Category: Norwegian

Reading highlights of 2022: A baker’s dozen and then some…

It seems to me that last year I resisted the annual “best of” round-up right through December and then opened the new year with a post about some of my favourite reads of 2021 anyhow. This year I will give in, look back at some of my favourite reading experiences out of a year in which I had a wealth to choose from and aim to get some kind of list posted before friends start hanging up their 2023 calendars around the globe. In a year with war, floods, famine, storms and still no end in sight to Covid infections, books seemed more important than ever, as a respite, a record and a reminder that we, as human beings, have been here before and must learn from the past to face the increasing challenges of the future.

As ever, it is difficult to narrow down twelve months of reading to a few favourites. One’s choices are always personal and subjective, and many excellent books invariably get left out. This year especially—2022 was a productive and satisfying year for me as a reader and as a blogger. Not much for other writing, I’m afraid, but that’s okay.

This year I’m taking a thematic approach to my wrap-up, so here we go.

The most entertaining reading experiences I had this year:

Tomas Espedal’s The Year (translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson) was one of the first books I read in 2022. A novel in verse, it is wise, funny and, nearing the end, surprisingly tense as Espedal’s potentially auto-fictional protagonist careens toward what could be a very reckless act.

International Booker Prize-winning Tomb of Sand  by Geetanjali Shree (translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell) looks like a weighty tome, but blessed with humour, magic and drama—plus a healthy amount of white space—it flies by. An absolute delight and worthy award winner!

Postcard from London, a collection of short stories by Hungarian writer Iván Mándy (translated by John Batki) was a complete surprise for me. In what turned out to be a year in which I read a number of terrific collections of short fiction, I was a little uncertain about this large hardcover volume some 330 pages long, but by the end of the first page I was hooked by the author’s distinct narrative voice and I would have happily read many more pages.

The most absorbing book I read this year (and its companions):

City of Torment – Daniela Hodrová’s monumental trilogy (translated from the Czech by Elena Sokol and others) is a complex, multi-faceted, experimental work that explores a Prague formed and deformed by literary, historical and political forces, haunted by ghosts and the author’s own personal past. After finishing the book, I sensed that I was missing much of the foundational structure—not that it effects the reading in itself—but I wanted to understand more. I read Hodrová’s own companion piece, Prague, I See a City… (translated by David Short) and more recently Karel Hanek Mácha’s epic poem May (translated by Marcela Malek Sulak), but I would love to have access to more of the related literary material, much of which is not yet available in English. I suspect that City of Torment is a text that will keep fueling my own reading for some time.

This year’s poetic treasures:

This is the most challenging category to narrow down. I read many wonderful collections, each so different, but three are particularly special.

Translator John Taylor has introduced me to a number of excellent poets over the years and in 2022, it was his translation of French-language Swiss poet José-Flore Tappy’s Trás-os-Montes. I read this gorgeous book in August and it is still on my bedside table. It’s not likely to leave that space for a long time yet, and that’s all I need to say.  

I first came to know of Alexander Booth as a translator (and read a number of his translations this year) but his collection, Triptych, stands out not only for the delicate beauty of his poetry, but for the care and attention he put into this self-published volume. A joy to look at, to hold and to read.

Finally, My Jewel Box by Danish poet Ursual Andkjær Olsen is the conclusion of an organically evolving trilogy that began with one of my all-time favourite poetry books, Third-Millennium Heart. Not only is this a powerful work on its own, but I had the great pleasure to speak over Zoom with Olsen and her translator, Katrine Øgaard Jensen, for Brazos Bookstore in May. The perfect way to celebrate a reading experience that has meant so much to me.

Books that defied my expectations this year:

Prague-based writer Róbert Gál has produced books of philosophy, experimental fiction and aphorisms—each one taking a fresh and fluid approach to the realm of ideas and experience. His latest, Tractatus (translated from the Slovak by David Short) takes its inspiration from Wittgenstein’s famous tract to explore a series of epistemological and existential questions in a manner that is engaging, entertaining and provocative.

A Certain Logic of Expectations (you see the back cover here) by Mexican photographer and writer Arturo Soto is a look at the Oxford (yes, that Oxford) that exists a world apart from the grounds of the hallowed educational institution. Soto’s outsider’s perspective and appreciation of the ordinary offers a sharp contrast to the famed structures one associates with the city (and where he was a student himself) and what one typically expects from a photobook.

The third unexpected treat this year was The Tomb Guardians by Paul Griffiths. This short novel about the soldiers sent to guard the tomb where Jesus was buried is an inventive work that explores questions of faith, religion, and art history. Truly one of those boundary-defying works to use a term that seems to get used a little too often these days.

The best books I read in 2022:

Again, an entirely personal assessment.

I loved Esther Kinsky’s River, but Grove (translated from the German by Caroline Schmidt), confirmed for me that she is capable of doing something that other writers whose work skirts the territory occupied by memoir and autofiction rarely achieve, and that is to write from the depth of personal experience while maintaining a degree of opaqueness, if that’s the right word. One is not inundated with detail about the life or relationships of her narrators. Rather, she zeros in on select moments and memories, allowing landscape to carry the larger themes she is exploring. So inspiring to the writer in me.

Monsters Like Us, the debut novel by Ulrike Almut Sandig (translated from the German by Karen Leeder) deals with an extraordinarily difficult topic—childhood sexual abuse. It does not shy away from the very real damage inflicted by predatory family members, nor does it offer a magical happy ending, but it does hint at the possibility of rising above a traumatic past. As in her poetry where Sandig often draws on the darkness of traditional European fairy tales, she infuses this novel with elements and characters that embody the innocence, evil and heroic qualities of folktales within an entirely and vividly contemporary story. So much to think about here.

Hanne Ørstavik’s The Pastor (translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken) was my introduction to the work of a Norwegian writer I had a lot about over the years. This slow, melancholy novel set in the far north regions of Norway, beyond the Arctic Circle in the dead of winter, was a perfect fit for me as a reader, in style and subject matter. The story of a female pastor who takes a position in a remote village following a personal loss that she does not fully understand, explores emotional, historical and spiritual questions through a character who is literally stumbling in the dark.

So, what might lie ahead? This past year I embarked on two self-directed reading projects—one to focus on Norwegian literature for two months, the other to read and write about twenty Seagull Books to honour their fortieth anniversary. I found this very rewarding experience. Both projects were flexible enough to allow me freedom, varietyand plenthy of room for off-theme reading, but in each case I encountered authors and read books I might not have prioritized otherwise. For 2023 I would like to turn my attention to another publisher I really admire whose books are steadily piling up in my TBR stack—Archipelago. As with Seagull, they publish a wide range of translated and international literature that meshes well with my own tastes and interests. I don’t have a specific goal in mind, but already have a growing list of Archipelago titles I’d like to read. Other personal projects—public or private—may arise, perhaps more focused toward the personal writing I always promise to get back to, but time will tell. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that it’s a long uncertain road from January 1st to December 31st and it’s best not to try to outguess what the road might hold. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst once more.

Best wishes for the New Year and thank you for reading!

Twenty Seagull books to mark forty years of publishing magic: A 2022 reading project wrap up

Long-time followers of roughghosts will know that I have a particular fondness for Seagull Books. They continually publish a wide range of interesting international and Indian authors, bring many to English language audiences for the first time and, oh, those covers! Senior Editor and Designer Sunandini Banerjee’s work is instantly recognizable, yet always original. And not only have I amassed a healthy collection of their publications, but I have also visited Calcutta twice, taught classes at their School of Publishing and treasured their friendship and encouragement over the years. I admire the work they produce, their dedication to supporting fellow independent publishers in India and abroad, and their work to further understanding and education through the Seagull Foundation for the Arts. So to mark their fortieth anniversary this year I decided, somewhat late in the game, to embark on a personal reading project. I promised myself that I would read and write about twenty Seagull books by year’s end. Twenty for forty.

And here we are.

To date, I have reviewed all but one of these books—the remaining review of Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s Marina Tsvetaeva will follow in the next few days—but I wanted to stop and celebrate twenty excellent reading experiences before the holiday busyness begins. My reading naturally overlapped with my other 2022 self-directed projected, a focus on Norwegian literature, and the annual months devoted to Women in Translation and German Literature that I try to contribute to each year. Within and beyond that there was still plenty of room for variety. Two of the books I read were English originals—both from India—and the rest were translated: six German, four Norwegian, three French (two of which were by African writers, the third Lebanese-French), two Arabic, one Hungarian, one Dutch and one Bengali. I read five works of poetry/prose poetry, nine novels, three collections of short fiction, one long form essay, one play, and one graphic novel. Had I planned this project a little earlier I might have read more nonfiction, but as the year was rushing to a close book length became a deciding factor—December’s four books were necessarily shorter and that influenced choice!

Among this stack of handsome books are some authors I had already come to know and love through Seagull—Tomas Espedal, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Franz Fühmann, Ulrike Almut Sandig and Friedrike Mayröcker, plus one writer I have long wanted to read: Mahasweta Devi. But, as usual, there were some unexpected surprises among the authors I encountered for the first time, most notably German Jürgen Becker and Hungarian Iván Mándy.

Happy fortieth anniversary, Seagull! Here’s to an ever brighter future.

Books read:
in field latin by Lutz Seiler, (German) translated by Alexander Booth
Requiem for Ernst Jandl by Friedrike Mayröcker (German) translated by Roslyn Theobald
Shadow of Things to Come by Kossi Efoui (Togo/French) translated by Chris Turner
Mother of 1084 by Mahasweta Devi (India/Bengali) translated by Samik Bandyopadhyay
The Beloved of the Dawn by Franz Fühmann (German) translated by Isabelle Fargo Cole
Winter Stories by Ingvild Rishøi (Norwegian) translated by Diane Oakley
Love and Reparation by Danish Sheikh (India)
Ever Since I Did Not Die by Ramy Al-Asheq (Arabic) translated by Isis Nusair
The Second Wave by Rustom Bharucha (India)
Marina Tsvetaeva by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Lebanese-French) translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan
Leaving by Cees Nooteboom, w/ drawings by Max Neumann (Dutch) translated by David Colmer
Love by Tomas Espedal (Norwegian) translated by James Anderson
Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude by Khal Torabully (Mauritis/French) translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson
The Sea in the Radio by Jürgen Becker (German) translated by Alexander Booth
The Dance of the Deep Blue Scorpion by Akram Musallam (Arabic) translated by Sawad Hussain
Monsters Like Us by Ulrike Almut Sandig (German) translated by Karen Leeder
Postcard from London by Iván Mándy (Hungarian) translated by John Batki
The White Bathing Hut by Thorvald Steen (Norwegian) translated by James Anderson
The Year by Tomas Espedal (Norwegian) translated by James Anderson
Ulysses by Nicolas Mahler, after James Joyce (German) translated by Alexander Booth

Death with romantic complications: Love by Tomas Espedal

Each and every leaf is unique. And yet not, the leaves grow together and clothe the tree like a unifying thought: we are the tree. The tree is us. We are spring, summer and autumn. In the winter we’re gone, laid beneath the soil. Dead and overgrown. In the winter we dissolve. The winter is when we die.

Love, the eternal flame that has sparked many a tale of passion, loss, betrayal. So often two essential human experiences, love and death, are bound in life and literature, but leave it to Norwegian writer Tomas Espedal to turn the classic love story on its head with his tale of a protagonist who is committed to keeping a self-imposed date with death—decided a year in advance without any idea of how or where he will meet it—a commitment that is challenged when he unexpectedly falls in love and his new girlfriend becomes pregnant with his child.

As ever, the Espedal hero/anti-hero is a complicated and conflicted character. His narrators are often outsiders, lonely and lovelorn. His last two books, Bergeners and The Year, feature a writer named Tomas whose wife has left and daughter moved away. His latest to be published in English, again translated by James Anderson, is Love, a slender novella centred around “I,” that is, a person referred to as I—a name rather than a pronoun, but clearly a choice that blurs the distinction—who has abandoned love. After the death of his first wife and six years after the end of a second long-term relationship, he is living alone in his childhood home. A writer who has enjoyed some success and experimented with living for better or worse, now that I has made “the exquisite decision to die,” he is filled with a fresh new purpose. He wants a good death, a beautiful death, and he has granted himself one last year to live his best possible life in anticipation of that final moment. Go out on a high, he might say.

Love is a most unusual novella. With a protagonist called “I,” the third person narrative has an initially jarring feeling. Once one gets used to the oddness, the occasional sentence that naturally reads as a first person statement reminds you of the internal otherness of the character whose thoughts and feelings you are following so closely. Not long after his springtime commitment to one final year of life, I is invited to join some friends for a week in Loire where they have rented a large house. He purchases a one-way ticket to Paris and makes his way by train to where they are staying. He knows everyone there except two women, Rie and Aka. He keeps his distance from them, in fact he prefers to enjoy all his friends from afar. Yet when the week is over, he announces that he is planning to walk to Paris and wonders if anyone would care to join him. To his surprise, Aka offers. She is young—thirty-two years-old to his fifty-six—carefree, confident and creative. I is smitten, but he’s careful to maintain his space. By the time they reach Paris he is in love. At an exhibition of the work of Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken it happens:

I had lost faith in a new love, nor did he want one; but here in the gallery amongst the van der Elsken photographs, standing behind Aka, who suddenly turned and kissed him, he was struck by something unexpected, like a bolt of lightning, or a shaft of light, as if the light from the photographs flashed into his eyes and exposed an inner picture, a picture of Aka and himself as lovers, as a couple; he was filled with a yearning for love.

The advent of a passionate love affair gives I the desire to live, but also causes him to wonder if this is not the perfect time to die, right at the height of happiness? A romantic death. And as the seasons pass, these paradoxical desires will intrigue and trouble him.

Naturally he tells Aka nothing of the pledge he has made. When she discovers she is pregnant and wonders if she is ready to become a mother he insists he does want to have a child with her. Yet he remains torn between the longing to live and the notion that it is the knowledge that he intends to die that heightens the exhilaration he feels in his relationship with Aka. He cannot stop thinking about where and how he will come to take his last breath even as doubts about his decision and the desire to live both continue to plague him. What unfolds is an existential exploration of the tensions tearing I apart inside. As he reveals more of his past experiences with difficult, painful deaths, one can imagine what he might be hoping to avoid, but it seems I is as afraid of life as he is afraid of dying. Or of simply growing old. The past holds a series of lives of loves and losses and the future holds, what, more of the same?

The drinker empties his life of content, fills his life with meaning. The drinker fills his life with death. Those who have been close to death know how beautiful life is. And life is beautiful and precious because death has set its mark upon it. The sick will be cured. The dying will live. But I wanted to die. It was this resolution that made his life beautiful. Which filled his last year with meaning.

Spare and poetic, this slender volume raises infinitely more questions—ethical and existential—than it answers, its weight and intensity resting in the strange contrary emotions of a man who is possibly happier than he has ever been, steadily making his way through a year of doubt, delight  and determinedness toward a destination at once individual and universal.

Love by Tomas Espedal is translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson and published by Seagull Books.

“Trembling in the dew. / Dancing in the fog.” Seriously Well by Helge Torvund

Can you
instead of
grieving the awful
deeds you have done,
or shuddering
dread the horror
that may come,
enjoy the fact
that you are
seriously well?

With a work of poetry that arises from an experience of significant illness, one might expect a to travel a familiar pathway through diagnosis, treatment and recovery—a healing journey. In his book-length poem, Seriously Well, Norwegian poet Helge Torvund begins with a meditation on the wonderous power of poetry to facilitate emotional connection and moves through a sequence of poems that explore questions of the relationship between mood and environment, the possibility of welcoming of Death as a companion in life, and the bond between the physical body and the energies of the world. The speaker calls to mind adult and childhood memories. Fashions thoughtful wisdoms and parables. These gentle free verse pieces unfold in quiet anticipation, or preparation, for what ultimately lies ahead in the doctor’s office where he receives worrying news.

Originally published in Norwegian in the collection Alt Brenner in 2011, this sequence of poems has now been translated by the author and released by The Song Cave. The tone of this work is crystalline, meditative and wise. The wonder of nature, the quality of light, and the comforting nearness of water are key motifs that recur, but there is also, underlying it all, an ever present awareness that life is fragile and death will, in time, come for all living creatures and things. A most affecting poem, not quite midway through, finds the speaker waking in the middle of a winter night noticing:

that something,
one thing or another,
was different,
strange, remarkable.

With his family asleep, he gathers his clothing, gets dressed and steps outside into a snowy world lit by a full moon. He marvels at the distorted landscape:

You recognize this side
but still it is different,
strange, peculiar, odd,
remarkable.
Sinister,
but beautiful too.
Changed. Deformed.

Further along, down by the water, he notices a strange shape, an object that suddenly moves. A heron on the ice cold concrete:

I went a bit closer,
stopped for a while.
I saw its ancient gaze
staring at me over
the long narrow beak.
There was great wisdom
in that eye.
I moved even closer.
It did not fly away?
No.
How
strange.
Suddenly it lay down
on the concrete.
And the eyes
became begging, helpless.

This nocturnal encounter with a dying heron seems to embody the keen perception and restrained sentiment that gives this sequence its immediate emotional force. Through a series of similar meditations and tales,  Torvund guides his reader toward what so often feels elusive—even impossible in our darkest moments—an expression of acceptance that is timeless and enduring.

Seriously Well by Helge Torvund is translated from the Norwegian by the author and published by The Song Cave.

The conversation we can’t have: Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik

Loss and grief are experiences that inspire and drive so much literature. For a writer there seems to be a compelling need to try to sort out the complicated flood of emotions that the injury, illness or death of a loved one releases with the only tool that makes sense—the pen. But that response typically requires a certain degree of distance before the diaries and records can be weighed against whatever it is one feels at the time and in the aftermath. The exercise of writing immediate grief is much more difficult. In his memoir, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Peter Handke seeks an element of closure by writing about his mother within two months of her death. He wants to honour her life without slipping into sentimentalism but discovers the peace he seeks is elusive, he cannot keep himself out of the story, and that is the best part of this raw, affecting meditation. More successful precisely because it was never intended for publication, is Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary. This collection of fragments, scribbled on scraps of paper during the first days, weeks and years following his beloved mother’s death is entirely unselfconscious, honest and stripped to the barest essential emotions. As such it is one of the very few books a recently bereaved person can turn to for company. There are no conclusions, no prescriptions, and many unanswerable questions.

One could say that Hanne Ørstavik’s Ti Amo is also an exercise is immediate grief writing, but she turns to fiction, choosing to hold close to the details of her own life, and at the time of writing—or at least beginning to write—her ailing husband is still alive. Her unnamed narrator, a Norwegian novelist, is living in Milan with her Italian husband who is dying of cancer. The work she is writing, addressed to the man she loves, is an attempt to put some kind of meaning to a time in which their relationship, and the expectations and dreams they once had, is shifting, losing direction. It is an effort to reach out across the space that has opened up between their respective realities:

Why can’t we speak the truth? Why can’t we say things the way they are? Why do they have to hide your death from you? Do you really not want to know, not be in contact with, not feel, the truth about yourself?

“Ti amo”—I love you—is the phrase that links the narrator and her husband, becoming in moments of physical and psychological distance, a mantra that reaches out through the fogginess of medication and the void created by that which is not being said. At the time when he first became ill, they were still in the early, heady years of a mid-life romance. He was her Italian publisher and, as their desire to be together intensified, she relocated from Norway to Milan, immersing herself in a foreign culture and language. Their lives were filled with travel, literary events, social engagements. When the first indications that something was wrong appeared, they both tried to imagine it was nothing but before long his symptoms could no longer be ignored. A diagnosis, surgery and chemotherapy followed but the cancer is refuses to be stayed. In the present moment of the emerging text, it is early 2020. Their relationship goes back only four years and almost half of that time has unfolded under the shadow of serious illness. Even their marriage, the formal recognition of their partnership, was a response, at his insistence, to the suddenly altered circumstances.

Tracing the onset and progression of illness against an account of their lives before and after diagnosis, the narrator is continually seeking to understand what she feels and who she is in relation to a man who often seems so helplessly far away. Through the maze of appointments and tests and endless trips to the pharmacy in the hope that the prescribed pain meds have finally arrived, small things, the simple moments together—stopping for hot chocolate, buying suet for wild birds, tea in the morning—take on an added poignancy. The narrative is nonlinear but regularly circles back to January, 2020, as the last of the normal treatment options have been exhausted. And still, they are not together in accepting the one truth that hangs in the air.

Ti Amo is novel of passion, commitment and confusion. It is an open window into the complicated, often conflicted, emotions of caregiving without the numbing effects afforded by time and distance. Details of the ravages of an aggressive cancer are laid bare, woven into a story of two people brought together by a love of literature, art and travel. Two different natures, she reasons at one point, recalling that he always exhibited a certain degree of hesitancy while she always carried “a compulsion for truth that feels like my very life force itself.” Is that why they can’t approach the topic of death?

This is, of course, a one-sided story. The narrator’s husband is hostage to pain and its pacifiers, grasping at normal whenever he has the strength, and much of the time that entails going into the office. As if a semblance of work will keep him alive. But isn’t that what the narrator turns to as well? Her own work? “I write novels,” she says, “It’s my way of existing in the world…” If he will not or cannot ease her through her fear of bereavement by bravely accepting his own death (for is that not what lies behind her sense of loneliness?), she will turn their situation into a novelized love letter.

The resulting brief novella, written in just ten days, overflows with warmth, tenderness and  grief rendered in spare, poetic prose. Through her looping narrative style, Ørstavik allows emotional tension to build, in her protagonist and her reader, as a moment of reckoning dawns for the narrator and her husband in their separate but parallel journeys. However, the end, as such, lies outside the frame of the story. The author’s real-life husband, Italian publisher, translator and painter Luigi Spagnol, died on June 14, 2020. Ti Amo, in arising so directly from her experiences and emotions in his final months, is more than autobiographical fiction or memoir—it is also a deeply personal tribute to power of love.

Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik is translated by Martin Aitken and will be published by Archipelago Books in North America and And Other Stories in the UK in September.

Reading Women in Translation: Looking back over the past twelve months

For myself at least, as Women in Translation Month rolls around each August, there is, along with the intention to focus all or part of my reading to this project, a curiosity to look back and see just how many female authors in translation I’ve read since the previous year’s edition. I’ve just gone through my archives and am pleasantly surprised to find twenty titles, the majority read in 2022. Within this number are several authors I’ve read and loved before and a number of new favourites that have inspired me to seek out more of their work.

First among these is Lebanese-French writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata, whose The Last Days of Mandelstam (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan) so thrilled me with its precision and economy that I bought another of her novellas and a collection of poetry, Alphabet of Sand (translated by Marilyn Hacker). I’ve just learned that another of her Russian poet inspired novels, Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga, will be released by Seagull Books this fall. I can’t wait!

 

The advent of the war in Ukraine instantly drew my attention to a tiny book I had received from isolarii books. The name Yevgenia Belorusets became suddenly and tragically familiar as her daily diary entries from Kiev were published online. I read that small volume, Modern Animals (translated by Bela Shayevich), drawn from interviews with people she met in the Donbas region and as soon as it became available I bought and read her story collection Lucky Breaks (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky). Although both of these books reflect the impact of war in the east of the country, they could not be read without the context of the full scale invasion underway and still ongoing in her homeland.

Another author I encountered for the first time that inspired me to read more of her work was Czech writer Daniela Hodrová whose monumental City of Torment (translated by Elena Sokol and others) is likely the most profoundly challenging work I’ve read in along time. Upon finishing this trilogy I turned to her Prague, I See A City… (translated by David Short and reviewed with the above) which I happened to have buried on my kindle. A perfect, possibly even necessary, companion.

My personal Norwegian project introduced me to Hanne Örstavik, whom I had always meant to read. I loved her slow moving introspective novel, The Pastor (translated by Martin Aitken) and have since bought, but not read, her acclaimed novella, Love. However, lined up to read this month, I have her forthcoming release in translation, Ti Amo, a much more recent work based on her experience caring for her husband as he was dying of cancer. The only other female author I brought into this project was Ingvild H. Rishøi whose collection Winter Stories (translated by Diane Oatley) was a pure delight. I have been making note of other female Norwegian writers to fill in this imbalance in the future.

The past year also brought new work by two of my favourite poets: a book of prose pieces by Italian poet Franca Mancinelli, The Butterfly Cemetery (translated by John Taylor), and the conclusion to Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s epic experimental trilogy, My Jewel Box (translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen). In May I had the honour of speaking with Olsen and Jensen over Zoom for a special event—it was a fantastic opportunity I won’t soon forget. I also became acquainted with a new-to-me Austrian poet, Maja Haderlap, through her excellent collection distant transit (translated by Tess Lewis) and have since added her novel Angel of Oblivion to my shelves.

Among the many other wonderful women in translation I read over the past year, Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker winning Tomb of Sand (translated by Daisy Rockwell) needs no introduction—it is an exuberant, intelligent and wildly entertaining read. On an entirely different note, Rachel Careau’s brilliant new translation of Colette’s classic Cheri and the End of Cheri completely surprised me. I had no idea what a sharp and observant writer she was, in fact I didn’t know much about her at all and I discovered that she was quite the exceptional woman. Changing direction again, In the Eye of the Wild, French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s account of her terrifying encounter with a bear in a remote region of Siberia (translated by Sophie R. Lewis) approaches the experience in an unexpected manner that I really appreciated.

Keeping with nonfiction for a moment, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Sarah Booker), a collection of essays about contemporary Mexico, was a difficult, necessary read. Annmarie Schwarzenbach’s account of her overland journey to Afghanistan with Ella Maillart in 1939, All the Roads Are Open (translated by Isabel Fargo Cole) was another book I had long wanted to read that did not disappoint but which carries much more weight given the more recent history of that region. Finally, My Life in Trans Activism by A. Revathi (translated from Tamil dictation by Nandini Murali) offers vital insight into the lives of hijra and trans women and trans men in India from a widely respected activist. Tilted Axis in the UK will be releasing this book to an international audience later this year.

Rounding out the year, were three fine novels. First, I after owning it for years, I finally read Seeing Red by Chilean writer Lina Meruane (translated by Megan McDowell) and was very impressed. Last, but by no means least, I read two new releases from Istros Books who have an excellent selection of women writers in their catalogue. Special Needs by Lada Vukić (translated from the Croatian by Christina Pribichevich-Zorić) captures the slightly magical voice of child narrator with an undisclosed disability in a remarkably effective way, while Canzone di Guerra by the inimitable Daša Drndić (translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth) offers a fictionalized account of her years in Canada as a young single mother that was most enlightening for this Canadian reader.

I have, at this point, seven books selected for this year’s Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth) and we’ll see how I manage—and now I also have a goal to exceed for the eleven months before August 2023! I would, by the way, recommend any of the titles listed above if you are looking for something to read this month.

Some thoughts about two months of reading Norwegian literature

I started 2022 with a personal decision to focus on Norwegian fiction for at least January and February. There was no particular reason apart from a couple authors I wanted to visit or revisit and a general sense of Norwegian literature fitting nicely into a Canadian winter. Canada is a similarly northern country, albeit much larger, and I have often felt “at home” in the climate and landscape that emerges in much of what I’ve read from Norway. Of course, although I had a number of Norwegian books already on my shelves, this little project inspired the purchase of more, a trend that continued during the reading.

So, I have some thoughts about this experience. I read a total of seven novels or short story collections by five male and two female writers. This was the first issue. I had difficulty finding female authors of interest, although I have since become aware of a number I’d like to explore. My initial searches brought up a predominance of writers of noir and historical fiction—neither genres of particular interest. And then I inadvertently purchased a few titles that turned out to be Danish, not Norwegian, enough that I could probably do a month of reading female Danish authors. I will confess, though, that I was curious to read recent work by male authors my age or a little older, and in that respect, four of the novels I chose fit the bill.

I really enjoyed five of my selections, had a few minor issues with a sixth and was decidedly underwhelmed by a seventh. I decided not to review that title, as I felt there was little to gain by dissecting a novel I found so disappointing—I’m ready to accept that the problem is probably with me—but my response does deserve a few words here. The book is The Other Name: Septology I–II by Jon Fosse (translated by Damion Searls–Transit Books/Fitzcarraldo). I have yet to read anything but praise for this work which extends for seven parts over three volumes and I honestly expected it to be a book I would have liked. But, not so.

It’s the story of an aging artist, a widower, who is a misanthropic loner with a rather religious temperament. In the nearby city lives another artist with the same name, matching the same description, whose life has followed a very different course. He is drinking himself to death. Other characters in this small cast also echo one another in name and biographical details but live different lives. Or so it seems, because our narrator, Asle #1 as I thought of him, and no one around him, appears to notice the duplication beyond the name. The story unfolds in a ponderous leaden prose—a glacial stream of consciousness—ostensibly a single sentence, but one that reads more like “sentences” with an absence of full stops. Other punctuation occurs and any dialogue is off-set in the text. However, I could not help but feel that the author has given himself too much runway for the story he is trying to tell. It not only drags on, but his imagined memory episodes, like two sections where Asle watches (and listens to) a young couple (obviously himself and his late wife) in a park, made me irritated rather than impressed. The general narrative style and the potential metaphysical questions at play appeal to me, but the execution did not. I did finish it, if only to see if I caught the spark others have felt, but although the second part was an improvement, I can’t imagine going any further.

I could not help but wonder if The Other Name suffered in part from the fact that I picked it up, halfway through this project, after beginning with two books that I loved, my favourites overall as it turned out. Tomas Espedal’s The Year is a stream of consciousness novel in verse about aging and loss that is intelligent, humorous and sad, whereas The Pastor by Hanne Ørstavik is likewise a deeply internalized narrative, dark and meditative that also deals with grief and matters of faith. These first two reads were so strong—that is, perfect for me at this moment—that I filled in the rest of my Espedal collection and bought Ørstavik’s earlier novella Love. It’s worth noting that I was not put off Fosse altogether either, but rather than looking ahead to complete his Septology, I bought one of his very short novellas. I think I might appreciate his work more in a very tight space.

The balance of my Norwegian project featured three new-two-me authors, Thorvald Steen (The White Bathing Hut), Ingvild H Rishøi (Winter Stories), Kjell Askildsen (Everything Like Before)  and one long-time favourite, Per Petterson (Men in My Situation). When I think about it, the one theme that binds every one of the  books I read is isolation. That is, perhaps, a significant aspect of the appeal for me.

All in all, this little Norwegian project has been a rewarding experience—I read a lot of great books and bought even more. This is the first time I have set a solid goal early in the year and met it. I have also read and reviewed several nonfiction and poetry collections and one other short story collection since the beginning of January. It feels good have been so productive, slow reader that I am, but it will also feel good now to think about reading without any strict self-imposed objectives for a change. However, I do hope it bodes well for 2022, reading wise. I mean, we’re still dealing with the pandemic despite the willingness of many governments to believe it’s over and the worsening situation in Ukraine and ongoing conflicts elsewhere are terrifying. Then, of course, there’s climate change and so much more. I would suggest we need literature and art more than ever at this time.

“I was thirty-eight years old, everything was blown, I had nothing left.” Men in My Situation by Per Petterson

There we sat in silence beneath the big wide tall trees behind the station building, breathing, each in our uneven rhythm, as if we’d all been running, but none of us the same distance. Then I said, Vigdis, I guess it’s up to you whether we should say anything about this to Mummy, about what just happened. It was quiet in the back seat, all three of them sat there looking out the windows. Vigdis sat in the middle, but it was Tine who said, no, and then Tine said, no, too, and Vigdis didn’t say anything.

Early 1990s, Oslo, Norway and Arvid Jansen is thirty-eight years old. From a later vantage point, a decade or more down the road, thirty-eight is young, but when you stand there it feels ominous, as if one is hurtling helplessly into middle age. And, at this moment, Arvid has found himself alone in the world. His wife has left him, taking their three daughters with her, and it is less than two years since his parents and two younger brothers perished in a tragic ferry accident. In Per Petterson’s most recent release in English translation, Men in My Situation, the Norwegian author places his frequent “stunt double” into a set of circumstances that will test his emotional awareness and resolve, and, as the title perhaps implies, as a man of his background, era and disposition, his resources may well be limited.

Petterson is a writer who has claimed that he is unable to detail a plot in advance; he begins with an image or a sentence and, as a result, a measure of uncertainty lingers in the finished product, a sense that the protagonist or narrator is not sure where he or she will end up. One has to give the story the time it needs. Grief and longing are also common themes in his work, as are life transitions and family dynamics (the boat accident is drawn from Petterson’s own personal history and appears elsewhere in his ouevre). All of these ideas come together in Men in My Situation, an accomplished novel from a mature, confident author. This version of Arvid is bemused and hurt to find himself abandoned. His self-awareness is of the moment; he retells his tale as if in an effort to make sense of it all—his confusion, his numbness and his blind spots all make him familiar, complicated and real.

Arvid is a writer of some renown, sometimes even recognized on the street, but he is ever conscious of his working class background. His exposure to literature was self-directed and it is only in recent years that he has been able to give up his factory job to write full-time.  But it makes him a bit of an outsider in literary circles. He and his ex-wife, Turid, met in their teens and, although she shares his background, she seems to have been able to find her place among an artistic crowd Arvid describes as the “colourful people”—a space he cannot penetrate. He senses that, seduced by her new friends, she simply grew away from him. But it hurts.

It was a cold autumn, the first after Turid. I felt cold all the time. I wrote almost nothing. I could wake up at night and not remember that her side of the bed was empty, a certain number of kilos permanently lifted from the mattress and her smell fainter with the passing days, and with the nights, weeks, and in the end completely dissolved and gone.

When, after about six months of weekend visits, his daughters announce that they no longer want to come to see him on a regular basis, he struggles to embrace the ambiguity of estranged fatherhood and a haphazard and unwelcome bachelorhood.

Alone now, Arvid does tend to spend a fair amount of time wandering aimlessly, often idly hoping to meet a woman to go home with, although he appears to be such a passive, lost soul that the women who are interested seem to drag him home as one might a stray puppy. And frequently he is a disappointing date. He attracts pity, but the rare instances suggesting real potential desire on his part generally frighten him off. He never calls back. Anchorless, he drifts without making an effort to either move on or make claims on the children he has been denied access to. As frustrating as this may be, the spiral of depression and grief he is caught in is real. Despondent, he falls short of anger which, properly directed, could be the motivating force he needs. Only his eldest daughter, Vigdis, appears to understand, but she herself has some uncertain medical or mental health concerns. And Arvid worries that she perhaps sees him all too clearly.

This is a slow moving novel, but it is beautifully realized through a narrator who has an appealing honesty and dry sense of humour. Long, winding paragraphs often extending for several pages, incorporate observations, memories, asides and dialogue without line breaks or quotation marks, echoing Arvid’s characteristic internalized processing. At the same time, great attention is paid to the urban and rural environments he travels through by bus, train or car, creating a vivid expansive sense of place and further highlighting his isolation within it:

On the way to the station along the wire fence and the railway line it began to blow and to snow again. I didn’t have a cap with me, but pulled one round of the scarf over my hair as a muffle against the snow, and the snow whirled around me in the wind and whirled over the closed-down factories by the Sagelva river, over the shopping centre up the road, over the hills beyond and over Øyeren lake and the river Glomma, over the forests toward Sweden. And I imagined I could see all this snow whirling over the treetops and then slowly falling and new snow coming, covering the timber roads, covering tracks of elk and roe deer, of hare and why not the wolf now moving in from  the forests of Sweden after a hundred years of absence, all this seen as if from a soundless helicopter, and I caught myself longing back to the Sundays when my father and I went skiing deep into the woods on the red-marked tracks in Lillomarka, his back broad and muscular ahead of me in the blue sweater my mother had knitted, just him and me breathing sharply in the sharp winter air and the dry snow and the dry cracking of trees leaning against each other in the brittle cold, and at the same time the longing for all this made me so weary. It wasn’t going anywhere. My father was dead. There wasn’t any before. There was only now.

As the novel progresses, Arvid begins to fill in some of the relevant or unfinished pieces of his past and make an increasingly resigned alliance with his new circumstances. But there is something missing. Toward the end of the novel, the depth of his compounded grief begins to become apparent, both to Arvid and his audience. The loss of four family members twice over in the span of little more than a year, first his parents and brothers then his wife and daughters, one loss quite likely setting the groundwork for the other, is a significant trauma. He never labels it as such, nor is he likely to allow himself that full recognition, at least not yet. That would be entirely in keeping with men in his situation.

Men in My Situation by Per Petterson is translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey and published by Harvill Secker in the UK and Canada, Graywolf in the US.

Sympathy for the misanthrope: Everything Like Before by Kjell Askildsen

The world isn’t what it used to be. For example, it takes more time to live now. I’m well into my eighties but it isn’t enough. I’m far too healthy, though I have nothing to be healthy for. But life won’t let go of me. He who has nothing to live for has nothing to die for. Maybe that’s why. (from “Chess”)

Norwegian writer Kjell Askildsen (1929–2021) is considered one of the greatest shorty-story writers of all time, a master of a spare, ascetic style in which quiet tension builds around what is unspoken. His themes tend to be sombre, with a dark, dry wit most reminiscent of Beckett, while his protagonists—all male—tend to be irritated, misanthropic and lacking empathy. Typically they find themselves isolated, often through their own behaviors or choices. There is little resolution in Askildsen’s world. Everything Like Before, gathers a selection of thirty-six of his stories spanning 1953–2015—including the entirety of his award-winning collection Thomas F’s Final Notes to the Public—that offers a generous taste of his idiosyncratic, if  bleak, worldview.

In such an extensive collection, within which many of the stories are very short, only two or three pages, the strongest pieces are often the longer ones—those which give the author more room to develop a scene or scenario. Some that really stand out for me include “The Encounter,” “A Sudden Liberating Thought,” “Mardon’s Night,” “Midsummer,” “The Wake,” “An Uplifting Funeral” and “Carl Lange.” Askildsen has a wonderful way with cranky, eccentric octagenarians in particular, but I did find that his fondness for stories involving husbands caught in marriages plagued by either tedium or restlessness—at least from their own dispassionate perspectives—frustrating for the persistent lack of communication, despite the fact that some of these pieces actually rely extensively on dialogue. Couples talking a lot, saying nothing.

However, his treatment of strained or difficult dynamics between fathers and sons is more effective. In “Mardon’s Night,” an older man named Mardon makes his way through an unfamiliar town to visit a his son, also named Mardon, whom he has not seen in many years. The exact nature of their estrangement is not clear, but the son is certainly odd and difficult. Their encounter is awkward, mediated by Vera, the son’s neighbour and at least occasional lover, one of the most fully realized female characters in the entire collection. But the visit fails to ease the distance of accumulated years, as neither man can or will make an effort.

Mardon lit a cigarette and said: We can’t actually do anything about who we are, can we? We’re completely at the mercy of our pasts, aren’t we, and we didn’t have a hand in creating our pasts. We’re arrows flying from the womb and landing in a graveyard. And what does it matter how high we flew at the moment we land? Or how far we flew, or how many we hurt along the way? That, Vera said, can’t be the whole truth.

As self-centred and insensitive as the younger Mardon may be, he echoes the view so many of Askildsen’s protagonists seem to have. A motivation for improvement, of one’s self or relationships, is lacking. The women, although we rarely see their emotional perspectives, often appear to demonstrate more will, much to the dismay of the men in their lives. Genderwise Askildsen tends to view the world through an odd one-way mirror—though that may in fact be the point he is making about his male characters. We as readers do not come to know the women because the men do not care to know what they really think.

Another highlight, “Carl Lange,” a story from the Thomas F collection, is a comedy of errors driven by paranoia. When two policemen arrive on Carl Lange’s doorstep and suggest that a man matching his description has been accused of the rape of an underage girl he is shocked. But, even though there is no reason to believe he is guilty, the suggestion triggers a series of increasingly neurotic and thus incriminating behaviours. Askildsen captures the gears turning inside our hapless protagonist so vividly that, as his reckless actions and antagonism directed at the investigating officer escalates, the tale is not only funny, but increasingly distressing as we watch a man careening into his own self-created disaster.

At best, these stories—whether long or short—open up haunting, unsettled spaces inhabited by characters who fail to connect, or do so only by awkward chance. There is a variation of form, not surprising given the wide span of Askildsen’s career covered here, but, taken too many at a time, the stories can, at times, flatten out and run into one another, as a certain sameness blunts the sharpness of his wit. In that respect, this collection, like other longer volumes, may be best enjoyed a handful of stories at a time.

Everything Like Before by Kjell Askildsen is translated by Sean Kinsella and published by Archipelago Books.

The Kindness of Strangers: Winter Stories by Ingvild H. Rishøi

Those of us who live in northern countries know that winter is not just a season, it is a state of mind. Ice and snow, cold and short days can test resources and strengthen resolve. Everything, good and bad, can be heightened at this time of year. This is the mood that permeates Norwegian writer Ingvild H. Rishøi’s third collection Winter Stories, her first to appear in English. This volume contains three stories, two almost novella length, set in winter and featuring working class characters and their children or siblings. As such it is a book about families, what to means to be a family. Each story is anchored in a strong, distinct narrative voice—a protagonist caught up in a situation he or she had not anticipated, circumstances they cannot escape. They know they have some agency, but it is not that simple—their own families of origin are damaged, wounded, marked by poverty, mental illness, violence. Yet in each case the central figure holds to the hope that they can break the cycle, that things can be better, for the sake of the young children in their lives, the children who give their lives meaning.

The first and shortest story “We Can’t Help Everybody” features a very young single mother and her sensitive observant kindergarten-aged daughter as they make their way home from school on a rainy, cold afternoon. The mother, down to her last 60 kroner, is worried about how they will make it through the weekend. She is overwhelmed by the responsibility of parenthood, the weight of poverty, and, one gathers, little support from the child’s father. As her daughter argues that they must help a young man begging on the street, the narrator thinks back to her own childhood, growing up in a caravan. The picture she sketches of a troubled mother, and emotional instability, is scant but telling. The insecurities linger, but:

Now everything is so different.  One thing after another has changed, and now I have a job and a daughter and days like this, and here I sit on the pavement and she is five years old and shakes her head, and squeezes her eyes shut, but the sound of the rain creates something light in me.

That everything can be different again.

Everything can be fine.

On the surface, the challenges that emerge in this short piece may seem small—the decision to help a beggar, the desire to buy a new pair of underpants—but if you have ever faced the inability to meet basic expenses for your children, as I have, you know the feeling of despair can be crushing. And the smallest of miracles pure magic. This story captures a reality many know too well.

The second and third stories, each running to about 70 pages apiece, also take place over a short span of time, but offer the space for a greater development of the protagonist’s character, background and the circumstances behind the immediate events. In “The Right Thomas,” a man recently released from prison is preparing for his young son’s first overnight visit in over a year. He has studied the recipe he plans to cook, and with only a few hours to spare, sets out to buy a pillow for his son’s bed. Only thirty-three himself, Thomas’ route to fatherhood is a little unconventional. A one-night stand led Leon’s conception, and when the panicked mother-to-be manages to track him down, she makes it clear that she expects him to take on the role of co-parent, but she neither wants a relationship nor does she need his financial support. Thomas has a difficult past, with an abusive, violent father and a troubled recent history, but he longs to be a better man, a new man.

Now, back in the outside world, ready to make good on his resolution, Thomas still reads threats and accusations into even the most mild interactions. What he fears most is his own anger, that it will be triggered, erupt, be uncontrollable. It is a legacy he wishes to leave behind, but it stalks him everywhere, mitigated only by the words of his prison psychologist that echo in his thoughts:

‘You want to buy a child’s pillow,’ she says.

But this isn’t an attack. This is just something I don’t master, if you’ve felt under attack for your entire life, this is how you react, that is Stone Age biology, the psychologist said, the fear is embedded in the brain, but I’m not going to behave like a caveman, because I live in a time period with pillow shops and psychologists and traffic lights and if I continue to feel suffocated and lose it, then the same things will happen to Leon, my father scared the bejesus out of me, and I scare the bejesus out of him, but I don’t want to.

I want Leon to sleep peacefully in his bed.

His sincere wish is that his son can enjoy the confidence and success he feels his upbringing and failures have denied him. But will he even manage to make it through to this important opportunity to start over again?

The final story, “Siblings,” opens with seventeen year-old Rebekka ready to run away, essentially from social services, with her two young half-siblings. The children have no idea what is going on, but they trust her, even if she is not sure she trusts herself. She picks up the children after school, dumps their books in the garbage, fills their rucksacks with clothes she has stashed, and hurries them off to catch a bus out of town. As the story unfolds and the challenges that threaten her careful plans mount, the complexity of the underlying factors behind this sudden flight are revealed.

This is excellent classic story telling; as a reader it is impossible not to become invested in each scenario as it plays out. With empathy and a keen poetic sensibility, Rishøi creates deeply human, interesting characters and gives each one a compelling voice. She excels at building narrative tension, fueled as much by the outside circumstances that arise as by her protagonists’ own insecurities and growing doubts that they will fail those who depend on them most. They take risks, stumble and pull themselves together again. Success is not certain, there are no happy endings, but there is promise. And, sometimes, promise is enough.

Winter Stories by Ingvild H. Rostøi is translated by Diane Oatley and published by Seagull Books.