Authors and After Words

All of the Scandinavian countries share a great literary tradition coming down from the Middle Ages. Sharing such a tradition within the confines of a small language (or five small languages) cannot but bolster each nation’s literary endeavors. Scandinavian writers have indeed risen up to bridge the language barrier that separates them from other nations. Henrik Ibsen single handedly reinvented drama in the West and August Strindberg expanded dramatic performance in Europe and America through his experiments with naturalism, expressionism and mysticism.

A generation later, Knut Hamsun and Sigrid Undset from Norway, Selma Lagerlöf and Pär Lagerkvist from Sweden, Isak Dinesen from Denmark and Haldor Laxness from Iceland earned international reputations through translation. These days, with the broadening horizon of the interconnected world, other nationalities are getting known through translation and rightly so. But now and then Scandinavians continue to engage the wider world. In the 1990s, Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World was translated into more than 40 languages and, according to the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reached "a larger audience world wide than any other Norwegian writer since Ibsen or Hamsun."

Now, it is not the mission of this column to review single books per se. We are most interested in considering the literature we present in a wider context. In the book in question this time, Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson places WWII at the center of his plot. Naturally, the German Occupation of Norway was a critical experience for all Norwegians alive at the time, young and old alike. Prior to Petterson’s novel, an earlier Norwegian novelist, Sigurd Hoel, had written a book called Meeting at the Milestone. (It’s available in a fine translation by Sverre Lyngstad and published by Green Integer.) Milestone just happens to be about the Nazi occupation. Just who was Hoel and what does his book have to do with Petterson’s?

Sigurd Hoel (1890-1960) was well established as a critic and novelist long before the German invasion. When the Germans did occupy Norway in 1940, Hoel moved out of Oslo to Odalen where he participated whole heartedly in the Resistance. In 1943, he and his wife were forced to flee to Sweden. When he returned after the war, Hoel continued to write fiction. Like many Norwegians, he was deeply troubled by the way the occupation played out in Norway. Vidkun Quisling was not by any means the only "quisling" among the Norwegians. Before the invasion Quisling’s nationalist movement had dwindled to an estimated 2,000 members. By 1945, that figure had risen to 45,000. Every occupied country had its collaborators and Hoel wrote Meeting at the Milestone to fathom why Norway produced her share. The novel was published in 1947. As Harald Beyer describes Hoel’s book in his History of Norwegian Literature, (p. 319):

To Hoel, that commandment emerged as totalitarianism and he vehemently stood against it from both the right and the left. He saw how totalitarianism was not solely a matter of politics. He saw that the entire human being could be consumed by it, body and soul. That left no alternative but to resist, body and soul.

Per Petterson (born in 1952) is a trained librarian, bookstore clerk and like Hoel, a translator and literary critic. His first book was a collection of short stories published in 1987. Five novels followed with growing success. Out Stealing Horses, which has been translated into English by Anne Born and was published in 2003 by Picador, won prizes both in Norway and beyond. Judging from his own words, Petterson is a highly intuitive writer who shuns planning a manuscript. When he discovered that the fathers in Horses could not look each other in the eyes, he explains, "…well, it’s 1948, only three years after the Germans left Norway. It has to be something with the war."

Petterson’s narrative begins in the fall of 1999 when one Trond Sandor, at 67, retires to a hut in the forest country of eastern Norway. It is soon clear that he has come to try to fathom the summer of 1948 which as a boy of 15 he spent with his father in a similar situation – woods, water, and Sweden nearby. In the course of that summer, Trond learned about his father’s heroic work in the Norwegian Underground in eastern Norway – which explained his frequent absences from his home in Oslo during the war. Trond also discovered that his father was having an affair with his best friend’s mother – an affair that evidently started when they were part of the Resistance. The summer of ’48 ends and Trond returns to Oslo thinking of his father as a hero. But when the father fails to follow his son to Oslo, Trond soon realized that he would never see his father again. The hero has chosen the other woman over his first family.

By placing Hoel’s novel next to Petterson’s, an interesting emotional pattern emerges. As one generation has seen life, body and soul, as sin, and retreated from that life behind totalitarian control, and as the next generation has sought to redeem life, body and soul, through absolute freedom, a third generation has been left in a state of crippling equivocation. In reclaiming his freedom, Trond’s father has inflicted a wound on his son that will not heal. The ultimate cost of the father’s freedom is the abandonment of the son.

In Ghosts, it was Ibsen’s dark insight that no matter how much we try to avoid it, in one way or another, the sins of the father will be visited on upon his children. So it is with war. Both Hoel and Petterson show how deeply personalized that process can be.