Sult

I finally managed to finish Hamsun’s Sult (Hunger). I started it months ago for a group read on the Scandlit list, but have been struggling to finish. Not because it’s not engaging, rather because it’s too engaging. It made me feel physically sick, and it was quite impossible to eat while I read it. As I tend to eat and read at the same time, it was therefore left on the side a lot. Very, very good. Very, very disturbing.

Hamsun, of course, is a complete embarrasment to any Norwegian. An extremely good author, but also extremely vocal in his support for the Nazis. Help! What do we do? Well, I admire his books and despise his political views and I really can’t see that there is much else you can do…

Evelina – and more

I have been chastised for writing about Norwegian books in Norwegian. Well, I suppose that’s fair enough, especially as it’s been slim pickings here recently. I’m back to English, now – partly because I’m also back to reading English.

Over the weekend I reread Fanny Burney’s Evelina. It’s well worth the trouble, and in parts it’s laugh out loud funny (though I wouldn’t be willing to bet on it always being intentional). I was intending to read it rather slowly and follow the group read on the Austen-List (the McGill Austen mailing list), but once I got started I somehow couldn’t put it down. I suppose I can still join in the discussions, I just need to remind myself which part we’re looking at each week. Well, anyway, what I wanted to comment on was that someone on that list «lamented» that Austen abandoned the epistolary form, reasoning that it would have been interesting to know what she would have made of it (that she had mastered it is plain from Lady Susan). I really can’t bring myself to agree. One of the things I missed most in Evelina was any sort of comment upon Evelina’s way of expressing herself. And what Austen excels at, more than anything else, is the narrative voice, and the way the narrative voice manipulates the reader into thinking and feeling exactly what the authour wants him/her to be thinking and feeling. In Evelina, I had to make up all the commentary myself. And, delightful as I find my own conversation, it’s not quite as satisfying.

Why do all the authors I like die young with too many books left to write? It is not fair.

I finished Evelina Saturday evening and found myself at a loose end. Somehow I had managed to pack just the one book. After a search through my grandparents’ bookshelves, I settled on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped – it’s a classic, I guess, and one has to read classics. The major drawback was that it was (naturally) a Norwegian translation, but I took my chances. It’s a quick read, at least. I can’t help suspect that it’s lost some weight in the translation, but maybe not. Not all classics are breeze blocks, after all. I’m not quite sure what to think of the story. It wasn’t what I expected, somehow, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It was riveting enough while I was reading it, but very easily forgotten afterwards. It also ended very abruptly, before the story had come to a satisfactory conclusion (satisfactory to me, that is). Does the original, I wonder? Does the protagonist still have the possibility of a trial and a hanging hanging (bad choice of words…) over him at the end of Stevenson’s unmeddled-with work? I guess I’ll have to have a peek at the last page of a «proper» edition just to check. If it does, I can’t help but feel that it’s a bit overrated, for the time being, though, I reserve my judgement.

Odds and ends

Ok, Easter is over and I’m back at work (sigh).

For some reason it has become almost mandatory to read whodunnits at Easter in Norway, so that’s what I’ve been doing. I had a very frustrating time of it, though, as what I like is to be surprised when I get to the end, and this year very few things surprised me.

First, I read Kakerlakkene by Jo Nesbø. It’s a Norwegian one, and I don’t think it’s been translated, so those of you who don’t read Norwegian will just have to ignore this bit. Nesbø is one of my favourite songwriters, so I thought it was about time I checked out his novels, too. And I’m glad I did, too. Very engaging, and beautifully written. Unfortunately, I sort of guessed major parts of the plot way before they happened. Pity. Still, I’m certainly going to read the other Harry Hole books as well.

Right, then I got on to P.D. James’ last novel, Death in Holy Orders. I got rather worried half way through, as the person I thought would be murdered had just been murdered and I thought maybe I knew who’d done it, too. Fortunately, I was proved wrong – I hadn’t guessed the murderer, though I’d sort of guessed the motive. All in all, the end made me very happy (for another reason, too – trying to avoid spoilers here), and I can say that, as usual, P.D. James really has to be read.

I also watched Evil Under the Sun (Agatha Christie) on television, and got the murderer way too early. Very annoying, but the Poirot mini-series are always so throughly enjoyable because of the setting and the people that it didn’t really matter all that much.

Gosford Park is a whodunnit of a sort, too, and I saw that Saturday. Beautifully done, with an amazing cast, wonderful props, costumes and cars, lovely lines abounding and an invaluable addtion to the portayal of upstairs/downstairs life. But again: there were no surprises. It was obvious who the murderer was, how the murder was done and what the motives were. So disappointing. On the other hand, you get Altman’s inimitable touches of reality twisted, so despite the obvious solution it’s a picture well worth seeing. And you never know, you might not think it all too obvious…

Adding to the disappointments, I finished listening to Ian Carmichael reading The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers yesterday. Delightfully read, Lord Peter was lovely company as usual and Sayers isn’t normally one to disappoint. But. I actually guessed at the «murder weapon» in the very first few chapters – granted, by the time the body was found I had forgotten about this (it was a few days later, my time). However, when the puzzle was almost solved but the weapon still a mystery, of course I remembered again. And it was so b****ing obvious! Fair enough, a little specialist knowledge helped, but I can’t believe that Lord Peter (who should, judging from the rest of the story, have more knowledge on the subject than me) would take weeks and even months to come up with the solution. In this case, then, as opposed to the others, the problem wasn’t so much that I guessed the solution, but that the sleuth didn’t. And in some ways I think that’s worse. I really do not want to be steps ahead of Lord Peter. Really.

All in all, as you see, I have been a bit too clever this Easter. Problem is, I don’t really think I’ve been too clever, I think the authors haven’t been clever enough. I still think I’ll read those other Nesbø books, though. And I’ve just started Lord Peter views the Body (same narrator), so I haven’t given up on him, either.