Njal's Saga is all I'm familiar with.

Njal's Saga is all about relationships and how personalities mesh and colide. Egil's Saga is simpler; it is about a man who is like a force of nature.

what's good

Since she hasn't been mentioned in the thread so far, Inger Christensen is great if you like procedural poetry that manages still to be lyrical and socially incisive: check out Alphabet or It.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1541210.ece

The baron introduces Siri’s pretty young cousin into the house as his mistress. Strindberg is obliquely invited to complete the quartet. Ambiguity reigns. Lesbianism whispers softly in the shadows. Strindberg becomes prey to the certainty that his rigid lower-class moral code is being undermined by the sophisticated flexibility of the confident aristocrats. Siri is willing to risk ruin for a career on the stage. She leaves her doll’s house, divorces the baron and marries Strindberg, who permits her to live the liberated life of sexual equality they both believe in. They write a feminist manifesto. She becomes an actress; smokes, drinks, treats everyone of both sexes with the same uninhibited even-handedness. He is disappointed that liberation leads her to behave as licentiously as a man. His suspicion over small incidents, which at first he recounts humorously as farcical vicissitudes, grows into jealousy, then full-blown paranoia as he interprets her unfettered behaviour, first as promiscuity, then as nymphomania. Who is right ? Who is wrong? Who is lying? Who is mad? The reader has no idea, and their violent clashes sweep headlong into tragedy. When at last Strindberg wrings a confession of sexual infidelity out of Siri, he wonders – even while beating her up – whether her confession is true or if it is designed to drive him mad so she can gain total power by committing him to an asylum.

This sounds great.

Haven't read the English translation but Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse is probably my favorite novel of his and, yeah, the English translation was released last year. Also a little ghosty re: Aliss at the Fire above.

Surprised there's not more discussion of Dag Solstad around here- I loved 'Shyness & Dignity', but currently struggling a bit with 'Prof Andersen's Night'

There are only 2/3 things published in English but yes 'Shyness & Dignity' was fantastic.

bummmmmmmmmmmp
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/11/top-10-modern-nordic-books

http://lithub.com/lydia-davis-at-the-end-of-the-world/

end up thinking abt Solstad's Telemark novel now and then

Such a crime that so few of his novels are translated

Just three books in English - this is v v bad.

Its strange as actually others of a similar ilk like Bernhard (not that they are the same at all writing-wise, more of a similar generation/outlook) have almost everything of theirs available in English.

We should compose a strongly-worded letter to the Authorities on the matter.

http://www.swedishbookreview.com/article-2000-2-tate.asp

can't quite believe she died 17 years ago, she was my primary inspiration as a kid to become a writer

(her kids often babysat me and my sister in the late 60s: naturally at the time they were all maoists)

Are you planning to go to the show at the Dull-itch Picture Gallery, Mark?

Haha I didn't click on that and assumed it was about Tove Jansson. Apologies to all concerned. But my question in ref the Jansson show stands.

i think the answer has to be YES!! (also hurrah)

(also finland not a scando nation)

*removes pedant's hat*

The baron introduces Siri’s pretty young cousin into the house as his mistress. Strindberg is obliquely invited to complete the quartet. Ambiguity reigns. Lesbianism whispers softly in the shadows. Strindberg becomes prey to the certainty that his rigid lower-class moral code is being undermined by the sophisticated flexibility of the confident aristocrats. Siri is willing to risk ruin for a career on the stage. She leaves her doll’s house, divorces the baron and marries Strindberg, who permits her to live the liberated life of sexual equality they both believe in. They write a feminist manifesto. She becomes an actress; smokes, drinks, treats everyone of both sexes with the same uninhibited even-handedness. He is disappointed that liberation leads her to behave as licentiously as a man. His suspicion over small incidents, which at first he recounts humorously as farcical vicissitudes, grows into jealousy, then full-blown paranoia as he interprets her unfettered behaviour, first as promiscuity, then as nymphomania. Who is right ? Who is wrong? Who is lying? Who is mad? The reader has no idea, and their violent clashes sweep headlong into tragedy. When at last Strindberg wrings a confession of sexual infidelity out of Siri, he wonders – even while beating her up – whether her confession is true or if it is designed to drive him mad so she can gain total power by committing him to an asylum.

"A Madman's Defence"? I read this recently 0_o a terrible man, terrible man. More of a child than a man though tbf.

(also finland not a scando nation)

*removes pedant's hat*

She wrote in Swedish though.

*replaces pedant's hat*

lol excellent point

*removes pedant's hat from where it was replaced and puts it on tom's head instead*

(finland is a scando nation)

ssonned in a baltic beef

eh, i thought finland was not part of scandinavia and I'm p sure i got this from a finn?

Danish expansionism.

Swedish

http://www.visitdenmark.com/sites/default/files/styles/news_and_article_image/public/vdk_images/Attractions-Activities-interest-accommodation-people-geo/TV-movies/broen.jpg

I went to Iceland but didn't read much due to exhaustion and there being far too much raw beauty to look at. Did meet a history PhD though, and got myself plenty of background on Laxness, and some support, from what little I had read of Independent People, that Laxness was very Soviet-influenced - in his prose, and his outlook.

Danes don't do irony, obviously.

Not in my generation, no. We all remember this famous youth tv discussion of the disease known as Chronic Irony. Never been ironic since then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmF0hGXkA8M

We should compose a strongly-worded letter to the Authorities on the matter.

― Tim, Friday, 27 October 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I want to write a letter to Lydia Davis to implore her to translate The Telemark novel. That piece has made sorta obsessed with it.

If she ever replied she would just tell me to learn Norwegian :-(

"A Madman's Defence"? I read this recently 0_o a terrible man, terrible man. More of a child than a man though tbf.

― Terry Micawber (Tom D.), Friday, 27 October 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Its really good and those few prose works are definitely on my canon of 19th century lit. They are all written in this high energy loud confessional hallucinatory tone. Very Trumpian man-child, and he would not be doing too good in the #metoo stakes either.

Top free PDF magazine on this page http://www.eurolitnetwork.com/the-riveter/ has lots of recent Scando lit reviews/extracts/etc

there was this review in the new yorker recently of a norwegian short story writer, and she was compared to lydia davis - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/a-norwegian-master-of-the-short-story

i love this thread

Two new Dag Solstads into English next May: 'Armand V' and 'T Singer'

Anyone other than me read Stig Saeterbakken? Norwegian author around the same age as Knausgaard, apparently quite famous in Norway, committed suicide in his mid 40s. I've read a couple of his, including his last, Through The Night, which was excellent but pretty harrowing stuff, about a man mourning the suicide of his son who goes on a journey to a mysterious house in Slovakia. (shades of Edouard Leve, who wrote the (also excellent) novel Suicide, then promptly committed suicide)

That's terrific news re: Solstad

It is.

I read "Siamese Twins" by Saeterbakken - "excellent but pretty harrowing" sums up my memory of it rather well. It sits fairly squarely in a genre of Nordic lit which revels in angry grimness, I liked it.

Danish writer Kirsten Thorup wins this years Nordic Council's Literature Prize! Danish critics are pretty surprised and ecstatic, apparently she's very good.

Why are awful people writing about Dag Solstad:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/03/dag-solstad-t-singer-armand-v-reviews

I scored copies of both the new Solstad translations in Chicago the other day; I am very excited to read them.

Got them too, starting one of them next I think.