[Nurba]

A nameless girl from Reykjavik is traveling away from home for the first time of her life. She is all alone, only 9 and already overwhelmed by homesickness. Her parents are sending her to the country as a punishment for some petty shoplifting. She is to stay at a farm all summer and earn her keep by working there. The farmer and his wife are indifferent, distant people. The farmhand is lonely and obsessed by sex and no fit companion for a little girl. The rebellious daughter (back from university) has her own problems and demons. There is little talking, feelings are suppressed. Contacts with the neighbouring farms are scarce, except for the spying on each other with binoculars and the get together at the annual district festival where all the farmer's families get staggeringly drunk together. Obviously country life is not all that idyllic.
The girl is aware that she has done something wrong and tries to take her utterly unfamiliar new world as it comes. The author makes us see this world through the eyes of a child who is not yet capable of analysis and introspection. She experiences her surrounding mainly through the senses and attempts to make sense of it by means of her imagination. This is the aspect of the book that I liked best, not Bergsson's pessimistic vision of the Icelandic countryside, but his spot-on expression of the mental life of a lonely little girl who finds herself in unknown, bewildering surroundings and tries to make the best of it. The world she has been exiled to may be rather harsh but in the landscape and the animals she is also able to see poetry. Her only means of escape therefore is using her imagination. Beautifully written and completely lacking in clich?s.

[ehib8yPc]

Thanks, Anna, for drawing our attention to this novel, which appears to be a "normal" novel, not a crime novel. I note, in the Icelandic Wikipedia article, the phrase:

Verk hans hafa veri? ??dd ? b?lg?rsku, d?nsku, eistnesku, finnsku, fr?nsku, lith??sku, norsku, sp?nsku og ??sku. The expression " ??dd ?" means "translated into". As usual, the English language is conspicuous by its absence. "The Swan" appeared in 1991, so it's nice to see that it's at least being brought to the attention of English-speakers, thanks to Anna. Are you in any way connected with the Scandinavian Translation and Information Bureau, or the "Scandinavian Newsletter" which I was just drawing some other British people's attention to?

I have had some contact recently with Roald van Elswijk, who has translated a collection of Icelandic and one of Faroese poetry and works at Groningen University.

[Nurba]

Eric, I have no connection with Scandinavian Translation and Information Bureau, or the "Scandinavian Newsletter". I don't even speak a word of Scandinavian and I know very little of Scandinavian literature. It's just that I became enchanted with Iceland after visiting it in the 1990s. I plan to review another Icelandic work of fiction soon (Sj?n's novella The Blue Fox), because I think it's a shame that people over here only seem to read crime novels from Scandinavia.

[ehib8yPc]

So, Anna, you and the centre for Scandinavian co-existing in Groningen is pure co-incidence, as I now understand.

Your said:
I plan to review another Icelandic work of fiction soon (Sj?n's novella The Blue Fox), because I think it's a shame that people over here only seem to read crime novels from Scandinavia. I'm looking forward to your review of "The Blue Fox", as you've done for "The Swan". I'm going to read the former novel myself soon. Will you be reading it in Dutch or English? I believe that the Breda publishing house De Geus does quite a lot of Scandinavian books.

I agree entirely with the sentiment of the above quote. There has been an almost hysterical push to turn the whole of Scandinavian literature into a source from which to mine (i.e. uitgraven) dark, gloomy crime novels where people get murdered, and the criminal has to be found. This orgy in crime novels is a purely commercial calculation, i.e. making as much money as possible for publishing houses.

There must be so many interesting Icelandic authors, beyond Bergsson, Laxness and Sj?n, that give foreign readers insights into Iceland, Icelanders and their mentality, Icelandic life (beyond another clich? matter: the bank meltdown on Iceland). Crime novels can be well-written, as Valdi suggests elsewhere (some of the sagas are almost crime novels, with a legal background!), but I would personally much prefer to read non-crime literature. Valdi has also explained, very helpfully, something about non-criminal Icelandic authors...

I'm an idealist, and would only translate a crime novel from any country if I really needed the money. You're lucky, you've got your career in law. So you can read what you want, without having to think of money.

[Nurba]

Eric, I read the English translation, because I find translations by De Geus somewhat uneven in quality. Some are alright, some are really lousy. On the whole English publishing houses usually have better translations than our Dutch publishers.
Personally I don't understand the present obsession with Scandinavian crime novels either. And the dramatizations on tv are even worse - all that darkness and gloom, all those divorced detectives who drink too much... There must be more to Scandinavia than that.