Seagull Books – Lee Klein

In early 2022 I started studying Norwegian. Using Duolingo, it seems less like “studying” than a translation game, a memory game. I settled on Norwegian because it’s close to English and considered easier than German. Also some of the more memorable reading experiences (Knausgaard, Solstad, Vesaas, Hamsun) of the modern era have been translations from the Norwegian, so I figured I’d see if I could get closer to those sources.

Early on in my adventures in norsk, my wife was studying for certification exams required before she could start a new career, which surely made me feel like learning Norwegian has nothing to do with anything — no function, no point. Playing my language game every morning for five or ten minutes and again every night for fifteen or twenty minutes seems frivolous, a waste of time.

But lack of obvious utility jibes with being a writer as I’ve come to conceive of it?

Respect intuition. Follow instinct. Explore and excavate. Exercise associative intelligence. Re-animate reality in language (aerodynamic, alluring, with unexpected and sometimes amusing turns). Organize (control) the mess of existence. Pledge allegiance to the natural looseness of life. All to offer a silent, meditative, vaguely enlightening/entertaining experience that seems “effortless” thanks to considerable effort.

Along those lines, when I read Tomas Espedal (all available in beautifully formatted hardcovers with becoming dust jackets from Seagull Books, all translated by James Anderson, who also translated A Time For Everything) I recognize some kinship in his organic and intuitive re-animations of life in text.

All of which makes me feel like I’m on the right track, with the destination by nature unclear and not what it’s necessarily about.

Put another way, in short, det er reisen, dritthode.

Anyway, here are some brief impressions of all books by Tomas Espedal available in English translation so far:

Against Art (2011)

Published in the original Norwegian the same year as My Struggle Book 1, there are some similarities, almost as though, or so I thought while reading this, Knausgaard had somehow stolen and extended this, the way Jimmy Page stole Bert Jansch’s Blackwaterside for Black Mountainside, but also extended it, made it extreme, not so quiet, more of a show? (I want to write “that’s it, that’s the review.”)

Read much of this in bed, admiring it, but finding it too soft, too diffuse, the writer narrator imagining scenes similar to his own involving relatives in the past.

There’s a riveting moment when two dogs attack a cat, when a boy possibly has his head smashed in, but moments of violence are minor and rare compared to what feels like spare, intricate, well-observed but not particularly detailed or descriptive language crafted in a combo of steel and wax.

Best when settled in first-person narration about the author’s early writing days in Copenhagen sharing a room with a squatter girl he writes about (I read this section while walking on a beautiful day but it also seemed clearer and more engaging than the previous imagined sections).

Like Knausgaard, mentions Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams. A stray note about visiting Handke, but that’s it.

Against Nature (2016)

Loved this. Unlike the complementary volume Against Art, this read like it had been written in a burst, the sentences strong and perfect, with an overall sense of solidity, steel to the other volume’s wax (the POV in Against Art often seemed diffuse as he imagined scenes with predecessors?).

This one focuses on the relationship between an older male lover (the writer, essentially, is his late 40s) and a lovely young woman half his age. Some explicit sex scenes that seemed surprising and well-done, the chiaroscuro of the older male’s rough skin and the younger woman’s perfect smooth skin et cetera, the urgency and insanity of falling in love perfectly/realistically rendered, even if it’s the oldest story in the book of old stories older male writers aren’t really allowed to write anymore.

There’s a section about the author’s first factory job, how working was against his nature although he worked well. He recognized immediately that factory work wasn’t for him. And then it switches to a retelling of an old story (The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse) that parallels his own, albeit not quite with the same ending.

All this is crossed by a gripping story about the author’s first wife and mother of his daughter, an actress who takes the family to a mountain town in Nicaragua, Matagalpa, a town I visited in 1995 while traveling in Central America and left after about three hours walking around after getting an overwhelming sense of bad vibes, as though I could sense the bloodshed there from the ’80s. They stayed there for a few months before bailing as militia rolled through town.

But generally this felt like it read itself, not easy reading but the story and the sentences had a sense of inevitability, like they had to be written as they were and had a sort of perfection, even or especially when the writing seemed casual, open, effortless.

Awesome too that he and his girlfriend read Knausgaard in bed and toward the end as he’s in full dissolution mode he goes to a record store and buys the new Lampchop (not sure when the events took place but maybe it was “Nixon”?). Highly recommended.

Bergeners (2017)

Loved the first half of this, before the focus turned to Bergen randos wherein/upon I felt like the quality fell off somewhat. It really can’t compare to Dubliners — not sure why the flap copy even dares that comparison. It starts with the image of a waterfall and the salmon trying to jump through the powerful cascading water — it seems impossible but they do it — and this is understood as an organizing emotional, psychological, spiritual parallel for the author’s dual pursuit of successful (not in terms of $) art and life.

It’s best away from Bergen, in that huge hotel (The Standard) that straddles the High Line in Chelsea, NYC, or in Madrid where he’s gone to hide from journalists after KOK describes an incident at Espedal’s apartment in Book Five (great bit about Dag Solstad all in white rushing across busy streets), or when he wanders through woods in Italy to an older American writer’s house, a writer who blames his idyllic home for not being able to write. And then it really takes off when he describes his relation with an unhinged artistic woman and her insane painter boyfriend — and then his version of the event related to the rape allegations against Knausgaard. But there’s also some underdone poetry like streaming waterfall text and the bits about Bergen that don’t quite compare to the rest of it.

Tramp: Or The Art of Living A Wild and Poetic Life (2022)

Another excellent, enjoyable journey with Espedal. The title in the original Norwegian is more like “Go,” so “Tramp” in the translated title can be read as an imperative, a command, but also of course a description of someone in a state of roving homelessness (unhousedness).

The first section collects mini-essays on great writer walkers like the Wordsworths, Rimbaud, Whitman, Rousseau, interspersed with descriptions of shorter hikes. The second half opens up with longer walks along Satie’s route through Paris, a slower section with a friend through Greece, a fraught solo excursion in Istanbul, and a long journey on foot with a friend through southern Turkey.

He’s so good at jotting details, quick sketches, often fragmentary sentences, stray images, from which a world emerges. Really just a great describer of drunkenness, of going over the edge among newfound friends in far-flung locales. Want to say there’s something suggested about running away from life and responsibilities (mentions of his children but no reflection or analysis or description of them) but it’s just as much about running toward life and a sort of wide-openness, although not necessarily carefree, there’s always a shadow lurking, fear of death. Loved that he hikes wearing a suit instead of tech-synthetic athletic gear.

The Year (2021)

Up there with Espedal’s best (Love, Tramp, Against Nature), maybe his best. The tightest in a way. Not quite about an entire year, more like some moments in May mostly with his father on a Mediterranean cruise and some moments in October conspiring to kick the shit out of the friend who’s now with his ex-girlfriend/love of his life and a dinner with his father on the author’s birthday in November.

The text is presented as a 200-page poem but it doesn’t really read like poetry, more like brief bursts of language, organically proceeding and graceful for the most part, easy reading, almost like thinking or the textual equivalent of a graphic novel. Lots of white spaces between brief sections, rarely disorientating, maybe only one chapter break for autumn. Focused mostly on the experience of heartbreak and aging, lost love and dying fathers.

Love (2022)

Probably my favorite Espedal so far. The title in Norwegian is “Elsken,” which is the surname of a photographer the narrator sees in a gallery with a woman with whom he’s hiked for a week to Paris alongside rivers etc, the Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken (“His imagery provides quotidian, intimate and autobiographic perspectives on the European zeitgeist spanning the period of the Second World War into the nineteen-seventies in the realms of love, sex, art, music, and alternative culture,” per Wikipedia), and while in the middle of the exhibit they kiss for the first time.

“Elske” means “love” in Norwegian, so there’s a sort of word play, a double meaning in the title, an intriguing artful obversive balancing act in that so much of the book is about death, about deciding to kill oneself and then because of that advancing expiration date seeing the world afresh, appreciating everything, allowing the author to describe the colors of flowers and the taste of wine or whatever.

Clear prose, short sentences mostly, organic, natural, usually associative progression. The walk with Aka to Paris and the pages about drinking himself to death and about the death of his first wife are so vivid and well done, they jump off the page and everything achieves three-dimensionality and palpable emotionality.

The narrator is called “I,” but it’s in third person, so the name creates a weird dissonance in sentences with I conjugated in third-person instead of first.

Feels real, ends well. A lovely 100-page hardback from Seagull.

Would love for his earlier novels and notebooks to come out in English.

If not, I should be able to read them soon enough. For now, the Tomas Espedal video content is worth watching (images are linked):