Search results for ""norvik press""

Witches' Rings portrays the history of a rural society in a new light, tracing its development through the lives of working class women and children rather than authorities and decision-makers. The central character is a woman so anonymous that her name is not even mentioned on her gravestone. This novel, written in 1974 and now published for the first time in English, is the first volume of a tetralogy which follows a Swedish community through a hundred years of recent history to the present day.

Read more less

Herman Bang (1857-1912) was a sharp-witted observer of the society and manners of his age; with an eye for telling details, he could at one moment mercilessly puncture hypocrisy and arrogance, at the next invoke indignant sympathy for the outcasts and failures of a ruthlessly competitive world. In his novels and especially in his short stories he often takes as his protagonist an unremarkable character who might be dismissed by a casual observer as uninteresting: a failed ballet dancer who scrapes a living as a peripatetic dance teacher in outlying villages ('Irene Holm'), or a lodging-house-keeper's daughter who toils from dawn to dusk to make ends meet ('Froken Caja'). He can also make wicked fun of pretensions and plots, as in 'The Ravens', where the family of the aging Froken Sejer are scheming to have her declared incapable, whilst she is selling off her valuables behind their backs to cheat them of their inheritance. His wide-ranging journalism has many targets, alerting readers to the wretched poverty hidden just a few steps from the thriving city shops or the ineptitude of Europe's ruling houses - as well as celebrating the innovations of the modern age, such as the automobile or the department store. Bang was well known throughout Europe in his lifetime, especially in Germany, where his works were translated early. In the English-speaking world he has had little impact, partly no doubt because of his homosexuality. Even now, only a couple of his novels have been translated. This volume is an attempt to remedy this lack by introducing a broad selection of his short stories and journalism to a new public.

Read more less

Hans Børli (1918–89) was born and lived in the wooded country of Hedmark in south eastern Norway. His days seem to have been divided into two separate parts: by day, he lived the physically demanding life of a lumberjack, but by night, he turned poet and spent the still, dark hours writing. His days, however, were an enactment of his poetry. Borli's verse is alive with his experiences of the Norwegian forests – with the moods of sky and water, with the creatures that moved in air and woodland, and with the trees themselves. In a series of books beginning in 1945, he wrote more than eleven hundred poems. They form a poetic record of a life reminiscent in spirit, if not in form, of Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass'. This collection can only suggest the scope and richness of the poet's life-in-verse, but it includes many of his most admired poems. Sometimes lonely or even mystical, the finest of these poems bite deep like the blow of an axe. Louis Muinzer worked on translations of Hans Borli's poetry over many years and several of his translations were published in periodicals before this book appeared.In addition to poetry, he is well known as a translator of Norwegian drama, especially Jon Fosse, and fiction, including Finn Carling and the crime writer Kjersti Scheen. This book has parallel Norwegian and English text.

Read more less

The twenty-six stories included in this volume are taut, economical in structure, precisely observed and laced with irony. They include some of his most popular and well known stories: A Dog without a Master, a meditation upon a godless existence, The Fur Coat, in which a borrowed garment reveals an adulterous secret, and The Chinese, with its delicate depiction of loneliness and isolation. Shining through all the stories is Söderberg's clear-sighted affection for Stockholm, in all its moods – it is only too easy to see why Söderberg is regarded as one of the foremost chroniclers of the city.

Read more less

Nils Holgersson's Wonderful Journey through Sweden (1906–07) is truly unique. Starting life as a commissioned school reader designed to present the geography of Sweden to nine-year-olds, it quickly won the international fame and popularity it still enjoys over a century later. The story of the naughty boy who climbs on the gander's back and is then carried the length of the country, learning both geography and good behaviour as he goes, has captivated adults and children alike, as well as inspiring film-makers and illustrators. The elegance of the present translation – the first full translation into English – is beautifully complemented by the illustrations specially created for the volume. Selma Lagerlöf was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909.

Read more less

Satan has a problem: God has come to the conclusion that it is unfair to send souls to hell if they are fundamentally incapable of living a decent life on earth. If this is the case, then hell will be shut down, and the human race written off as an unfortunate mistake. Satan is given the chance to prove that human beings are capable of salvation - thus ensuring the survival of hell - if he agrees to live as a human being and demonstrate that it is possible to live a righteous life. St Peter suggests that life as a farmer might offer Satan the best chance of success, because of the catalogue of privations he will be forced to endure. And so Satan ends up back on earth, living as Jurka, a great bear of a man, the put-upon tenant of a run-down Estonian farm. His patience and good nature are sorely tested by the machinations of his scheming, unscrupulous landlord and the social and religious hypocrisy he encounters. The Misadventures of the New Satan is the last novel by Estonia's greatest twentieth-century writer, Anton Tammsaare (1876-1940), and it constitutes a fitting summation of the themes that occupied him throughout his writing: the search for truth and social justice, and the struggle against corruption and greed. Tammsaare combines a satire on the inequalities of rural life and absurdly rigid social attitudes with biblical themes, mythology, and bawdy folklore. The novel has proved to be an enduring classic of European literature.

Read more less

This volume marks the apex and the culmination of the provocative Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe's investigations into the nature of evil. Here the study moves to a broader canvas than in earlier works; the enquiring narrator explores not just European history, but the crimes committed by Europeans against the rest of humanity in the name of expansion and conquest. Cortez' destruction of the Aztec empire and Pisarro's of the Incas were crimes of genocide comparable with Hitler's against the Jews, and Columbus' glorious discovery of America becomes simply an act of colonialism: "The Indians had discovered America long before I came." His realization of European culpability and anticipation of the blood-bath that will ensue when the Third World claims its rightful share of the world's riches lead the narrator into a long plunge into the tunnel of depression, from which he emerges in a cathartic realization that human beings have not only an unfathomable capacity for evil, but also an immeasurable capacity for good; man is the destroyer of all things, but also the renewer of all things. The 25 years which have passed since this novel was first published have not diminished its relevance and its urgency.

Read more less

In an intricate study of relationships in which marriage is the only respectable career for a woman. Sophie, the youngest of four daughters of a cynical and disappointed mother, struggles against society's precepts and her own conditioning to be allowed to make an independent choice.

Read more less

The Löwensköld Ring (1925) is the first volume of the trilogy considered to have been Selma Lagerlöf's last work of prose fiction. Set in the Swedish province of Värmland in the eighteenth century, the narrative traces the consequences of the theft of General Löwensköld's ring from his coffin, and develops into a disturbing tale of revenge from beyond the grave. It is also a tale about decisive women. The narrative twists and the foregrounding of alternative interpretations confront the reader with a pervasive sense of ambiguity. Along with the narrative technique, the spell of the ring extends into the two subsequent volumes, Charlotte Löwensköld (1925) and Anna Svärd (1928).

Read more less

Kerstin Ekman's novel Blackwater took the world by storm in 1993 and has now been translated into over twenty-five languages. But her reputation as one of Sweden's best-known and most successful authors rests just as securely upon the series of four novels she wrote between 1974 and 1983, which are based on the author's childhood home town of Katrineholm some forty miles southwest of Stockholm. The first of these, Witches' Rings, which portrays the final years of the nineteenth century in a small urban community on the cusp of industrialisation, was published by Norvik Press in 1997. The Spring, which focuses on the lives of three women, Tora, Frida and Ingrid, moves the story on from the early twentieth century to the interwar years. According to Ekman herself, two major socio-psychological studies carried out in Katrineholm indicate 'that this was a community with which its inhabitants were content... I have devoted eleven years of my life to maintaining the exact opposite.' This is accomplished in a narrative of great subtlety and compelling power; once again Kerstin Ekman recreates the past with an authenticity that resonates urgently in the present.

Read more less

This is the most comprehensive history of modern Swedish literature to have been published in English. The book includes both in-depth studies of major writers like August Strindberg, Hjalmar Soederberg and Par Lagerkvist and survey accounts of the more important periods and movements, from the neo-romantic writers of the 1890s to the uniquely important working-class literature of the 1930s and the modernist lyric poetry of the following decade. The authors are all acknowledged experts in their respective fields, and the volume is designed and written both for the general reader, who will find it a valuable introduction to a fascinating body of literature, and the specialist student, for whom it provides an authoritative first port of call. The volume is also equipped with suggestions for further reading and a helpful bibliography of English translations of many of the works discussed in the various essays.

Read more less

One August day in 2008 the Norwegian Labour Party's most colourful MP, Arve Storefjeld, is discovered in a remote cabin in the country, together with four of his family and friends, all with their throats slit. This unprecedented crime in the peaceful backwater of Norway sends shudders through the national psyche, as the search for the perpetrators begins and people have to adjust to the terrifying thought: it can happen here too. The rapidly unfolding events are narrated from the stand- points of three observers who in different ways become drawn in to the investigation: Ine Wang, a young journalist who has just finished a biography of Storefjeld and realises that the tragedy has presented her with an irresistible scoop; Peter Malm, a judge whose ideal of a quiet contemplative life away from public scrutiny is turned upside-down by his unwilling involvement in the case; and Nicolai Berge, a former boyfriend of one of the victims, who emerges as the main suspect and a focus for the public demand for catharsis. Published six years after the trauma of 22 July 2011, when 77 Norwegians were killed in a one-man assault on the government offices in Oslo and a Young Labour camp on the island of Utoya, Jan Kjaerstad's novel explores the vulnerabilities of modern life and the terrifying unpredictability of acts of terror.

Read more less

The Nordic Research Network (NRN) was established in 2010 by graduate students of Scandinavian Studies in the UK, as a forum for sharing ongoing research and fostering collaboration across the wide range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives that characterise scholarship on the Nordic region. Held at eighteen-month intervals, the NRN conference has grown steadily and has provided many emerging scholars with their first opportunity to introduce their research to the academic community. Like previous volumes of proceedings from the NRN conference (Illuminating the North, 2013, and Beyond Borealism, 2016) this anthology showcases the scope of current research by early-career scholars in Scandinavian Studies. The essays in this volume originated as papers delivered at the 7th Nordic Research Network conference, organised at the University of Aberdeen in summer 2017, and explore how the North has been imagined and mediated as 'home' in literature, historiography, language and the arts.

Read more less

Powderhouse is a novel which is set in an asylum for the criminally insane, where the narrator functions as a kind of porter, observing and commenting on the foibles of inmates and keepers alike. The patients are a motley collection, and their treatment is unorthodox to say the least; part of their treatment consists of composing and delivering a series of lectures on subjects dear to their hearts, such as the history of witchhunting and the most humane methods of execution. The doctors themselves have their own troubled history; and the narrator finds rich material amongst both for his study of the follies and evil of which mankind is capable. Yet he is not just a gloomy philosopher, but also a sensualist, and the novel is relieved by passages of lyrical beauty as he enjoys the velvety summer nights, the taste of black bread and white wine, and the gentle caresses of his lover. This is the first English translation of this novel from 1969 by the controversial Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe, a man whose irreverent provocations of the sacred cows of his society several times landed him in a court of law. Powderhouse forms the second volume of a trilogy dedicated to exploring "The history of bestiality," following Moment of Freedom (1966), though it stands on its own with a different setting and narrator from the other two.

Read more less

This novel tells the story of the misalliance between Lucie, a vivacious and beautiful dancing girl from Tivoli, and Theodor Gerner, a respectable lawyer from the strait-laced middle society of nineteenth-century Norway. Having first kept her as a mistress, Gerner is so captivated by Lucie's charms that he marries her, only to discover that his project to turn her into a proper and demure housewife is continually frustrated by her irrepressible sensuality and lack of fine breeding. What had made her alluring as a mistress makes her unacceptable as a wife. His attempts to govern her behaviour develop gradually into a harsh tyranny against which she rebels in a manner which brings misery and despair to both. Amalie Skram, a contemporary of Ibsen, expresses the same criticism of repressive social mores and hypocrisy here as he does in plays like A Doll's House and Ghosts, although in a deeply personal way. In this novel from 1888, as in her other novels, she makes an impassioned statement on the double standard, contributing to the great debate about sexual morality which engaged many Scandinavian writers in the late nineteenth century. She also presents a closely observed realistic depiction of a lively cross-section of Kristiania society from the turn of the century, ranging from high society dress parties to arid country cottages to dark and dingy tenements reeking of poverty.

Read more less

Often referred to as Sweden's Charlotte Bronte, Fredrika Bremer (1801-1865) was widely translated during her lifetime and became internationally acclaimed as the author of an impressive series of novels and travel books. The Colonel's Family first appeared in two parts in 1830-31 as part of a series which she called Sketches from Daily Life - a title which at an early stage declared her lifelong preoccupation with the details of her domestic day. What was less immediately apparent to her contemporaries was her courage in abandoning the prevailing conventions of insipid romantic fiction in order to explore more profound social and moral problems. Her novel is now recognised as a sensitive exploration of the problems of a frustrated, silenced woman, a creature of strong repressed passions, in an era of highly constrictive marital conventions. The striking narrative style is a combination of the picaresque, the sentimental, the realistic, the comic and even the farcical. This translation of a classic of Swedish literature preserves the freshness and idiosyncratic flavour of the original. Sarah Death has over thirty years' experience as a translator from Swedish and has won the George Bernard Shaw Prize three times. In 2014 she was awarded the Royal Order of the Polar Star for services to Swedish literature. She has translated books in a wide variety of genres including children's stories, crime fiction, literary criticism, novels by Nobel laureate Selma Lagerloef and the work of many contemporary writers. She lives and works in Kent.

Read more less

Penwoman is the classic novel about the Swedish women's suffrage movement. Originally published in 1910, this was Elin Wägner's second novel. Having begun her career as a journalist, she went on to become one of Sweden's leading writers, her prolific output developing radical feminist and feminist-pacifist tendencies. The novel, whose central character is a young female journalist, offers exceptional insights into the dedicated work and strong sense of sisterhood uniting a group of women campaigning for suffrage. But it also explores a range of other issues affecting the situation of women in Sweden at the time, from the role of paid work to matters of morality, eroticism and love. The refreshingly disrespectful and witty style has helped make the novel one of Wägner's most enduringly popular.

Read more less

With high hopes, Captain Riber embarks with his young bride Aurora on a voyage to exotic destinations. But they are an ill-matched pair; her naive illusions are shattered by the realities of married life and the seediness of society in foreign ports, whilst his hopes of domestic bliss are frustrated by his wife's unhappiness. Life on board ship becomes a private hell, as Aurora's obsession with Riber's adventures as a carefree bachelor begins to undermine his sanity. Ultimately both are betrayed by a hypocritical society which imposes a warped view of sexuality on its most vulnerable members. Amalie Skram was a contemporary of Henrik Ibsen, and like him a fierce critic of repressive social mores and hypocrisy. Many of her works make an impassioned statement on the way women of all classes are imprisoned in their social roles, contributing to the great debate about sexual morality which engaged so many Nordic writers in the late nineteenth century. Her female characters are independent, rebellious, even reckless; but their upbringing and their circumstances combine to deny them the fulfilment their creator so painfully won for herself.

Read more less

Ypsilon is a human being reduced to the most basic essentials, a naked one-eyed brain floating in an aquarium of nutritious liquid. Through his consciousness we observe his obstinate struggles to maintain his freedom of action in this utterly dependent situation - to assert the right to express his anger, to fall in love, to run away - whilst it slowly dawns on him that he is a part of a wide-ranging scientific experiment. In this fantasy about a society which is scientifically only slightly more advanced than our own, the Swedish novelist P C Jersild explores the resilience of the human spirit set against the threatening Big Brother of technological progress. Like most of his other novels, it paints no rosy picture of the future of mankind, yet it celebrates the defiance which cannot be eradicated as long as the mind itself remains intact.

Read more less

Wilfred - alias Little Lord - is a privileged young man growing up in upper-class society in Kristiania (Oslo) during the halcyon days before the First World War. Beneath the strikingly well-adjusted surface, however, runs a darker current; he is haunted by the sudden death of his father and driven to escape the stifling care of his mother for risky adventures in Kristiania's criminal underworld. The two sides of his personality must be kept separate, but the strain of living a double life threatens breakdown and catastrophe. This best-selling novel by one of Norway's most talented twentieth-century writers is also an evocative study of a vanished age of biplanes, variety shows, and Viennese psychiatry.

Read more less

Fru Inés is a city novel, vividly evoking the sights, sounds and smells of nineteenth-century Constantinople. The city is a hub, a meeting point of East and West, where privileged Europeans enjoy a cossetted existence screened from the tumult and misery of the streets. One of the privileged is Ines, a Spanish Levantine from Alexandria, whose marriage to a Swedish consul has brought her a life of enviable luxury; but behind the polished facade she is lonely and unfulfilled, trapped in a loveless marriage. Her yearning for passion leads her to embark on an affair with a naive young Swede, Arthur Flemming; but their love is threatened from the start by portents of disaster and the threat of discovery, and Inés is inexorably drawn to seek rescue from the sordid dealers from whom she had been so careful to keep aloof.

Read more less

Pentti Saarikoski was a prolific translator and journalist, and a revered modernist poet central to the Finnish literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s. The inventiveness, warmth and humour of Saarikoski's voice have made him something of a national treasure in Finland. His writing is at once playful and political, drawing on everyday life and current affairs, as well as Greek antiquity. This collection of poems chosen and translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah charts Saarikoski's artistic development over the decades from his early Greek period to his politically charged participative poetry, and ultimately his last known poem. This dual-language edition places the original Finnish poems side-by-side with their English translation, inviting readers to explore the elegant craftsmanship of Saarikoski's use of language.

Read more less

Ann-Marie is a middle-aged woman returning from Portugal to the Swedish town in which she grew up in order to sell the old house she has inherited from her father. Memories of the past are everywhere, ensnaring her. She ends up staying in the house, alone with her memories of her father, an idiosyncratic character whom only she truly understood. She is also nervously awaiting the arrival of her daughter, and now realises that she has never really tried to understand her. With this eloquent and gripping story Kerstin Ekman concludes her epic sequence of novels, Women and the City (whose earlier volumes Witches' Rings, The Spring and The Angel House are also available from Norvik Press). City of Light is an intensely moving novel about love, in a rich and unusual variety of forms, and also a sensitive and thoughtful depiction of the way in which human beings approach life and one another.

Read more less

For poverty-stricken farm labourer Jan, the birth of his daughter Klara gives life a new meaning; his devotion to her develops into an obsession that excludes all else. We are taken from the miracle of a newborn child and a father's love of his baby girl into a fantasy world emerging as a result of extreme external pressures, in which Jan creates for himself the role of Emperor of Portugallia. Yet this seemingly mad world generates surprising insights and support. Described as 'perhaps the most private of Selma Lagerlöf's books', the novel takes us deep into a father-daughter relationship that carries the seeds of tragedy within it almost from the start. Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) quickly established herself as a major author of novels and short stories, and her work has been translated into close to 50 languages. Most of the translations into English were made soon after the publication of the original Swedish texts and have long been out of date. This Norvik Press series, 'Lagerlöf in English', provides English-language readers with high-quality new translations of a selection of the Nobel Laureate's most important texts.

Read more less

In this second part of her notionally autobiographical trilogy, Selma Lagerloef broadens the perspective from the farm where she grew up to include the people and places around Lake Fryken in her beloved Varmland county. The personal creation myth which she began in Marbacka continues here with a focus on the self-discipline and imagination needed to fulfil a childhood ambition to become an author. It is hard work that sometimes means taking a stand against convention but also a deeply enriching process in a home steeped in storytelling and books. The mature author reveals the roots of the young bibliophile's growing skill in deploying fiction to manipulate and embellish reality, producing a wryly charming, tongue-in-cheek account that we should beware of taking at face value.

Read more less

Are the peripheries the new centre? How do the 'debatable lands' of Scandinavia and Scotland write their relations with their national centres, and with each other? Is the story of the margins just a figment of the metropole's imagination? How have postcolonialism and postnationalism made themselves felt in the literature of the cultural patchwork of Northern Europe? In these sixteen essays, Scandinavian and Scottish scholars trace ways to tell the stories of connections, boundaries and localities that might go undetected by historians and artists in the metropolitan centres. Centring on the Peripheries opens up unexpected perspectives on cultural roots and on the routes between cultures, demonstrating that relations between 'core' and 'periphery' are in constant flux. It will appeal to scholars of cultural identity, postcolonialism and European literature, and to readers who delight in exploring the borderlands of the literary canon.

Read more less

The Angel House is the third in the remarkable series of free-standing novels that cemented Kerstin Ekman's reputation in her native Sweden during the 1970s, long before she achieved world-wide success with novels like Blackwater and The Forest of Hours. It follows the fortunes of the inhabitants of a provincial Swedish town familiar from the previous two books in the sequence, Witches' Rings and The Spring, from the late 1920s to the Second World War, when events beyond the boundaries of neutral Sweden threaten to disrupt the regular rhythms of life. With this sequence of novels focussing primarily on the lives of ordinary women, Kerstin Ekman provides an alternative, subversive history of the community in which she grew up, and gives a finely-drawn portrait of a town in transition. The Angel House is published here for the first time in English in a translation by Sarah Death, an acknowledged expert on Kerstin Ekman's work.

Read more less

Life in a grand Norwegian mountain hotel is not what it used to be; Norwegians have deserted the traditions of their nati- ve land, with its invigorating ski trips and lake-fresh trout, for charter tours to `the infernal south'. Sedd's grandparents are fighting a losing battle to maintain standards at Fa vnesheim hotel, which has been in the family for generations, whilst the young Sedd observes developments with a keen eye for the absurd and a growing sense of unease that all is not well. He has his own demons too, as he tries to unearth the truth about his father, an Indian doctor who died as Sedd was conceived, and his mother, who was `taken by Time' when he was a toddler and whom he remembers only as a foxy-red sheen in the air. Death stalks this peaceful place, as cracks in the polished surface begin to show. The first to die is the bank manager, who has kept the hotel going on credit, and whose demi- se has ominous consequences for the whole district. Then the new bank manager's daughter almost literally pesters the life out of Sedd; he has trained as a life-saver, but finds saving people more complicated than he had thought. He becomes obsessed with a locked room, which he imagines will reveal the truth about his mother - but it refuses to give up its secrets. Erik Fosnes Hansen's latest work from 2016 is a coming- of-age novel with a narrator who stands comparison with Holden Caulfield or David Copperfield.

Read more less

In Tallinn in 1946 a young boy is transfixed by the beauty of a luxurious cream-coloured car gliding down the street. It is a Russian Pobeda, a car called Victory. The sympathetic driver invites the boy for a ride and enquires about his family. Soon the boy's father disappears. Ilmar Taska's debut novel captures the distrust and fear among Estonians living under Soviet occupation after World War II. The reader is transported to a world seen through the eyes of a young boy, where it is di cult to know who is right and who is wrong, be they occupiers or occupied. Resistance ghters, exiles, informants and torturers all nd themselves living in Stalin's long shadow. Ilmar Taska is best known in his native Estonia as a lm director and producer. Pobeda 1946: A Car Called Victory is his first full novel, and is based on a prize-winning short story from 2014.

Read more less

Malin Forst is a precocious, devout twenty-year-old woman attending a Stockholm teachers' college in the 1930s. Confounded by a sudden crisis of faith, Malin plunges into a depression and a paralysis of will. Oscillating between poetic prose, social realism, fragments of correspondence, and imagined dialogues between the forces of nature, Crisis telescopes Malin's distress out into metaphysical planes and back, as her mind stages struggles between black and white, Dionysian and Apollonian, and with an everyday existence that has become unbearably arduous. And then an intense infatuation with a classmate reorients everything.

Read more less

Nils Holgersson's Wonderful Journey through Sweden (1906–07) is truly unique. Starting life as a commissioned school reader designed to present the geography of Sweden to nine-year-olds, it quickly won the international fame and popularity it still enjoys over a century later. The story of the naughty boy who climbs on the gander's back and is then carried the length of the country, learning both geography and good behaviour as he goes, has captivated adults and children alike, as well as inspiring film-makers and illustrators. The elegance of the present translation – the first full translation into English – is beautifully complemented by the illustrations specially created for the volume.

Read more less