Finding North

As publishers catch the Nordic wave, a skewed portrait of Scandinavia emerges.

by Justin Bauer

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Published: Nov 11, 2009

The motivating figure in Jan Kjærstad's The Discoverer (Sept. 2) might be a woman's lifeless body. But that doesn't mean this new Norwegian translation is anything like the Scandinavian novels — steeped in police procedure, littered with dead bodies — that we've come to expect. It's a credit to tiny Rochester-based nonprofit Open Letter press that English-speaking readers get a glimpse of a different corpus. After all, Scandinavian writers have become an English-language fashion. Led by the success of Stieg Larsson's posthumously published Millennium series, Scandinavian writing in English has never been more easily available.

Larsson is the most successful of this new Nordic circuit. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a legitimate surprise, a Swedish take on the classic country-house mystery that featured two idiosyncratic and appealing leads and conflated financial dishonesty with sexual perversion. This summer's sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire (Knopf, July 28), traded its predecessor's jewel-box plotting for a chain of coincidences (dead cell-phone batteries! convenient martial-arts experts!) and diluted its lead characters' chemistry through separation, in a plot skewed toward serial-killer psychological melodrama.

But even as Larsson's books elevate the profiles of his Scandinavian cohort, Fire shows the limits of the criminal franchise. The book — the second of three — provides a warning about diminishing returns, familiar to all of us who keep seeing movies with roman numerals in their title.

What's more, with large commercial publishers trying to catch the Nordic crime wave, a strange, skewed portrait of Scandinavia emerges, characterized by a well-ordered calm routinely broken by extreme violence and bitter universal misogyny. It's only in the work of small presses that a fuller, stranger picture of the region emerges.

Take Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver (Dec. 8) as an example. Jansson's novel, published in Finland in 1982, is just about to be released in English by New York Review Books — which, along with Dalkey Archive and Melville House, puts out fine new translations of important foreign books. Jansson, best-known in her home country as a cartoonist, turns in a performance more unsettling than most procedurals.

The story, which matches retiring, reclusive illustrator Anna with bluntly pragmatic Katri as her new caretaker, reads like a philosophical thought experiment crossed with an uncanny fairy tale. In their isolated village, wealthy Anna is respected but held at a distance; Katri, pridefully poor and unwilling to submit to convention or politeness, is seen as a witch with a talent for figures. "They say that money smells, it's not true," Katri tells herself early in the book. "Money is as pure as numbers. It's people that smell, every one of them with their own furtive stink, and it gets stronger when they're angry or ashamed or when they're afraid."

Jansson puts the artist and the pragmatist together in a house for the winter, and invites her readers to watch as they slowly taint and warp each other. While The True Deceiver is no murder mystery — there's not a drop of blood anywhere in that dark Finnish winter — it may as well be, given how Jansson's characters coldly sabotage each other. The psychology of the book belongs to the unsettling tradition of Hitchcock and Highsmith. The lack of blood in the snow is merely incidental.

Jan Kjærstad keeps a corpse on display in The Discoverer, but he refuses to use it to drive a plot or cause a spectacle. Jonas Wergeland, convicted of murdering his wife, Margrete, has served his time; now isolated on an expedition with a daughter he barely knows, he labors to come to terms with Margrete's death.

The third in a trilogy, The Discoverer is able to stand alone as Wergeland's chance to tell his own story. The book, a 450-page brick in 9-point type, can be off-putting in sheer volume. And there are occasional wrong notes: Simple concepts get explained as if they were profound; incidental characterizations suffocate as symbols and metaphors. But Wergelund stands as an impressive invention, stretched out in massive self-absorption at the center of the book.

Kjærstad's great strength comes from his command of irony, his ability to present Wergeland's self-portrait as outsized and tragically flawed, as he begins to grasp the extent that his personal success is identical to his private failure. And Kjærstad maps out this picture through a dizzyingly complex narrative, looping and discursive, that mirrors Wergelund's fixations and his ties to his childhood's countryside.

Even though it begins with a corpse and ends with a cry for mercy, Kjærstad's ambitious examination, like Jansson's chilly nastiness, shows a serious and complicated literature no less satisfying than any chart-topping Nordic thriller.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)

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