Scando Lit: search

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.