Scando Lit: search

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(also finland not a scando nation)

*removes pedant's hat*

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

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

(also finland not a scando nation)

*removes pedant's hat*

She wrote in Swedish though.

*replaces pedant's hat*

lol excellent point

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

(finland is a scando nation)

ssonned in a baltic beef

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

Danish expansionism.

Swedish

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

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

Danes don't do irony, obviously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i love this thread

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

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

That's terrific news re: Solstad

It is.

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

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

Why are awful people writing about Dag Solstad:

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

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

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