This is another Lanterne book — I happened upon this while looking for the previous book (The Birds) and thought “yay”.
Jan Erik Vold is Norway’s most famous poet, and this is a fantastic book. His poems are usually funny, absurd, tending towards aphorisms, but can take sudden turns towards being affecting and moving.
Or political:
(“Today’s Czech”.) Still relevant today!
As is his most famous poem, which I didn’t know was in this book:
“Culture Week”. I remember seeing him on TV declaiming this poem when I was a child, and I was rolling around, laughing.
But is this bit on the top of the next page part of it?
Which brings me to the only thing I didn’t quite enjoy about this book — the way it’s set. Poems often start on one page and then continue onto the next page for a stanza or two, and sometimes they don’t, which just makes you stumble a bit as a reader.
It feels like they had to cram the poems into a specific number of pages or something… But on the other hand, it does make them seem less “precious”, which might be the point.
Isn’t that a great cover? This is an early 60s pocketbook edition (but my printing is from 1974) — part of a series of cheap but stylish editions that I’ve been collecting for a while. And that’s one reason I read this book now: I was thinking that I should start actually reading these books at some point.
But I’m not sure… I’ve got so many new, crappy books to read — should I just drop that to read old, actually good books?
The second impetus towards reading this is that I see it mentioned on Twitter all the time. Which is so weird! I mean, this is a classic of Norwegian literature, so I should have read it yonks ago (but I haven’t). Instead all these random Americans are reading it? What?!
”The best Norwegian novel ever” Karl Ove Knausgaard
Yes, after the tremendous success of My Struggle, Knausgaard is using his powers for good and making people all over the world read this book from 1957.
But I mean — it was a commercial and critical success in Norway from the start — when the 1974 edition was published, 101K books had been sold.
And so… here we go.
And it’s fantastic! It’s so interesting, moving (bring several hankies) and edge-of-your-seat exciting and nerve-racking. I could barely put it down after I’d gotten started.
I give it 11 thumbs up.
After finishing it, I was curious how the translators had approached the book — it’s written in a kinda old-fashioned Norwegian. Norwegian has been through a whole bunch of reforms (all to the good), but it means that it’s “harder” to read a Norwegian book from 70 years ago than it is to read an English book from 110 years ago. But this was pretty old-fashioned even back in 1957. So I checked the Penguin edition… Which, by the way, has this totally misleading cover:
Kudos to the designer here! No, the protagonist is totally not a rugged viking…
Oh, yeah, back to the translation — it’s totally modern and plain. In a way, I’m guessing many Norwegians would prefer to read it in this translation than read the original text, really. Translation has one advantage — it gives the publishers a valid excuse to update the language, while if you do that within the same language, it’s a scandal or something.
Anyway, I’m glad I finally read this book. And I’ve got The Ice Castle, too, so perhaps I’ll read that in a while.
So why am I reading this book about athletic wear, anyway…
I thought it was because I saw that Lois Bujold recommended it, but that seems to be a fake memory. I have no idea! Did somebody else recommend this?
The name is awfully misleading, though.
It’s a mystery/fantasy novel, and it’s written in a most entertaining fashion. It’s like the writer tried to cram in as many clichés as possible — the book is 2024 on a stick. The protagonist is the helper of a Holmes/Wolfe type, and is dyslexic, because of course he is. (The Holmes character is on the spectrum, of course.) There’s weird scenes like when he beats up a suspect (because of course he does (the suspect confesses all after the beating)) who’s been described as being too old to be a gardener… so… he beats up an old doddering guy?
The author doesn’t really think any of this through, but just stitches together familiar tropes higgedly piggedly. But in a very entertaining way! Easy on the branes.
It’s fascinating the things he leaves out — there’s no traumatic past that’s brought up every two pages to give the characters character, and there’s no character development to speak of (so no “you’re not my father — you weren’t there for me when I grew up!”), there’s no sex, and there’s virtually no conflict between any of the major characters. I.e., there’s really no filler: It’s full-on investigation and world exploration for a solid 410 pages. I can’t really remember reading a book that’s this obsessive in quite a while.
It totally works. This book is pure heroin-injected popcorn. So much fun to read. It doesn’t sag at any point.
But oh, it’s also probably the stupidest book I’ve read in a while, and I’ve read some really, really stupid books. None of the plot particulars make much sense if you stop to think about them, and even on a micro basis everything is just, well, moronic (like the Super Secret Assassin who goes around murdering people in a way that’s so distinctive that it can only be a Super Secret Assassin). Oh, and the resolution? It was blindingly obvious who the killers were, just because we weren’t presented with any alternatives.
I see that my copy of the book is the sixth printing (and the first one was in 2024), so it’s a great commercial success, and I’m not surprised at all.
Now I wanna read the next book in the series, but I should probably read something else in between, what?
It’s a Pi Zero 2 with an HDMI screen, so either… the Pi has gone bad, or the screen has. Oh, well, I foresee some debugging in my future.
[Update some hours later: I pulled the plug on it a few times, and now it works perfectly again. *sigh* That’s really the Raspberry Pi Experience — they mostly work until they don’t, and you never find out what the real problem is. Power? Cables? Heat? Coldth? Nobody knows.]
