Lists

Chad Post, writing at Three Percent about selection bias in lists of 'best translations' (“It’s like record shop employees telling you what’s cool.” [Tom Roberge]):

So, as a list-maker, you have the non-genre specific, gigantic works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, even Nabokov and Camus on one hand, and the mostly contemporary crime-fiction writing by women on the other. This is not a good mixture.

Hat tip: Ian Giles

A View of the Kingdom

Nauja Lynge: Ivalu's Color, IPI, 223pp.

Nauja Lynge’s novel is something of a mixed bag: on one level it’s an intervention in the Danish policy debate on Greenland’s status and its exposure to big-power politics, connected with the increased interest in the Arctic region on the part of China and Russia, the Arctic ice-melt due to climate change, the issues surrounding uranium extraction and the approaching reality of Greenlandic independence.  On another it’s a crime story about a trial, an abduction, a case of espionage and a triple murder. The two narratives sit somewhat uneasily beside each other. In their course, however, the reader learns a great about Greenland, its people and history – and in a sense the book is saved from its weaknesses by the tenacity and passionate engagement of its author, whose own experience lies transparently in the background of this autobiographical work.

Perhaps what comes through most clearly from the occasional confusion is Nauja Lynge’s own message: she appeals to Denmark and the Danish people to take more interest in their former colony, and to accept their share of the responsibility for Greenland’s past, present and future, which are inextricably linked. In this, the Danish Realm, the rigsfælleskab of Denmark, Faroes and Greenland – has a vital role to play. Although Greenland left the European Union more than 30 years ago, it needs to consider the consequences of isolation. For if the present vacuum in the Arctic is not filled by a Western presence, it will be occupied by Russia and China, who are waiting in the wings to move into a region they see as ripe for economic, military and scientific development:

Chinese morals and values lie far from Danish values. So when Greenland allies with China and Russia, it positions China as a hostile nation with low morals, which wedges itself into the Kingdom.

It would be interesting to read the original Danish-language version of this book, but it was not available. The English version of the book is not a translation: it's an adaptation, a retelling of the story, with elements of public debate inserted into the story in a way that is at times perplexingly uneven. Throughout, the style is a blend of journalism and crime fiction writing. In the first 90 pages or so the English is distinctly wobbly, with passages that need further editing. Thereafter, however, the style and grammar improve quite a bit, and by the end of the novel – or documentary narrative – the reader feels much more at home, with a sense above all of having learned something.

See also in this blog: Ivalu's Color

Darkness at noon

In the Observer, Andrew Anthony discusses the case of a retired Swedish police chief, Göran Lindberg, who last week was jailed for rape and assault.

In the course of the article he also interviews some Swedish writers and commentators who have some harsh things to say about their native country. Their views on the apparent agenda of left-wing Swedish crime authors are particularly noteworthy:

"I have always been suspicious and critical about people like Mankell and Larsson," says Lars Linder, "because I'm not a fan of this conspiracy theory. I'm an old leftist too, but I don't like when they pick out the old social democratic Sweden as paradise, and now the bad guys have taken over with all their hidden connections. It's simplistic and nostalgic. The kind of power abuse you see with Lindberg is much more interesting."

Mankell may bar Hebrew translations of his books

Via Ynetnews:

Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell may prohibit the translation of his popular books into Hebrew after the Israeli attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, he said in an interview published on Thursday.
"I am a best-selling author in Israel and I must consider seriously whether I should block my books from being translated to Hebrew," the author of the popular Wallander series of detective novels told daily Dagens Nyheter

To me there's something wrong about this,but I can't put my finger to it...

Mankell missing

The present status and whereabouts of Henning Mankell, the 62-year-old Swedish author of detective thrillers, are "unknown", according to The Local. Mankell earlier set off from Cyprus with the Gaza "peace flotilla": 

"I think that when one talks about solidarity, one must always know that actions are what proves destiny," he told Sveriges Radio last Thursday.

Shady characters? - 2

Yet another example of how Finland and its complex history get distorted in the eyes and minds of Finland's Nordic neighbours. From The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo:

How well do you know the history of Swedish Nazism?”

“I’m no historian, but I’ve read a few books.”

“In 1939 the Second World War began, and in 1940 the Winter War in Finland. A large number of the Lindholm movement joined as Finland volunteers. Richard was one of them and by then a captain in the Swedish army. He was killed in February 1940 — just before the peace treaty with the Soviet Union — and thereby became a martyr in the Nazi movement and had a battle group named after him. Even now a handful of idiots gather at a cemetery in Stockholm on the anniversary of his death to honour him.”

See also: Shady characters?

More crime - 2

A few signs of what may be a slight change in the attitudes of some SELTA members to the issue of the current dominance of crime writing in the Nordic – and particularly the Swedish – book world, and in translation. One U.K.-based member writes of the present vogue:

I would guess that Swedish "culture" has never had such widespread
coverage in this country ever before.

And the next issue of Swedish Book Review will apparently contain an article on this thorny subject.

See also: More crime

Shady characters?

In HUB - the magazine of Helsinki University - Janna Kantola takes a look at how Finns are portrayed in foreign literature. Starting with Tacitus, the profile of Finns is an obscure one, to say the least (Tacitus appears to have thought that Finns and Lapps were the same), and their image in 19th century Russian literature is also quite a shadowy one. But it's not until we reach the modern era, and especially the era of the thriller, that the picture begins to clarify, and not always in a positive direction:. in particular, it seems that Finns are not liked by their Nordic neighbours, and have reason to feel insulted:

The Finnish characters appearing in Nordic literature are in a class of their own. Finns are primarily drunkards and on the wrong side of the law.

The shady characters in Stieg Larsson's recent Millennium series of detective stories frequently have Finnish names. In the series, the heroine, Lisbeth Salander, finds herself being chased by characters such as the simple duo of Sonny Nieminen and Hans-Åke Waltari.

Read it all.

Hat tip: Soila Lehtonen

More crime

Back again - to find among the mail on my doormat an invitation to yet another Nordic crime novel-related event. This time it's a literary function at the residence of Sweden's UK ambassador, to which members of the translators' association SELTA  are automatically invited as part of their membership. My address on the envelope, after my name, begins with "SELTA", as if SELTA were housed at my home, which it's not - I'm just an ordinary member.

The evening, to be held on March 18, is called "Crimes of the Millennium - Stieg Larsson and the rise of Swedish Mystery Fiction", with Barry Forshaw, Eva Gedin, Lynda La Plante, Mark Lawson (chair) and Håkan Nesser.

Readers who've followed this blog over the past year will know that I'm not a fan of this form of fiction, and believe that the "Nordic Crime Wave" is likely to have negative consequences for the chances of non-mass-market Nordic literature in translation, which is steadily being crowded out of the picture by the serried ranks of detectives. It seems perverse of the Swedish embassy to be hosting this event - in effect, raising the profile of Mystery Fiction (an elevated name for thrillers) still further when really it needs no more raising. Is it churlish of me to react in this way?

The irresistible call of Scandiwegian crime

London's Mayor Boris Johnson explains in his Telegraph column why the British are so fond of Nordic crime novels:

It's like our joy in the Iris Robinson story. We wouldn't be so thrilled to discover her in bed with a 19 year-old if she hadn't spent all those years ranting drearily on about family values. Nordic crime writers profit from the fact that the blood is all the more vivid on the snow, the corpse more horrifying on the swish hygienic IKEA furniture. Scandinavia is still a mental landscape where crime is shocking, and that is a great compliment to Scandinavia.

Cold comfort

Swedish crime fiction is very popular in Germany, but it's not so often that German crime fiction is translated into Swedish. Reviewing the third of three recent translations of detective novels by Andrea Maria Schenkel – the three books constitute Schenkel's entire output so far – Bodil Zalesky notes a disturbing trend:

The voices of the main characters are almost completely interchangeable and shorn of identity, which gives me as a reader a sense of discomfort. Perhaps this is the author's intention, and it contributes to the cold undercurrent that persists throughout the book.

Nordic fingerprints

Reviewing Don Bartlett's translation of The Consorts of Death (Dødens drabanter), the thirteenth of Gunnar Staalesen's sixteen Varg Veum novels, in the Independent last month, Tone Sutterud relayed the news that Arcadia Books intend to publish all sixteen novels in English. This is welcome news, although I wonder why it has taken so long for Staalesen's work to reach an English-speaking public, when other Nordic crime writers, several of them somewhat less talented than the pioneering and innovative Staalesen, have fared so comparatively well. I have to confess an interest here: back in 1985 I translated an earlier novel in the Varg Veum series - At Night All Wolves Are Grey ( I mørket er alle ulver grå) - which attracted some favourable reviews in the British press, but  is now, more than two decades later, out of print.

I'm still equivocal about the rise of Nordic crime fiction in the Anglo-U.S. publishers' lists. When so little serious Scandinavian new writing and poetry is published in English translation, it seems wrong that quite so much attention should be given to what's really, in spite of attempts to characterize it otherwise, an escapist entertainment genre.  Also, when raising this point, I've constantly been struck by the intensity of the negative reaction that usually follows. There's a defensiveness in the reaction which suggests that some of the more central issues concerning the crime genre and the effects of its popularity are being avoided, and I feel that there's a reluctance to discuss those issues in public (though much is said in private).

Finlandia candidates announced

The shortlist of candidates for this years 30,000 euro Finlandia Literary Prize has been announced (apparently leaked by Uusi Suomi a day early), Hbl reports, noting that Finland-Swedish author Merete Mazzarella's Ingen saknad, ingen sorg – En dag i Zacharias Topelius liv is present on the list in its Finnish translation (published by Tammi). The other candidates are:

Turkka Hautala -  Salo (Gummerus)
Kari Hotakainen Ihmisen osa (Gummerus)
Antti Hyry Uuni (Otava)
Marko Kilpi Kadotetut (Gummerus)
Tommi Melender Ranskalainen ystävä (WSOY)

In their statement, the members of the jury remark that many of the novels submitted for consideration this year show signs of the influence of the methods and conventions of the detective novel - even those which have little connection with the thriller genre. This is a tendency that has been pointed to on this blog more than once.

The prizewinner will be announced on December 2.

Literary Dialogues

Swedish Book Review has published an anthology called Literary Dialogues: Contenporary Swedish Writing in English, edited by Sarah Death and Neil Smith. The book contains an introduction by Sir Michael Holroyd, and the featured writers and poets include Johannes Anyuru, Marjaneh Bakhtiari, Henning Mankell and Eva Runefelt. Among the translators are Sarah Death, B. J. Epstein, Tom Geddes and Tiina Nunnally. Copies can presumably be ordered from Swedish Book Review - see their website, though there doesn't appear to be any mention of the anthology there yet.

Life is short

by Michel Ekman

I imagine a place of permanent, unspecific existence, a time without time, a limbo, a death without death’s finality and sharpness of definition, where the souls are stored away in an incomplete state of being that has no aim or meaning. It may be a veranda, but outside the windows no lilac bushes are visible, just an unbroken grey darkness.

And what do they do there, the souls? Well, they do crosswords, they play patience, they read detective novels. The boxes are constantly filled with words, the cards finally end up in four piles of equal size, the detective concludes by revealing to the surprised and slightly disappointed reader that it was actually the person who was murdered who committed the murder, even though everyone went on thinking the opposite for as long as possible.

Life is short and full of suffering, our bodies weigh us down to the earth, our routines clog our senses. The pull to escape from it all is almost irresistible. The crosswords, the games of patience and detective novels are of course very blameless and old-fashioned ways of doing so.

They stand vividly before me, a middle-aged man, because I remember an older generation which doggedly waited for death while occupied with these pastimes. But in them dwells the seed which – via the infinite number of television channels, computer games and the commercial music industry – has, in the wake of increased leisure time, turned the whole of life into a waiting for death. We have come many steps closer to what Elmer Diktonius put into words in one of  his aphorisms: “If the purpose of art were to anaesthetize, to make us forget life, then a hammer-blow to the skull would be the simplest art, and the best” – though perhaps not quite in the way that Diktonius meant.

But why do I dwell on detective novels in particular? Perhaps because texts are such a large part of my life, literary scholar that I am. Ever since I developed grown-up reading habits some thirty years ago, I have been sceptical about the plot, that two-stroke engine that will helpfully chop any mass of text at all into little pieces. True, there are also books that make even me turn the pages nervously and skip to the end. Joseph Skvorecky’s The Engineer of Human Souls was one such book, for example.

But on the whole it seems to me as though the plot, when it isn’t in the hands of the greatest masters, is a way of leading the reader past the text’s weaknesses, past the thin, in human terms uninteresting, linguistically mediocre by holding out the prospect of something more, something that will come later as long as one follows the sequence of events without stopping to think about that it is one’s reading right now. Rarely, rarely are those promises fulfilled – and even if they were to be fulfilled it would not be worth picking one’s way through the stereotyped masses of text just in order to be finally rewarded with a stereotyped surprise: the novel’s dénouement .

And what literary genre is more slavishly bound by the compulsion of plot than the detective story and the thriller? And as a result, more stereotyped in its particulars and its structure. The opera, of course – and one can only imagine the joy of seeing Tosca without music.

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

Detective Story - 4

Continuing the discussion of this thorny subject, I've raised two contributions from the comments to this post:

Larissa Kyzer said...

I wrote the article responding to Nathaniel Rich’s piece about Scandinavian crime fiction, and have followed the discussion here and in other blogs surrounding these pieces with interest. The debate over what country or region produces the ‘best’ of any type of literature is bound to be limited (I said as much in my article), but I find myself a bit at odds with the polarization here: those who are for Scandinavian crime fiction and those who are against it. I am deeply interested in Scandinavian literature--including crime fiction--and aspire to translate Danish literature myself one day. I’d hope that one can be a ‘committed’ translator and also foster an appreciation for genre fiction at the same time. (It’s seemed to me that many Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian fiction translators have translated both ‘literary’ and genre fiction.)

While many of the points made by David McDuff regarding crime fiction have raised some important and interesting points—particularly that current Scandinavian crime fiction marks a “continuation of the "radical" movement that produced the socially-committed novels and poetry of the 1970s,”—I wonder at the assessment that the prevalence of this genre within Scandinavian literature is “a tragedy whose consequences it will take several generations to overcome.”

It’s a common enough opinion that genre fiction of any stripe is inherently sub-literary, which is a debate that is perhaps larger than needs be argued here. Suffice to say that I do think that genre fiction merits serious literary consideration for its content, structure, and yes, even prose style. There are certainly many, many poorly written and conceived crime novels, but surely enough there are terrible ‘literary’ novels as well. However, I don't believe that the existence of crime novels can, with any credibility, be faulted with ‘diverting’ Nordic writing talent. Rather, I tend to hope that translation begets translation—that every new Henning Mankell or Karin Fossum novel that is published in English opens the door a little wider for more ‘literary’ Scandinavian authors to be translated as well.

David McDuff said...

Thank you for this contribution to the discussion. While I also don't think there should be a "polarization" of the kind you mention, I do believe that it's important to set some sort of markers as to what constitutes literary culture and what is basically just "reading entertainment". I'm certainly not against the latter, and have translated at least one Scandinavian crime novel myself - but when crime novels become the flagship of a nation's literary production, I think it's a danger signal.

In a later post to this blog, I've been more specific. There I argue (together with the author of the article quoted by the anonymous blogger at Scandinavian Crime Fiction), that of all the Nordic countries it's primarily Sweden where the problem is most acute - in Sweden there is virtually no middle ground between the marginalized avant-garde literary scene and the huge space that's occupied by bestsellerdom, led primarily by trend-following crime novels of various kinds and tendencies. The situation in Denmark is different, as is evidenced by the popularity of the traditional historical novel genre there, for example. Finland presents a similar picture.

So while the problem isn't yet universal, what I have tried to make clear is that it has the potential for a disaster, a tragedy - please read what I wrote in my original post a little more carefully. My caveats are just that: a warning of what may happen, rather than a statement of accomplished fact. The developments that have taken place in Swedish publishing could affect the rest of the Nordic publishing world, too - let's hope that doesn't happen, and as translators let's make some efforts to make sure that it doesn't.

See also:
Cornering the market
Detective Story
Detective Story - 2
Detective Story - 3
The missing midfield

The missing midfield

Writing in Sydsvenska Dagbladet (thanks for the link, SCF), journalist and author Per Svensson claims to see a major difference between the literary scenes in Sweden and Denmark respectively. In the preamble to an interesting but somewhat inconclusive interview with Danish poet and literary critic Lars Bukdahl, Svensson says that literature in Denmark plays a more central role than it does in Sweden. Presenting Bukdahl as "one of Denmark's most powerful and controversial literary critics", he styles this description as "an expression of differences between the Danish literary landscape and the Swedish one":

In Sweden, there is hardly a literary critic who could claim to be either influential or controversial... It's often said that soccer matches are decided in midfield. In Sweden, the literary midfield has gradually grown weaker and weaker. Audience-centred quality literature has been forced back. Instead we have a polarization - with on the one flank, an ever more dominant and confident bestseller culture, and on the other a marginalized, closed-off and self-sufficient avant-garde literature.

Both get along very well without the literary reviewers of the daily newspapers.

In Denmark, things appear to be different. There the expansive novel with artistic ambitions is still perceived as so important that it can spark magnificent quarrels.

To back up his assertion, Svensson points to a poll that was organized last autumn by Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper. In this, readers were asked to name "the Danish novel of our time" and a panel of experts chose its favourite novels of the past 25 years. The book that came top of the readers' list was Carsten Jensen's We, the Drowned (Vi, de druknede, a book about seafarers, variously described as an "ocean adventure", a "family saga", and "a chronicle about the birth of modern Denmark").

While one might reasonably question the "novel of our time" label, at least Jensen's book is a genuine historical novel, which doesn't rely on a crime plot or the devices of an entertainment genre for its success. In some ways it can be compared to another Nordic historical prose work which was mentioned here in an earlier post. Svensson's characterization of the Swedish literary scene as one in which bestsellerdom has taken over to the point where it's now probably more or less out of control is a though-provoking one. Together with his reflections on the absence of a "middle ground", it adds a further dimension to our ongoing discussion about the decline of mainstream quality writing in Sweden (as evidenced by the "crime wave"), and the negative effect this is having on the general availability in the English-speaking world of new, non-bestseller translated titles by Scandinavian authors in general.

Detective Story - 3

Our analysis of the present situation surrounding the over-large representation of crime fiction among published English translations of new Nordic writing appears to have ruffled some feathers over at Scandinavian Crime Fiction. An anonymous blogger there, who confesses to "not reading any Nordic languages", says that it's "taking me a while to figure out how to respond," and after attempting one or two objections, more or less concedes that the translation of crime writing may not be the ideal field of work for professionally committed translators:

Luckily, I have a day job doing something I love, so I don’t have to read or write anything I don’t want to because my life depends upon it.I imagine full-time translators feel a bit more at the mercy of the marketplace, and it must be dispiriting to find the work on offer trending toward a type of book you don’t like much. But is this really a tragedy? And is genre fiction to blame? I don’t buy it.

The argument sounds a tad cynical, no?

No doubt there will be further responses of this kind in SCF's comments section - but I'd recommend anyone who wants to argue the toss to come over here and continue the debate.

Detective Story
Detective Story - 2

Detective Story - 2

Some more reflections on the vexed issue of Scandinavian crime novels (See Crime Does Pay, At Least for Nordic Authors, Detective Story ):

At Three Percent, Chad Post recently published a useful roundup of attitudes to the genre found among fiction critics in the U.S. online media. In particular, he highlighted the interesting debate between novelist Nathaniel Rich (writing in Slate) and Larissa Kyzer (in L Magazine), which exposed the author-reader dynamic that underlies the whole question. Wondering about the reasons for the extensive adoption of the crime genre by contemporary Nordic writers, Rich saw some fairly predictable factors at work:

the best explanation is the most mundane: Crime novels sell. Most of the Scandinavian crime novelists began their careers in other genres. Mankell, for instance, wrote seven well-received but unlucrative novels, and more than a dozen plays, before turning to a life of crime; Karin Fossum was a prize-winning poet; Maj Sjöwall was an editor and translator. Before the current explosion of crime novels, the only contemporary Scandinavian novelist to enjoy major international success was Peter Høeg. Høeg may be a "literary" novelist, but his breakout Smilla's Sense of Snow is about the investigation of a suspected homicide. The lesson is clear: If you want your novel to be read abroad, particularly in the English-speaking world, you'd better include a murder. Even if you've never heard of a murder actually being committed in your country.

Wondering again why readers across the world have found the Scandinavian books written in this genre so compelling - they are not particularly innovative, after all, and are for the most part "straightforward whodunnits"- Rich suggested that

What distinguishes these books is not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness. There is a good reason why Mankell's corpses tend to turn up in serene, bucolic settings—on a country farm, on a bobbing raft, in a secluded meadow, or in the middle of a snow-covered field: A dark bloodstain in a field of pure, white snow is far creepier than a body ditched in a trash-littered alley.

Kyzer challenged this view, seeing it as patronizing and playing to stereotypes:

One need only skim recent headlines from mainland Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) to ascertain that the famed tranquility of the Nordic welfare state has begun to face some dramatic challenges. For instance: each of these countries has seen a marked increase in immigration in the last few decades, an influx which has challenged the homogeneity of the local populations, and more often than not, created quite an existential crisis for societies which have for so long been able to claim a fundamental sameness in traditions, language, and cultural outlook.

The most striking feature of the whole debate, however, is that it reveals an essential characteristic of the kind of writing that's involved: ultimately the main concern of the Nordic authors who produce these books is not with writing itself, with the creation of literary art, but is focused instead on a form of fictionalized sociology. It's really a continuation of the "radical" movement that produced the socially-committed novels and poetry of the 1970s, and it shows that this tendency has not died out in Nordic fiction, but is being reinforced and re-tuned to suit the trends and exigencies of the new century.

This is a pity, for it seemed for a time during the 1980s and 1990s that writers in Scandinavia were once again, as they did in the 1940s and early 1950s, beginning to question the society-based values and assumptions that had dominated fiction during the two earlier decades, and were finding their way towards a renewal of the universalist, formally innovative and metaphysical tradition that had characterized the writing of the immediate post-war period, with its roots in the writing of authors like Joyce, Kafka, Borges and Camus, the long legacy of Kierkegaard and the myth-oriented humanism of Karen Blixen. While authors and critics like Jan Kjærstad and Mikael Enckell continued in their different ways to uphold those values, and Inger Christensen, Tomas Tranströmer and Pia Tafdrup wrote their poems in a conscious emergence from the traditions of pre-and postwar modernism, there was a sense that in the Nordic literary world as a whole another kind of value was gaining ascendancy, in just the way that Nathaniel Rich describes above, and for the same translation-related "reasons".

I see the increasing dominance of crime fiction and its related genres in Scandinavian writing today as a problem that has the potential to become a tragedy whose consequences it will take several generations to overcome. For some of the best Nordic writing talent is being diverted into these sub- and semi-literary channels, from which it may never return.

Note: although this and other related posts are now being discussed on FriendFeed and elsewhere, I'd like to repeat my invitation to those who want to debate the issue to come here and write in the comments boxes. David McDuff.

See also: Detective Story

Detective Story - 3

The missing midfield

Bucking the trend

Despite the recent vogue, Scandinavian crime writing isn't having it all its own way, the Guardian notes:

French writer Fred Vargas has seen off competition from a cluster of Nordic authors to take the Crime Writers' Association's International Dagger award.