The Optimists Play Volleyball

Many wonderful films last week at Seattle's Nordic Lights film festival, but the clear winner for most delightful (and inspiring) was The Optimists, about a team of strong, funny, endearing Norwegian women, aged 66-98, who play volleyball and are about to embark on their first match with a Swedish men's team. The director is the talented Gunhild Westhagen Magnor.

Here's a great clip of the trailer:

Nordic Lights Film Festival in Seattle

8 Seasons, a Sami Short Film

 
January lights up next week with films from the Nordic countries at the annual festival held at Seattle Center and sponsored by the Nordic Heritage Museum and the Seattle Film Festival. This year I'll be seeing the always amazing Sami Shorts, on Sunday Jan 18 at noon.

I'm also looking forward to the Norwegian documentary, The Optimists, "a moving, humorous and absorbing documentary film about an extraordinary volleyball team in Hamar town, consisting of ladies between 66 and 98 years of age."

I worked in Hamar once for a few months, living with a wonderful family. I can't wait to see this one.

 

The Reindeer of St. Matthew Island

St Matthew Island is a comic strip by the Australian cartoonist Stuart McMillen. Based on a true story, it describes what happened when 29 reindeer were introduced to the eponymous island in the Bering Sea in 1944. With an absence of predators and plenty of food, life was good for the animals and they bred rapidly. Until 1966, that is, when their population fell from around 6,000 to just 42.

This story comes by way of most recent issue of the e-journal, The Island Review
which always has something interesting, remarkable, or unexpected.

Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses: an anthology about the Stieg Larsson trilogy

I confess I haven't read this anthology, edited by Donna King and Carrie Lee Smith (published by Vanderbilt University Press in 2012), but I couldn't resist the title. A critical summary of the book appeared in the most recent issue of the journal Scandinavian Studies, considerably spicing up the review section and asking some interesting questions about feminism and crime in Scandinavia. About Stieg Larsson I assume I need to say very little, except that in Swedish the title of his first book was Men Who Hate Women. It became The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in the English translation.

Less provocative, but closer to my own heart, was a very encouraging review of With the Lapps in the High Mountains, written by Tim Frandy, a scholar whose work on the Sami I respect. He calls the translation "an elegantly written ethnographic narrative" by Emilie Demant Hatt.

Norwegian Novelist Helene Uri Explores Sami Roots

Helene Uri’s 2013 novel Rydde ut [Clearing Out] begins twice. First, on a lonely marsh in Finnmark, Norway, with the character Ellinor stepping from tussock to tussock, turning to hear a man calling her and moving toward him—walking past the author without stopping or seeing her.

Then, in chapter two, the novel begins again: with a woman telling us about her father and what she knows about him—very little in fact. This father will turn out to have been the grandson of a sjø Sami, a coastal Sami, from northern Norway, or Sápmi.

Helene Uri, Norwegian Novelist

The first-person narrator is a middle-aged novelist, also called Helene, with two daughters and a husband, living in a comfortable flat in Oslo. Her father is long dead; her mother aging. Helene is about to begin a new novel and is searching for a protagonist. She will be called Ellinor, Helene decides; she’s an academic, without a settled job, a linguist with an interest in dead and dying languages. In her late thirties, Ellinor is painfully divorced, for reasons as yet unknown to her creator Helene, but that have something to do with the fact she wasn’t willing and then not able to bear a child. Ellinor has no mother, but a father, who, like Helene’s mother, is traveling into old age.

This postmodern premise is familiar from contemporary fiction. Novelists as disparate as Philip Roth, Ruth Ozecki, and Karl Ove Knausgaard have taken to employing not just a lightly fictionalized “I,” but to writing characters who have the same name and many of the same outer circumstances and inner characteristics as their creator. This doubleness is not exact and is always partial. In Rydde ut we can’t be sure that Helene the fictional novelist is completely the same as Helene Uri, who, like Ellinor, studied linguistics and has a doctorate in the subject from the University of Oslo.

Ellinor is a character with both firm and flexible attributes who shapes herself before our eyes and is given a history that helps set her story in motion, but remains resistant at times to Helene’s molding of her personality and her fate. As writer, I was fascinated by the push and pull of Ellinor and Helene’s stories: intertwining, paralleling, and conflicting. As a reader, I found myself drawn into Ellinor’s story in particular, giving myself over to the fictional experience—as if she were “a real person,” whose loneliness, loss, and awakening touched me deeply. I trust Helene and I care about her story as well, but I worried less about her—she is, we know, successful and loved, even though she too will suffer losses in the course of the novel—losses that in fact may well be more true than Ellinor’s.

One of the things that sets this novel apart from most Norwegian fiction is the inclusion of Sami history and Sami characters, not just as window dressing but an integral part of the narrative. As Helene begins to contemplate her fictional character Ellinor, trying to give her a project to work on and destination for the journey she’ll make, Helene receives a call from a woman who says she’s a relative living near the far northern town of Hammerfest. Through contact with this relative and her own research, Helene tentatively realizes that her grandfather, Nicolai Nilsen, was half Sami, listed in official documents as blandet, or mixed race. His father was a coastal Sami fisherman. Helene had thought her family background settled—she believed they all came from  southern and western Norway. Uncertain how to weave this new knowledge into who she believes she is, Helene chooses an alternate route. She sends her character Ellinor up to an unnamed town in Finnmark, during the dark time, with a research project: to interview and survey the Sami families there and to understand the ways in which they have retained or lost the Sami language. In the process Ellinor slowly makes friends with Anna, an elderly Sami woman, and Kåre, a Sami man with whom she’ll have more than a friendship.

Anna and Kåre are fully realized characters, intelligent, complex, and generous individuals—far from the stereotyped Sami figures that have appeared on the margins of Norwegian literature for two centuries. Ellinor’s relationships with them add depth to the story, and Anna and Kåre’s irony and insight also intensify the themes of historical displacement, political conflict, and renewed interest in Sami culture (Anna was and is an activist and Kåre’s grown children take pride in their Sami background). The novel also casts a welcome light on the coastal Sami society of Finnmark.

The sjø Sami aren’t the reindeer herders of fairy tales and history and have often been neglected in research and popular imagery. Their ancestors have been there for millennia; they were sighted by sea travelers as far back as the ninth century. Fishers and boat builders (they constructed many of the Viking long ships, it’s thought), they also carried on trapping and hunting, which eventually led to domesticating reindeer. As colonization took hold along the coasts of Norway, many Sami moved inland, but others co-existed with Norwegians and Finns while still keeping their separate language and traditions. However, “Norwegianization” policies regarding education, citizenship, and rights to territory and resources made conditions for the Sami people increasingly more difficult and many dropped their identity or moved away. Thousands emigrated to North America in order to escape stigmatization and make new lives for themselves. During the last stages of World War II many towns and farms in Northern Norway and Finland were destroyed in a scorched-earth retreat. The Sami, particularly in Norway, were pressured into ever greater assimilation or isolation; it’s no surprise that many abandoned the Sami language or didn’t teach it to their children. Often children were sent to boarding schools where only Norwegian was spoken.

Rydde ut isn’t a historical novel, but the events above and their consequences form the backdrop to the parallel stories. Helene’s grandfather Nicolai was one of those young people from the turn of the century who was sent to a boarding school and then emigrated briefly to North America; he returned to southern Norway to study engineering, marry, and raise a family. He spoke little about his past and he never mentioned to his relatives that he was half Sami. Ellinor’s story, set in the present, shows her ignorance in first arriving up north about Sami history and language, and her gradual acclimatization to the rich meaning of past culture and the stirrings of renewed Sami pride. Not that the novel ever stoops to rhetoric; the Sami themes are handled with some subtlety, and the Sami themselves give voice to their own resistance, resignation, pride, and the irony so characteristic of their society.

This novel works on many levels as it deftly moves back and forth through place and time. Both Ellinor and Helene experience deaths and are forced into the role of children dealing with the accumulated possessions of their parents. Hence the term “rydde ut,” which in its most direct translation means “clear out.” But the term can also has more sinister, active meanings: “utrydde” means “eliminate, eradicate, obliterate, wipe out, exterminate, kill off.” An “utryddet språk” is a language threatened with extinction.

There are nine or ten Sami languages in the territory of Sápmi, several of which are not in popular use. The one that Ellinor is pursuing in Northern Norway is North Sami, which has the most speakers. It is threatened but also protected in Norway and Sweden. Over the last decades new elementary schools have been created and numerous programs exist to help save and promote the language. For many older Sami it’s too late; while socially Sami, the language they were never taught or heard only from their grandparents has indeed been eliminated. Ellinor, as a linguist, has much of interest to say about dying and dead languages from around the world; but until she comes north to Sápmi and engages with the men and women who speak or don’t speak Sami, who remember when they stopped or why they never started speaking Sami, Ellinor doesn’t fully engage with the pain of language loss. Helene, as Ellinor’s creator, who is herself as it turns out, related to people in and near Hammerfest who also share the same heritage, is not unlike others in Norway with a forgotten or suppressed heritage.

Beautifully constructed, Rydde ut is both a clearing out and a gathering together of strands from Norway’s past history and current preoccupations. For many Norwegians, their far north is a strange country, a distant land of colonization and resistance, a frontier of exploration and recovery. In this novel Helene Uri bravely takes a step toward acknowledging what has been lost of language and memory, as well as what can be recovered and remembered.

Helene Uri has a website, with a Wikipedia page in English and a more substantial entry in Norwegian. An interview with her in Norwegian in Dagsavisen from 2013 gives more background on her discovery of her family’s roots in Finnmark and how she used that information in her novel.

Slowly Reading Knausgaard: My Struggle

It was toward the end of the second volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s opus, My Struggle: A Man in Love, that I noticed something strange on my Nook e-reader. Instead of turning at their usual lightening speed, the pages were slowing down. I tapped the lower right-hand corner as vigorously as I could; still, each page stayed stuck for a good ten seconds before moving forward. As any sentient person knows, electronic time is not like ordinary time, say, when you are sitting in your backyard watching the birds at the feeder or talking with a friend over dinner. Waiting for anything to appear online or on a screen is nearly unbearable, even when that wait time is just a few seconds longer than usual.

I’d read the first book of the series in print (also in the English translation) and when I put it down, after the long, visceral, and grueling description of Karl Ove’s father’s death and the horrible state of the family house afterwards, I thought, Okay, it’s a fascinating project and I’m interested in Knausgaard for so many reasons, including why and how his book has become such a phenomenon to people don’t know Norwegian and Swedish culture, but I don’t think I’ll be reading the second book anytime soon.  I felt wrung out and vaguely ill.

Then, late one night a couple of months ago, a kind of Knausgaardian feeling began to come over me, a curiosity about what he might do next. A yearning to be in his world again, to see him smoking outside his apartment building, changing nappies, walking around Stockholm and buying expensive second-hand books, talking with his friend Geir and his current wife Linda. What ever happened with his first wife? And how did he end up in Sweden?

I called up him on the Nook.

I don’t read regularly on my Nook Simple Touch, which I bought a few years ago in protest against the Kindle, but there are many things I love about e-reading. One is the opportunity to read lots of samples, sometimes a good thirty pages, of all kinds of books. This is a brilliant way of getting a feel for all the works of an author and for exploring work by writers I’m unfamiliar with. I don’t buy a huge number of e-books, but I do buy some every month, along with going to the library and continuing to shop at independent local bookstores.

I hit “buy” on My Struggle: A Man in Love that evening and for a few days I read, enthralled and vaguely uneasy, trying to pin down what makes him so readable. For me there’s some nostalgia and recognition at many of the places he describes. I lived and worked in Norway in the early 1970s and returned frequently for long stays after that. I’d once had a friend in Knausgaard’s hometown of Arendal and I know the beauty and loneliness of Southern Norway’s rocky coasts and beaches. I also recall the tedium and narrowness of small-town Norway. I knew the Bergen of the 1980s, too; I had younger friends, Bjørn and Ida, who used to go to Hulen, the club Knausgaard mentions during his university years. As for Stockholm, over the last ten years I’ve been there often; I’ve know those Östermalm streets and I’ve seen those men with baby carriages (maybe I even saw Karl Ove?). Last March in Stockholm I went to the cafe Blå Porten with my friend Hugh and to Zita Bar with Eva; both locales turn up in My Struggle: A Man in Love. (Eva, like others I know in Sweden, assured me that she doesn’t have the patience to sit around reading Knausgaard.)

So there’s the familiarity, the recognition, and also for me the curiosity of reading about a Norwegian in Sweden, uncomfortable at Swedish collectivity, worried about Swedish gender roles and his sense of not belonging. He illuminates something for me, as an outsider who translates, researches, and has good friends in both countries, about what it feels like to be Norwegian, to live in Sweden.

Knausgaard’s writing is sometimes lyrical, sometimes ordinary, and his philosophic and literary ideas often strike me as half-baked. His identification with the great man, nonconformist truth-teller thread in Norwegian literature is vaguely clichéd and self-aggrandizing––Ibsen, Hamsun, and Hauge are among his chosen fathers. One could add Strindberg, too, who also minutely examined his soul in countless works of fiction and autobiography.

Knausgaard gives a nod to older contemporaries, Dag Solstad and Kjartan Fløgstad, important male Norwegian authors he measures himself against; otherwise he’s dismissive of most Scandinavian writers, softened by modern socialism and somehow feminized and coopted by the easy life that popular writers have in Scandinavia. You wouldn’t be getting a good idea, if you only read Knausgaard, that there are significant women authors in Scandinavia and that historically they’ve had much to say about marriage, patriarchy, and unheroic daily life.

My good friend Katherine Hanson, who did her dissertation on the poet Olav M. Hauge, has immersed herself for many years as a translator and commentator on the work of the bold and incisive nineteenth-century writer Amalie Skram. If you want to talk about a writer colliding with social norms, talk about Skram, whose husband put her in an insane asylum, or Norwegian Gerd Brantenberg, whose witty novel from the 1980s, Egalia’s Daughters, sends up gender roles in an imaginary world where women have all the power and men have none. There seem to be no gay or feminist writers, no immigrant voices in Knausgaard’s literary world. His views of Scandinavian literature are weakened by this absence.

All the same, his way of seeing the world and his constructed appearance of honesty and self-revelation are compelling, I can’t deny it. Boring sometimes, but compelling and often memorable. As a reader I can’t help feel the imprint of his sensibility and the rhythm of the words getting under my skin. I engage with him. I engage deeply and sometimes I go back and reread passages, or linger on scenes, or feel I am lingering, because Knausgaard himself is loitering so distinctly on the page. It may not be Proustian (the writing is not often as beautiful as Proust’s), but there is a kind of attentiveness to daily life and its ordinary events that captures the sense of suspended time, a present moment in which other past times exist, in which childhood is conjured up from smells and tastes.

Perhaps it was because of all this Knausgaardian lingering and loitering in My Struggle: A Man in Love that at first I hardly noticed that the pages of my Nook had slowed so noticeably, and that the story or the description took so long to progress, but instead hovered in its digital shimmer longer than normal before moving on, as if in a kind of suspended time.

But at one point, shortly after the scene where the narrator’s cell phone is knocked from his hand on a Stockholm subway platform and seems to fly into a woman’s open purse—a scene that actually did arouse some curiosity on my part as to what happened next—the pages turned no more. I could go back to the beginning and move forward and back, but around page 380, a barrier went up, and all I could get from Nook was an error message, one I’d never encountered before: “Activity Reader is not responding. Wait or force close.”

Waiting was no use, nor were repetitive actions, nor turning the Nook on and off. I began to realize that the problem could be in the e-book itself.

Thus began a correspondence with B&N’s Customer Service over the next three weeks. As with most online businesses that make it incredibly simple to buy things and so complicated to get help should anything go awry, I spent a long time looking for the right contact information. I was oddly thrilled when I got a response the next day that showed I wasn’t just imagining things:

Thank you for contacting Barnes and Noble. We understand that "My Struggle, Book Two: A Man in Love" is showing an error message "Activity Reader is not responding. Wait or Force close". We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

We have downloaded the same title on our NOOK Simple Touch, and we got the same issue. Thanks for letting us know.

This eBook was not formatted correctly. We will forward this to our NOOK Content Management Team for revision. This will take 1 to 2 weeks to be corrected. You will receive an email stating that the necessary corrections have been applied.

Isaac

Of course, having been validated so thoroughly, I thought that I would actually receive an email in a week or two; why shouldn’t I believe “Isaac”? But two weeks passed and no email arrived stating that the necessary corrections had been applied. Once or twice I check my e-copy; no, things still came to a grinding halt around page 380. I grew impatient. Surely, with Knausgaard’s importance, other readers must have had this problem? Was this a sign that I was the only person left reading a Nook not a Kindle? Wouldn’t Farrar Straus like to know that eager Knausgaardians had met an error message?

The response to my follow-up inquiry was friendly but of course by someone other than “Isaac.” “Marie” didn’t believe I had a problem. She’d looked at My Struggle: A Man in Love on her company Nook and the pages turned just fine. Obviously she hadn’t gotten up to page 380. Maybe that was true of other readers as well?

So I asked for a refund. And received a lovely letter from “Mickey.”

Warm greetings from Barnes & Noble!

I understand that you would like to get a refund on the eBook entitled "My Struggle, Book Two" that is still having an error after downloading it on your account even though you were informed that the eBook has already been fixed. On behalf of Barnes & Noble, please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Since you're one of our valued customers, as you requested, we are issuing a refund to your credit card with the amount of $10.89.

Should you have any further concern, please do not hesitate to email us back and we would be grateful to assist you.

I hope that, I was able to address your concern accordingly. It is my great honor and privilege to assist you with this concern.

Take care and enjoy the rest of the day!

Clearly “Mickey” was not a native English speaker, but he was very close. What gave him away was a slight floweriness, a concern for my welfare. And how kind that he offered to address my concern accordingly, that it was an honor and privilege to assist me.

After my refund, the copy I had of My Struggle: A Man in Love swiftly vanished from my Nook library. After some thought I decided to give it another try and ordered a new copy—how simple that always is on the Simple Touch: “Buy. Confirm.” But sadly this copy had the exact same problems as the earlier one: a slowing down, followed by a refusal to budge, and an error message.

I wrote again to Barnes and Noble, complaining mildly, and asked for another refund. Again, a kind reply came back the next morning from “Arren.”

Thank you for writing to us, and we hope you are doing great today. We can certainly understand your frustration because you ordered My Struggle, Book Two: A Man in Love again, but you still encountered the same issue, and you would like to be refunded.

This missed opportunity to give you an enjoyable experience with B&N is something that we could never abide by. As a result of the issue you have recently encountered, and in order to prevent this from happening to you and other customers in the future, we are investigating issues more often and new procedures are being put in place. 

I love this letter about B&N’s missed opportunity to give me an enjoyable experience even though, forgive me, I harbor doubts about new procedures being put in place. Still, I wanted to reassure “Arren” that in the scheme of world events and life’s disappointments, it’s not the worse experience I’ve ever had. I have trouble sustaining the pose of entitled consumer and am easily placated by a refund. I wanted to tell him that in a strange way, the slowing of Knausgaard made sense to me, and that it illustrated, unintendedly, all that was most Knausgaardian about modern life and its peculiar irritations, as well as giving me a sense of suspended time, a yearning to know the future while stuck in the present.

The truth is I had quite liked my correspondence with B&N. The opportunity for enjoyment was not missed at all. The gracious tone of their emails with their hint of Google Translator was so different from what I usually find in my inbox that I delighted in them.

All the same, that very same day I went to my local library and just checked out My Struggle: A Man in Love. And very soon I knew what had happened to that cell phone that went flying out of Karl Ove’s hand.

The Art of Recalling: Art Essay in New Issue of Feminist Studies

The most recent issue of the well-respected and long-lived journal Feminist Studies has just been published and my essay about the artists Emilie Demant Hatt and Johan Turi is included. "The Art of Recalling," illustrated by works in oil and on paper by Turi and Demant Hatt, considers the effect that Turi’s drawings for his book Muitalus samiid birra had on Demant Hatt’s own artistic career as an expressionist painter. 

I've been studying Demant Hatt's life and art a good long while, but it was only when I read Harald Gaski's insightful essay, More than Meets the Eye, a couple of years ago in Scandinavian Studies that I began thinking about the ways in which Demant Hatt and Turi had a reciprocal artist partnership as well as an ethnographic collaboration.

The designer has used the same painting of the ice bridge that the University of Wisconsin Press put on the cover of With the Lapps in the High Mountains: A Woman Among the Sami 1907-8, my translation of Demant Hatt's travel ethnography of her time in Lapland. The imagery of the reindeer going up the mountain  can now be compared with Turi's drawings inside, which also show simplified figures of reindeer ascending and descending the mountains.