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Book Reviews

27 February 2010

Together with the quaint aesthetics of the Scandinavian countryside, this socialist backdrop is precisely what makes the genre work. It’s shocking enough when a bloated corpse turns up floating in Stockholm’s pristine, well-managed waterways or when a serial killer disrupts the huddles of little red cottages that dot the Swedish countryside. More…

Last Friday morning, the world turned its gaze toward Norway, the narrow, fjord-fringed country that Americans associate with all things un-American: a comprehensive cradle-to-grave welfare program; a devotion to universalistic foreign policy and international philanthropy; a taste for rotten fish and bitter aquavit. More…

The stated purpose of Hamsun 2009, in the stilted, bureaucratic syntax of the jubilee year’s website, is “to care for, make visible, and utilize” Hamsun’s legacy, “complicated” as it may be. On the 57th anniversary of Hamsun’s death, I joined several hundred very cold Norwegians in the gray afternoon outside the granite portico of the National Theater for the mission statement’s first enactment. More…