Roy Jacobsen's Reading List

"I am afraid not too many of my colleagues share my fascination for the old sagas. They are still—to a certain extent—taught in school, but I wish I could say that of all the things that were bad when I grew up, the knowledge of the saga tradition was not one of them. That does not mean, however, that contemporary Norwegian literature is not influenced by the sagas, when it comes to style, wit, irony, the soft spot for realism—and especially the main subject of the sagas. It is at least not easy to pick one modern Norwegian writer who—sooner or later in his or her career—does not elaborate on the twin questions, Who am I? And where do I come from? A perhaps more frequently asked question in young nations than in older ones. Norway is still quite young and unshapen as was Iceland in the 12th century. Just look at our love for childhood and coming-of-age stories. Too complicated to be retold, so take my word for it: it is a flawless, beautifully written and complex mix of family saga, love story and crime novel with an unknown culprit. It is helpful to know the values of the society the story is set in, its social, political and anthropological context, but a modern middlebrow should be more than capable of pointing out the villain—this is realism. It is a masterpiece that can be measured against almost anything in the literary canon. Not quite—it is set in motion by the reality behind the gossip, the true minds of the characters whom the women are gossiping about. Fate is at work, i.e., both man and woman are to take their part of the blame. Absolutely. It’s a novel about a wonderful brotherhood that no sane person would dream of breaking up—apart from through love and death. And it is an even more beautiful love story: between man and woman. As you said—vengeance begets vengeance, violence begets violence—that is the backbone of fate, but it is also important to remember that in no saga does it go on forever, till the last man standing so to speak. “Norway is still quite young and unshapen as was Iceland in the 12th century—just look at our love for childhood and coming-of-age stories” There are lots of remedies to break the spiral of violence and vengeance, and that’s where the saga ceases to be just a retelling of fate—to be an exemplum—and turns into pragmatism and realism, stories of real men and women. Aud leaves for Rome after she (unsuccessfully) has tried to avenge her murdered husband. But that is not the finale—in the ending we see the two sons of the third brother (whom they left behind in Norway in the beginning of the book), tying up the loose ends by killing off the last living killer of their uncle—they are, so to speak, fulfilling the wish of their aunt Aud, who has now (unknowingly to them) turned herself into a nun in Rome. I guess you could call that neat, or maybe more of a holy merger of irony and realism."

"Well—Hamsun is here because there is no way around him. He tore apart both the grammar and the lexicon of our language, mixed high and low, dialect and aristocratic speech, and put all the pieces beautifully together again—in the totally new fashion we call contemporary Norwegian literature. As every Russian writer is rolled out of Gogol’s coat, every Norwegian one is an offspring of Hamsun, admittedly or otherwise. This is a very typical Norwegian subject—and typical for many small countries, I guess, that have gone through such dramatic changes in just a generation or three. Nostalgia looms large. The art is, of course, not to be nostalgic yourself, in your writing head, but to handle it as a literary concept, something that comes naturally to human kind, so that it can be X-rayed from every angle. “We have made a taciturn deal—to punish him postmortem for his political ideas, and simultaneously, and reluctantly, praise him for his contribution to literature” Then you will be able to see also the problematic and reactionary aspect of nostalgia, and I am not sure Hamsun quite managed to do that…—he was, after all, a committed and incurable Nazi. So we (at least most of us) have made a taciturn deal—to punish him postmortem for his deeds and political ideas, and simultaneously (and reluctantly) praise him for his contribution to the Norwegian language and literature. We simply have no choice, he is our Luther, our King James Bible. As a result of this attempted pragmatism, we still read and cherish his work, but we do not name streets and oil platforms after him (they are left to more palatable creatures, such as Henrik Ibsen, Alexander Kielland, etc…)"

"Dag holds in his generation (born in 1941) both a very similar and a totally different position than that Hamsun did in his. Dag is and has been the uncrowned and undisputed leader of the ivory tower since his debut in the late 1960s, whereas Hamsun was always a loner. Dag is the sole contemporary writer that we all (nearly, I know of two who don’t comply) must read when he publishes a new book. Mainly because he has turned the language around again, given it the first new twist since Hamsun left us. Yes, it’s a lament. Everything Dag puts his hands on turns out in some way or another to be a lament. You see—as a devoted communist—history isn’t developing to his liking. And you are absolutely right to ask if it is satire. Because it is actually both—both satire and not. Dag can make that possible. He denies categorically (in interviews) the fact (my view) that he is ironic, and is thereby creating a third layer in his writing—from irony back to truth. And I mean—if you constantly create main characters that are lamenting that most people around them are idiots, the project could easily turn into an elitist nightmare. But with self-loathing and self-irony you can get away with everything. He does it in the most beautiful fashion possible. And after all, who doesn’t—at least once in a while—think of themselves as smarter than the others? Dag is a true intellectual, and has a lot of references to previous heroes, and he has probably spent more time with Ibsen then with anyone else—both in this novel and in four others, as I recall. Ibsen is even more important to him than Hamsun (whom he also appreciates), and in a quite complex way—Ibsen bothers him, like every father figure and national icon should. He is struggling with Ibsen, moving about like a roller coaster between respect and criticism, admiration and irritation. In spite of his really strong political opinions he rather seems to avoid making too direct references to them in his literature. He is no propagandist, it’s more like he’s dancing around his own views, pulling them into a tango, or—more bluntly—taking a negative stance, that is, mocking the opposite views and especially the lifestyle and habits that he does not share himself. A satirist, but also, to a certain degree, a thinker undermining and ridiculing his leftist opinions. He is always an interesting and complex writer. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He is mostly working with contemporary stuff, but he has a keen eye for history, has written a bunch of articles about a lot of historical subjects, and has also published a trilogy set in World War II , during the occupation of Norway."

"I could just as well have mentioned his great novel The Half Brother , a magnificent work. Lars is the poet among us, a constantly working metaphor machine. He is a master of poetic prose, constantly posing the everlasting Norwegian double-question: ‘Who are we? And where do we come from?’ Maybe expanding or deepening that too: ‘How the hell did I end up being the person I am?’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Both Beatles and The Half Brother are coming-of-age stories, speckled with details, impressions, time-markers, time-shifts, smells and sounds and fury—often melancholic, but with hilarious episodes, shocking understatements, silent cunning and even big tragedy. He should be read by all people who fall into any of the following three categories: 1) Those interested in Norway. 2) Those interested in Norwegian literature. 3) Those interested in literature. Lars is so typically Norwegian in his settings and so typically human in his thinking that he can be recognised by everyone whoever they think they are."

"Not an easy task. The amazing Karl Ove Knausgård came to the craft with a programme—to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth. In my opinion that is a dead end, both morally and existentially. But a programme is—thank God—not necessarily in concert with the end result. Said Clausewitz (among others): the first casualty of war is the truth. And what miracle hasn’t come out of a misconception—or an accident, as Isaac Newton could have put it? The Struggle is something as rare as a well-composed, sometimes brilliantly written, and organised stream of consciousness which lasts, as you said, for 3,000 pages. It certainly is—but Knausgård manages brilliantly to keep order in chaos, his language is clear, clean and floating like a river in another river’s bed, the one of a tradition that he will not himself always recognise. “The smaller the time-discrepancy between writing and reading, the more dynamic the reading experience seems to be” He moves his prose effortlessly between the trivial and the ecclesiastical. Here is everyday life in all its brilliant dreariness combined with learned essays on the most extraordinary philosophical topics. And although I prefer his surgical pen dissecting the triviality of everyday life, the glowing light of it would not be so bright without the more theoretical essays. Let me say something about time, since you mentioned Proust . By being able to write as fast as Knausgård does, without losing the grip and intensity of it, he manages to convey a certain and quite extraordinary flow to the reading process—I am not sure how to put it, but the smaller the time-discrepancy between writing and reading, the more dynamic the reading experience seems to be. It has something to do with freshness, I think, close contact between the writer’s and the reader’s experience. I guess this is at least part of the answer to why so many readers get addicted to his work. In addition to—of course—to being the reason so many people recognise themselves in his work; programme or not, he has managed to paint a highly gripping and provocative picture of our time. (Working fast is—by the way—not something I would recommend, unless you are Knausgård.) The word artless does not immediately ring a bell for me, unless in the sense that he is trying to free himself from the tradition, from the grip of all predecessors—and who doesn’t try to do that? By and large he seems sometimes more arty to me than, for instance, Dag or Lars…—but maybe the people who describe his prose as artless are the people who have subscribed to his programme? He is right of course—without failing you get nowhere. And when you stop failing and think you are finally educated, you are not only no longer a writer, you are no longer alive. That does not mean, though, that you have to publish all your failures and disasters—stealing time from the readers is not a decent line of work. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Don has been my protecting angel for years. He says himself that I am the most challenging one of his Scandinavian clients, but I have, to this day, not read a single review without the critic praising the translation—it looks like the book is written originally in English, they say. And for that I am most grateful. Nicely put—I have done some translation work myself, from Old Icelandic. These authors are long dead now, but they are still hanging like Damocles’s swords over my neck, so I will remember that quote."