Scandinavian novels

It doesn’t happen so often that Scandinavian novelists are featured in the New York Times Book Review, but this summer novels by the Norwegian Per Petterson and the Dane Christian Jungersen have featured prominently in the review: Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses (2004) and Jungersen’s The Exception (2006). Both are award winners, bestsellers in Europe and treated very kindly by the Times.
Here the similarities end. Out Stealing Horses is a masterpiece, while The Exception is a good story based on an excellent idea that is poorly executed. It is 250 pages too long and the plot intends to be so clever and sophisticated that it falls apart in the last part of the novel. The story evolves around the Danish Center for Information on Genocide, where four women work, two of them are close friends in their late twenties, the other two are ten years older with family and children.
At the center they study evil, and try to bring crimes against humanity to the public’s attention. Sounds like a very noble cause, but somebody is of another opinion, and the two younger women receive anonymous death threats in their mail. In the beginning they suspect a Serbian war criminal, whom they have exposed in their writings, but later they grow suspicious of one another, and the very same mechanisms of evil that cause genocide begin to play themselves out in the relationships between the four women at the office.
Jungersen builds his narrative skilfully by constantly shifting point of view as the story unfolds. But it goes on for too long, and I agree partly with the L.A. Times reviewer Donna Rifkind who wrote:
”…without the reader’s emotional investment, this thriller fails to thrill. Its repetious Big Idea about the fluidity of identity – the notion that humanitarians can be as malicious as the genocidal criminals they study – is less shocking than galumphingly obvious.”
Out Stealing Horses is a great novel, one of the best I have read in recent years, and the author’s fellow Norwegians seem to agree. It has sold 100.000 copies in a country with a population of 4,5 million. Quite remarkable. It’s a melancholic story about fathers and sons, parents and children, about the art of growing up and getting old, and not least, it is a story about grief and treason.
The main character, Trond Sander, has retired, and after having lost his wife and sister in a car accident he moves to the country side, not far from the region, where he as a teenager spend his summer holidays right after the end of the Second World War. His new neighbour in the country side turns out to be a childhood friend. Meeting him takes Trond back to the summer of 1948 and dramatic events that changed his life forever.
It was a time when Trond recognized the strong and some times irrational desires of grown ups, a time when he encountered sudden death for the first time, and most importantly, it was the last time he saw his beloved father.
The father who doesn’t have a name in the novel leaves Trond and the rest of his family behind, probably to join a woman with whom he had a secret relationship during the war and German occupation. They both took part in the resistance. In fact, this woman is the mother of his new neighbour, but Trond shies away from asking him painful and troubling questions about what actually happened that fateful summer after his father left. The composition of the novel is tight, it’s not a word too long and it’s a tense read. No wonder, Petterson is flooded by phone calls and letters from men who want to talk about difficult relationships between fathers and sons.
My recommendation: If you want to spend 22 dollars on Scandinavian literature buy Out Stealing Horses. Are you willing to spend twice this sum buy both novels.