This review is of the translation by Jesse Muir (London: Hodder Brothers, 1894). The book can be read here.

In Praise of the “Naive” Book Review One way in which I hope to distinguish the book reviews on this site from those to be found on other sites is to abandon any pretensions of expertise–that is, to pitch my review at the level of someone who knows just as little about the subject matter as I do. This is a major contrast from what one finds in academic writing, or even in many reviews one reads in the literary press: there the purpose is for the author to establish ethos by giving as much an impression of command of the subject matter as possible. We don’t want to hear about your process of finding information, goes the refrain. We want to know what you actually found. One perhaps unintended effect of hiding from the reader the steps whereby knowledge was obtained, is that it can intimidate the readers out of seeking that same knowledge for themselves. Knowledge is rendered inaccessible–you aren’t the great writer on a pedestal, this is not for you. One of my goals for this website is to create something quite the opposite of that: a website where I show the reader how I came by the information I’m presenting to them. By removing the mystery from my process, I hope to gain readers who feel empowered to join with me in an ongoing conversation about old books.

The Visionary: My Entrée Into Norwegian Literature

Jonas Lie (1833 – 1908)[note]Not to be confused with his nephew, the Norwegian-American painter of the same name.[/note] is considered one of “Four Greats” of 19th century Norwegian literature.[note]The other three are Alexander Kielland, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, and–the most well-known 19th century Norwegian writer to English speakers–Henrik Ibsen.[/note] Prior to reading Lie’s first novel, The Visionary (and consulting some companion texts, which I’ll mention later) I knew precious little about life in Norway in the 19th century, much less anything about Norwegian literature.

If you asked most Americans–including myself, prior to a couple weeks ago–what they know about Norway, Sweden, and Finland (the three countries that make up Scandinavia) you would hear some of the following clichés: Scandinavians make thin, straight-legged furniture that you can buy at IKEA, write dark robotic-sounding pop songs, and have social democracies with free healthcare. This all has something to do with the fact that Scandinavia–aside from being generally European (with all that entails, to your average American)–is also situated at a very northerly latitude, and therefore is dark and cold. The darkness and the coldness are emphasized when the discussion turns to Scandinavian crime fiction like Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, or the relatively high rate of suicide in Scandinavian countries. If you were to ask specifically about Norway, what would come to mind for most Americans are tales of the Vikings, Norse mythology, and epic sagas.

Of the 19th century life of Norway, we are less familiar, though more well-read readers will know one Scandinavian writer here or there, Henrik Ibsen or August Strindberg perhaps, Knut Hamsun for the more Modernistically-inclined, or (speaking of a present-day author) Karl Ove Knaussgard. Jonas Lie, by contrast, has never been remotely as famous in the English-speaking world as any of these writers, even if, as Lie’s translator Jessie Muir argues, “Ibsen and Björnson may be better known in England, in America, and on the Continent of Europe, but Jonas Lie is dearer to the Norwegian heart.” This begs the question: What is it about Lie’s work that endears him to Norwegians and makes his work essentially Norwegian? I decided to start with Lie’s first book, The Visionary or Pictures from the Nordland (Den Fremsynte), to find out.

Lie starts his first novel by getting his readers out of the house. Frederick, the narrator we open the book with, is one of that strange type of grown man who likes to run around in the rain and get soaking wet; on this occasion, however, he is out in the rain because he is going to meet an old friend from his school days. We are then introduced to the protagonist of the book, David Holst, who Frederick finds a broken middle-aged man on the verge of death. Frederick and his wife go to David’s house every day to treat him. She tells Frederick after one trip that what’s killing David is “unrequited love.” David meanwhile tells Frederick that he has written a memoir of his life because, “You have a right to know him who has been your friend.” After David passes on to the next life, Frederick and the reader are given the memoir which constitutes the rest of the novel.

But instead of starting directly to tell the story of his life, David begins his memoir with an introduction, telling readers about the far northern district of Norway he came from, the beautiful, terrifying, awe-inspiring Nordland. We are given to understand that life in the Nordland is far different than life in Norway’s more cosmopolitan south. Norway, geographically, is a long strip of coastal land which–due to a variety of factors, including its high mountain ranges, its position along the Gulf Stream, and its position along the Arctic circle–is marked by wildly different climatic conditions in different parts of the country. The south experiences weather very similar to much of the European mainland, and is home to the Norwegian capital of Kristiania (modern-day Oslo). Southern Norway has always had deep cultural ties to the rest of Europe, particularly Denmark, which was the senior partner in a personal union between it, Sweden, and Norway for almost 400 years, with Norway only becoming independent of Danish control in 1815. Since that time, the political and social life of southern Norway had been a tug-of-war between the pro-Danish faction and a faction of Norwegian nationalists who wished to be independent from Denmark not only politically, but also culturally. This entailed a literature that celebrated the Norwegian peasant and the heroes of old sagas, and this literature found its first true champion in the early novels and plays of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

In the southern cultural milieu, David cannot help feeling like an outsider. He is a Nordlander from the remotest region of Norway, and his first chapter presents a series of boastful comparisons between north and south:

[Southerners] talk here of fishing, and are pleased with a few poor cod and whiting. A Nordlander understands by fishing a haul of a thousand fish; he thinks of the millions of Lofoten and Finmark, and of an overwhelming variety of species, of whales, spouting through the sounds, and driving great shoals of fish before them, as well as of the very smallest creatures of the deep.
. . .
When a Nordlander speaks of birds he does not mean as they do here, only a head or two of game, but an aërial throng of winged creatures, rippling through the sky, flying round the rocks, like white foam, or descending like a snowstorm on their nesting-places.
. . .
Instead of the fruit-gardens here, he has the miles of cloudberry moors at home. Instead of a poor, uniform shore with nothing but mussels, he remembers a grand beach strewn with myriads of marvellously tinted shells.

What distinguishes the Nordland is not just darkness and cold (the region also experiences entire months of uninterrupted daytime). Rather, what works on the mind of a Nordlander are the extremes of its natural conditions, the ever-day greenery of pines and cloudberry brakes that grow high up the peaks during the brief summer, the months-long plunge into darkness and Arctic storms which blow down houses and smash ships under their towering waves, a precarious place with few roads, no rail service, and where houses were separated by mountain crags and if one wishes to go to church or into town or make one living in the predominate fishing trade, one must paint a cross on one’s boat and pray to God for a safe passage. The experience of going from that life to that of the comparably milder South, Lie describes thusly:

A Nordlander, therefore, down here, is at first apt to feel like Gulliver, who has come to Lilliput, and, on the whole, does not get on well among the inhabitants, until he has screwed down his old customary ideas to the simple proportions of their insignificant life; in short, until he has taught himself to use his intellect, instead of his fancy.

Hjalmar H. Boyesen, a Norwegian-American author, translator, and scholar at the turn of the 20th century, argued that these two elements, his fantasy and intellect–the Norwegian and the Finn, as Boyesen framed it in the racialized rhetoric of his day–were two competing sides of Lie that manifested in the different stages of his career.

What stands out about the early life of Lie that finds its parallel in the story of David Holst is the overwhelming fear that comes paired with the fantasy. “In every life, as in every race, the God of fear precedes the God of love,” writes Boyesen writes in an essay on Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.[note]Incidentally, I am trying to sell a rather large, lavishly illustrated four-volume edition of Schiller which Boyesen edited and translated. I have found his Essays on Scandinavian Literature as energetic in handling their subject matter as D.S. Mirsky on Russian literature or William Hazlitt on the Age of Elizabeth.[/note] “And in Northern Norway, where nature seems so tremendous and man so insignificant, no boy escapes these phantoms of dread which clutch him with icy fingers.” Boyesen could as easily have been describing the childhood of Jonas Lie, the friend and schoolmate of Bjørnson, though both writers grew up in dramatic natural settings, Bjørnson in a thickly-mountained and roughly ffjord-carved district called Romsdal, and Lie much farther to the north in Tromsø, an Arctic port down dramatically situated on an island in the middle of a coastal strait ringed on all side by pine-clad mountains (a city perhaps comparable to Rio in terms of topography.)[note]Later on, another Norwegian writer, Knut Hamsun would also grow up in the Nordland and produce fiction marked by its own extremes of psychological tumult.[/note]

Boyesen calls the story of David Holst a sort of “Nordic Romeo and Juliet.” We are taken back to David’s childhood, told of his youthful fondness for Susanna, the daughter of a local minister who so happens to be feuding with David’s father over shipping rights. As David and Susanna grow older, they engage in the normal dance of lovers, finally pledging each to other and becoming secretly engaged. Two things stand in the way of a happy ending for David and Susanna: first, the feud between David and Susanna’s parents. Second, David finds himself cursed with visions. He hallucinates about seeing a woman with a rose, the same hallucination that earlier caused his mother to lose her sanity and never recover. When David leaves Nordland to attend school in the south of Norway, he is told that getting out of the extreme environment of Nordland will improve his mental condition; but being an unrequited lover, he finds that distance from Susanna only heightens his anguish. What follows are some very poignant scenes in love is regained, then lost, then regained–to further summarize would spoil the story.

One of the aspects of The Visionary I most enjoyed were the generous amounts of local color which Lie uses to explain life in Nordland to the reader. We see the lives of fishermen, clergy, and clerks, the recreations of the townsfolk and the servants, and we hear harrowing tales of sea-goblins and trolls. Lie’s sentences fairly fall over themselves to provide as much information as possible–as I was recording an audio book of The Visionary, I found many of the sentences continued a clause or two beyond a single breath’s recitation. He is most lyrical when describing the natural environment, but otherwise I did not notice any particularly rhetorical cadence to the narration as translated by Jesse Muir. (This is in contrast to Lie’s contemporary, the highly rhetorical Alexander Kielland.) In general, Lie is not so much of a prose-poet as Kielland or Bjørnson, but his prose style is certainly not tedious either.

The biggest defect I found in The Visionary is that it is so reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, a story about two prototypical teenage lovers whose desperate actions are taken to be purely the product of desperate circumstances. In The Visionary, by contrast, the characters reach their 20s and the plot turns in part on the supposed mental illness of the protagonist, David. Yet aside from having occasional hallucinations, it is hard to say exactly what makes David anything less than a normal, sane young man who likes stories of ghosts and goblins and falls in love with his childhood sweetheart. Susanna, however youthful and vigorous she is made to seem, seems entirely unconflicted in her love for David. When the local doctor tells David he cannot marry her due to his mental illness, Susanna’s reaction–to proclaim that her love for David overwhelms any reservations she might have–is a very stereotypical response for a 19th century female character to have, and it seems like an especially easy one here because Lie never really shows the reader any particularly ugly aspects of David’s mental illness! He collapses, he faints a couple times, he sees a woman with a rose–okay, I’ll marry you. But that’s just not how mental illness works; mental illness is not Prince Charming with a couple harmless hallucinations.

Consider Lie himself, who presumably inspired David’s character to some extent. Boyesen tells us of young Lie:

Throughout his boyhood [Lie] stuggled rather ineffectually against his Hyde, who made him kill roosters, buy cakes on credit, go on forbidden expeditions by land and sea, and shamefully neglect his less. Accordingly, he made an early acquaintance with the rod, and was regarded as well-nigh incorrigible.

Lie continued to be a volatile sort of character when he went to university:

Here his Finnish Hyde promptly got him into trouble. Having by sheer ill luck been cheated of his chances of a heroic career, he began to imagine in detail the potentialities of greatness for the loss of which Fate owed him reparation. And so absorbed did he become in this game of fancy, and so enamored was he of his own imaginary deed, that he lost sight of the fact that they were the stuff that dreams are made of. With frank and innocent trustfulness he told them to his friends, both young and old, and soon earned a reputation as a most unblushing liar.

Now here’s a story and a character worth writing about! Granted, this character is not as sympathetic a one as David Holst is, but he does feel more real, more true to the reality of having a mental illness, and more likely to engender many of the social complications (including romantic ones) that come with having this sort of personality. This is not to say that a love story involving our alternate David Holst cannot have a happy–or at least, sympathetic–ending. Indeed, Boyesen recounts that,

If things went on in this way [Lie] would have no choice but to be a bachelor. However, one fine day a most attractive-looking craft, bearing the name Thomasine Lie, appeared upon his horizon, sailed within speaking distance, and presently a great deal nearer. They became engaged; and were subsequently married. And from that day, the Finnish Hyde in Jonas was downed and reduced to permanent subjection.
. . .
Truth to tell, I know among contemporary men of letters no more complete, happy, and altogether beautiful marriage than that of Jonas and Thomasine Lie.

The real life of Lie stands as a somewhat more interesting, and more hopeful counterpart to that of his fictional character David Holst. Here is a person who overcame actual, discernable rough spots in his personality and subsequently had a very fruitful writing career. By contrast, David Holst ends up without love and dies alone and mostly forgotten. One of the virtues of Lie as a writer is that he moved beyond the limited vista signified by the fictional story of David Holst in The Visionary and in later novels would produce more complex and true to life characters. Nonetheless, despite its conventional plot, I found the book an enjoyable introduction to the locale and to the literature of 19th century Norway.