Posts in Category: Scandinavian literature
Telling stories
I have started to read Karen Blixen’s Seven Gothic Tales and I am really liking it. The first story ‘Roads around Pisa’ reminded me a lot of Don Quixote and how Cervantes playfully deals with sexuality and misconceptions that invite a reconsideration/reaffirmation of the cultural meaning of gender. There is an awful lot of reflection about women and their stand in life in Blixen’s tales. It is really fascinating to read when most of it narrates through the characters of men, and that which is narrated by women is done with regards to their station within the realms of society’s norm. The seven tales from the title are interspersed with many, many tales that use this power of narration to get their story out.
I am a firm believer in the idea that we sculpt our world through narration. The stories we choose to tell are our takes on reality as we perceive it, or in some cases how we challenge it. We accept and join in on some narrations, while we reject and replace others and in doing so we create meaning for ourselves. The characters of Karen Blixen are all trying to communicate their knowledge or view of the world through their tales. There are those in her character-base who create stories that are double-edged, recounting past experiences with present knowledge (older, wiser attitude) while forming their explanation by present outlook. And then there are stories that attempt to incite future action, stories that distress, stories that bring joy and stories that contemplate life’s fickle nature.
Karen Blixen - Syv Fantastiske Fortællinger
Narration has a great power over humans. We relate to each other when we tell tales and listen to stories of others. We invite others to see what we see and use stories to understand others, and mostly ourselves. Telling stories is a very common pastime in my family (both immediate and extended). There are some great storytellers among them that capture their audience with exhilarating stories, and it is of no matter how often we have heard them. It is not so much the story per se, as the setting, the way the story is being told and the feelings that the storytellers convey that have an effect on the listener. Without being told to ‘laugh here’, ‘cry here’, or ‘be shocked here’ you use all of your sociocultural learned skills on picking up signs and identifiable markers.
I guess this inclination towards stories and narration in my family has been naturally conveyed into the wonderful world of literature for me. I feel at home in processing stories and using my skills to look at a text not as an inanimate object that is merely to be read or seen, but a living creation always up for interpretation and always experienced by the next listener/reader in line.
Newly acquired books
I was in Gothenburg from Wednesday to Friday to visit my sister and her boyfriend with my mother. It was great fun, although I missed my weekly food club (major bummer)!!
On Friday we went to a district called Haga and there were so many charming little streets, with so many adorable little shops and cute little café’s, that I would gladly recommend it to anyone going to Gothenburg. It’s worth the stroll and luckily for us it was hot, hot, hot. So we sat outside Jacob’s eating white chocolate cheesecake with mango sauce and drinking latte’s, enjoying the sun. And afterwards we went into Clara bookstore to browse through Mucha posters and English classic literature. We also went through tea shops and gadgets shops and antique shops and in every little shop there were smiles and greetings. Truly a happy-go-lucky day (or as they say in Danish – lalleglad) 🙂
When me and my mom went back to Copenhagen my bags were filled with newly acquired stuff – a handbag and a dress from Indiska, a ‘The Bitch Is Sleeping’-mask for my beau who hates my intensively used night-light, but most importantly 5 books in Swedish by different authors and nationalities. And when I got home, sweet little Herta Müller was in my mailbox awaiting my return… well, her book ‘Der Mensch ist ein grosser Fasan auf der Welt’, was in my mailbox. But she is welcome to it any day.
Books in Swedish (and one in German)
I am starting to look incredibly much forward to summer holidays where I can fall off the planet with my books and a steaming jug of java.
I wish you all a good Saturday, happy trails.
Whatever happened to good old fashioned tennis rackets?
The other day I got the urge to learn to play tennis. There are some tennis courts close to my home so this means all I need is a tennis racket. So what do I do? I go online and on to a search-and-compare site to find tennis rackets. I type in tennis racket, click go, and…. I don’t know, maybe I am a bit naive, but when I think tennis racket I actually think about the bat with the oval frame strung with nylon which is used in the physical, outdoorsy sports activity. What I found was a bunch of Wii and Playstation games with accessories, and a couple of designer tennis socks. But then again, why on earth go online when you have a sport shop specializing in sporting equipment 2 streets away? What’s with the lack of common sense (read laziness)?
Stille dager i Mixing Part
Erlend Loe - Stille dage i Mixing Part
I was reading Erlend Loe’s latest novel ‘Stille dage i Mixing Part’ (Quiet days in Mixing Part) when this thought sprung up on me again. In one of the first pages is printed the exchange between two parties (a norwegian woman, and a German couple with a house for rent). Now, the town in which the German couple live in is called Garmisch-Partenkirchen and, due to the lack of English skills by the German couple, they run it through a translation program into English, and the town ends up being called Mixing Part. Being that English is not a force with the elder generation of the German-speaking population, this passage is funny in an ‘aw’-kind of way. The fact that blind trust is being put into a translation engine just says it all about our relationship to these new devices. We often forget to reflect and keep a critical sense when we get dazzled. Not that it is a decidedly bad thing, I mean, why not Mixing Part? Common sense out the window or laziness?
The novel is narrated from Bror Telemann’s point of view (Telemann for short) and with a massive amount of the novel riding on dialogue the reader has much more room to imagine scenes and expressions. Basically the couple are having a marital crisis which they resolve one summer holiday in Germany (kids and all) by having affairs, one at a physical level and one on a (slightly disturbed) emotional level. It is so clear through the dialogue that this couple have been at a stand still for too long, their conversations are bland and their outbursts are not really outbursts. The famous mid-life crisis label could easily be put on Telemann, but for the fact that I don’t get the feeling he is consciously unhappy in his life, he seems more out of sync with his life. His greatest passions in life are theater and Nigella (the sensuous chef) concocted by, and played with in his fantasy. His obsession with seeing everything as theater distances him away from his family and reality to a point where he is up shit’s creek with only a toothbrush (you will get this if/WHEN you read the book, believe me it’s funny and gross).
Telemann is also a kind of ‘I’m more intellectual than thou’ type of person, which makes his nonsense and actions even more hilarious. Your everyday non-hero with a side order of unreliable narrator. It’s like Loe wanted to give the stuck-up a beat-up. And he does it so well 😀
Herbjørg Wassmo II
Herbjørg Wassmo is an interesting lady. She says stuff like: ‘God bless birth control, study loans and the washing machine.’ And she laughs with a charming tickle in her voice, the kind that makes you laugh whether you want it or not. But the most interesting thing about her is her presence. She is the kind of woman you would have anxiety attacks approaching (I did). It’s not due to the fact that she is famous, but because of the ‘can’t-put-my-finger-on-it’ blend of experienced elder and rebellious child.
The dialogue between her and Anette Dina Sørensen, apart from a few cross-linguistic hiccups, was affable. And as an extra titbit the actor Karin Bang Heinemeier read passages from Wassmo’s latest book. She talked about children, being a child and emphasized quite a few times the importance of individuality. How the family quite often was the first assault an individual had to relate itself to, assault both as a physical and psychological entity.
Hundrede År - Herbjørg Wassmo
She also stressed how important it was for a mother to be able to step out of the glorified role of Motherhood, and escape the pedestal she was placed on. Accepting your mother, sister, aunt as an individual first and foremost would only be of gain to yourself and to them. And through the passages that were read to us, I got a sense of just how much the individual meant to her. How does a person, a writer, describe another person, or for that matter herself? Is it possible even to capture Individuality when you are mediating thoughts, actions and feelings of someone you have conjured up?
This makes me think about Roland Barthes’ claim that the author is dead, that she/he is of no importance to the work, the key to it is language and the one with the key is the reader.
I imagine Wassmo can concur with this. At one point Anette Sørensen talks about a passage in the book where the pastor and one of the leading women (both married to other people) are in the church, and Sørensen reads it as they are having sex. Wassmo (with a chuckle that makes the whole house smile) says that this is entirely up to her, she has not explicitly written this but laid heavy emphasis on the passion which doesn’t necessarily leads to the physical act of sex. And then says, that when the book is out there, it is out of her hands. She has no ownership of it.
It is interesting though, because she has not completely given her writing up to others without feeling that the work reflects her, and so that it is part of her. With the exception of this one (so she said) she has always felt angst when releasing a book. What would people think, say? And so maybe this latest book is like catharsis for her.
I would recommend reading something of Wassmo, and as one man in the audience said, ‘if you know Norwegian, do yourself a favor and read it in its mother tongue so you get the scent of local dialects too.’
Happy reading.
Herbjørg Wassmo
Herbjørg Wassmo - The picture is from The Royal Library, www.kb.dk
I remember reading about a girl, Tora, who lives in a small, shabby island community in the northern part of Norway with her mother and stepfather in the 1950’s. She is a ‘tyskerunge’ and this has great consequence for her. The hatred towards Germany is great after WWII, and any sign left of the occupation is unwelcome. Tora is bullied, her stepfather abuses her and her mother is struggling with herself and survival. Tora must find ways to survive or get by in life in spite of the adversity.
It was one of my favorite books growing up. I was intrigued by this term and what lay behind it. It was also another entry point to WWII, which I had knowledge of as a war, but not so much what kind of consequences faced a big part of the world both during and after.
Later on, Wassmo wrote about Dina, which was so popular it was made into a movie called ‘I am Dina’. And now Wassmo is out with ‘Hundre år’ (A hundred years). She joins the ranks of novel writers exploring the generational tale with the recount of the women in her family. The book is definitely on my to-buy list, maybe I’ll even go nuts tonight and buy it in the bookstore and get it autographed 🙂
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