Destination of the Month: Svalbard

When I was 12 and reading The Golden Compass for the very first time, I really liked the idea of a mythical frozen land in the north inhabited by armored polar bears. It was not until many years later that I discovered that in fact Svalbard--the locale of some grisly happenings in Pullman's meisterwerk--is a real place, and I want to go to there.

It's the smack-dab middle of the year, which means on some parts of the globe it's sunny times all night which is the perfect time to go on your own epic voyage to the frozen north, which is a little less frozen, and has more hours in the day for partying with polar bears.

So I've chosen Svalbard as our destination of the month. Check out our neat display and read The Golden Compass as you sip a beer on a sunny Allston patio and immediately transport yourself, or if you have a few extra kroner in your pocket grab a Norwegian phrasebook and hop on a plane and go party all day(night), but SEND PICS.

My Way or Norway, or; Tied Up in Knuts

Knut Hamsun is considered one of Norway's most important writers. He's not read very widely in the US despite Hemingway's claim that "Hamsun taught me to write." But Hamsun was a hugely prolific author and one of only 11 Norwegian Literature Nobel laureates. His books are spare, taught, with deep characters and lush Nordic atmospheres. It sounds oxymoronic but he is really worth reading to understand what I mean.

Just this last week the UBC coincidentally acquired several of the few novels of Hamsun's translated into English from different customers throughout the week. Get a foothold in Norwegian literature with Hamsun, or discover a new writer. There are many points of entry and no two of his novels are alike.

Here are the ones in stock this week:

A perennial Hamsun favorite; considered his masterpiece by the Nobel committee. Chock full of Norwegian landscape it is the story of man in nature told through a village of homesteaders at the turn of the 20th century.

A masterpiece of existentialist literature. A man wanders the streets of Oslo starving himself in order to fuel his experience and creativity. Haunting, creepy, like staring into the gaping maw of an Edvard Munch painting or reading a depressing Kafka story turned grotesquely realistic.

One of those heartbraking love stories where the poor young man is in love with the wealthy girl, but she is expected to marry into her own social caste while he works desperately to make something of himself.

A mysterious stranger moves into a shack near a village. He lives a solitary life with his dog until a village girl wanders by. They fall in love but neither knows the other's feelings. A bittersweet modernist fable.

Protagonist Ove is a drunk, a womanizer, an incorrigible. His interactions in the microcosmic world of his Norwegian fishing village occupy this slim, humorous novella.

Women, Whiskey, Per Petterson and Other Sweeping Generalizations.

Today marks the end of my short relationship with Evan Williams brand Whiskey. Last night, the events manager and I got in a "little" debate about Franzen on the cover of Time. At least that's what I think we were arguing about. It may have been about the cable bill ...I can't say for sure but I can say this; women are the driving economic force in the book industry. We run the stores, buy the books, read the books and gift the books. For all the men out there, I acknowledge you and thank you for your presence too, though today I am just giving the ladies a "what what."

I don't want to detract from Franzen, or any other white male novelist, goodness knows I love Raymond Carver. I just want to see all the lady novelists getting equal critical attention. I don't think we are quite there yet.

Name Drop Time:

When I was walking Per Petterson back to his awaiting line of (mostly female) fans, he said to me....this industry is a woman's industry...but men are the ones getting published.... (or something to that effect). When he said that, I nearly planted one on him, but I'm a professional so I restrained myself. I complimented him on how he answered Diane Rehm's question about one of his character's apparent "alcoholism". Rehm was pushing the topic, and I thought it was so typical, how we in the states rush to pathologize ....everything. The character got drunk a few times....and she needed a diagnosis, from Per. Sigh.

I guess it took Per mentioning this gender discrepancy for me to finally have license into feeling the way I did when I rethought the Time cover..."Great American Novelist". I of course note the dissonance in needing a man to agree with me in order to bring this topic up publicly....but I am working on it...and it doesn't hurt my case that Per agrees.

What do I take away from these loosely connected meditations? I love the ladies of Brookline. The women who work here, shop here, and speak here. Sometimes deconstructive literary diagnostics are just reductive, and miss the point.

Also, no more whiskey. It's better to read about.

a quality of light

Per Petterson's feet, and I don't know if anyone noticed this or if anyone else could see, were lifting, releasing themselves one at a time from the burden of holding him in place for the length of time he had been asked to spend in front of us, reading his story.

My father told me that Out Stealing Horses was less like an exceptional reading experience, and more like being introduced to a new quality of light. He told me that as he read it he was brought back to his boyhood in Maine, to the barn, and to the shafts of light falling through the air, catching the motes of hay dust. I Curse the River of Time, and To Siberia, and, I will hazard a guess, In the Wake, all share that same quality; perhaps none are quite so crystalline as the former, but what Petterson does (and this I am lifting from my father's words, too) is to leave the light alone in the center of everything he writes. Weightless, illuminating light. So unlike all of the things of this world about which we tell stories. About which he tells his stories.

Letting light be the center, his words are quick, his sentences piercing. Petterson doesn't need to buttress a cathedral in his books, he needs to balance needles in the sunlight.

I don't have the faintest idea of what it means to write like that, but to whoever it was that asked him tonight what lessons he hoped his readers would get from his books, that is why I think he had no answer for you. Asked about how he creates his characters, he said that you have to imagine them, and then place your self above them, and then sink your self right down into them, until you can see out of their eyes. The best novels, the best paintings, the best songs, the best people...they leave that space in the middle of themselves, for you.

Per Petterson knows how to write a story in such a way that you find yourself in all the things he doesn't say. His books are cradles built for light, and air, and people.