I’ve always been a big fan of Scandinavian literature. In fact, I set my phone to alert me on the first day the winner of the Icelandic literary prize, Hotel Silence, by art history professor, novelist, playwright, poet and author Audur Ava Olafsdottir, was available in Canada.
In Hotel Silence, Jonas Ebeneser, mid-50s and divorced, discovers that he isn’t the biological father of his only daughter. He’s adrift and suicidal. Too polite to want his daughter to discover his body, he books a trip to a war-torn country riddled with landmines. Surely, while he is there, he will be blown apart or simply disappear.
At a hotel that hasn’t had guests for years because of the war, he meets a few survivors. He discovers among other things, that he just might want to live after all. This book is warm, lighthearted, and isn’t meant to be a commentary on suicide. It does highlight how we can find connections in the most unlikely places. Although set outside Iceland, this was filled with a good dose of Scandinavian sensibility and strange sense of humour.
Why do we love books from certain countries or areas of the world? Surely, they are filled with so many different voices that it’s impossible to generalize. Yet, I’ve found time to read more than twenty medieval Icelandic sagas, and can’t make it through War and Peace.
After reading so much Scandinavian literature, I thought it was time to take a short break. I picked up a book from another remote island, on the opposite end of the globe. A Long Way from Home is a new book by Australian literary heavyweight, Peter Carey. This is a deep and intriguing book set amidst racial tensions in postwar Australia. It centres around a young married couple, who while trying to secure a car dealership, end up in a cross-country auto race, so grueling that many contestants not only don’t finish, they don’t survive.
Although it’s set in the landscape of willy-willies and billabongs, its theme of alienation and lost souls actually reminded me of Hotel Silence. But A Long Way from Home is a much broader social commentary. Here in Canada, we struggle with the representation of the treatment of First Nations people. We are just starting to scratch the surface of how the story of Canada needs to be retold. Carey, on the other hand, takes Australia’s representation and blows it apart.
I don’t spend all of my time reading; I’ve recently watched two entire series on Netflix. Of course, the first series, called Rita, is Danish, and the other, The Bridge, is a co-Danish and Swedish production. I’d recommend both. If you’re sticking to books, some of my Scandinavian favourites are Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg, Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, The Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson and Popular Music from Vittula by Mikael Niemi. Happy reading!