The map inspired us here at Norvik Press to think about how London is portrayed within our books. We have zoomed in on two of our favourite examples of London in literature below.
Ana had got into the habit of travelling into the City at around four in the afternoon. She took the underground to Bank and rose up into the anonymous security of marble and glass. She felt at home in the City’s ivory-coloured concrete desert, where she had been a frequent visitor over the past ten to twelve years. She knew the streets, the cafés, the bars, the smooth upthrust of the buildings which blocked out the sky. She knew the well-cut suits and jackets, the high heels and the brief cases with the same label as her own. She knew the purposeful steps which echoed back from between the walls like the hollow beat of drumsticks.
She had finally arranged an interview with the HR manager. She circled around City Place House where Rower had its premises, and ended up sitting in the large high-ceilinged bar just opposite. She placed herself strategically at a table right next to the glass façade, so that she had a view of her former workplace. Sitting in the low armchair, she sipped her Campari soda. She leafed absent-mindedly through the Financial Times, and felt she was out of circulation. She recognised some of her former colleagues as they walked past on the pavement and cut across the square in front of the entrance. […]
She finished her drink and walked out of the bar and across towards City Place House and the sterile little marble square. With her smart appearance, the discreet elegance of her suit, the shoes moulded perfectly to her feet, and the stiletto heels which added three inches to her height, she looked like the career woman she had been in her earlier life, and blended in with her surroundings. It struck her that the fountain in the middle of the square looked touching in its stripped-down minimalism with the threadlike jets gathered into vertical bundles.
Their baggage had been sent on board and after Ory and Riber had said good-bye to their landlady, they went out to buy a few little things before departure.
‘Is there anything else?’ Riber asked, holding packages in his hands. They had walked out of a shop in St. Paul’s Churchyard.
Ory stood for a moment and thought carefully. ‘Nothing I remember,’ she said. ‘Of course we’ll be forgetting the most important thing.’ […]
Down the street they hailed a cab. Riber called out “Victoria Docks” as they got inside and off they went as fast as the moving throng of pedestrians and vehicles allowed. […]
Then the cab stopped. Riber shot up, put on his hat, pulled on his overcoat, stepped out and paid the driver.
Ory gathered her packages. Riber held his hand out to her and she jumped down.
Silently they walked side by side across the paved wharf that looked like an enormous courtyard, huge warehouses on three sides, reverberating with activity and tumult. The fourth side was open to the water, chock-full of large-hulled steamers and high-masted sailing ships; all the vessels that could find room were alongside the paved wharf, loading or unloading cargo.
‘Stop, Aurora! Here is the ship. Orion ahoy!’
‘Ahoy!’ came back in return, and a red-freckled man wearing a flat-crowned cap and a wool scarf around his neck appeared waving from the rail of a full-rigged ship.
–– Translated by Katherine Hanson and Judith Messick
August is Women in Translation month, and as editors and translators here at Norvik Press we would like to make a bit of a fuss about ours. The Press has always prioritised Nordic women writers, whether it be lesser-known classics like Camilla Collett (The District Governor’s Daughters) and Fredrika Bremer (The Colonel’s Family) or modern writers so far little known in English, such as the Danish Dorrit Willumsen, the Norwegian Helene Uri and the Icelandic Svava Jacobsdóttir. All of our directors and the majority of our translators are also women. This month we are highlighting three of our major women writers: Amalie Skram (Norway), Kerstin Ekman (Sweden) and Kirsten Thorup (Denmark).
Amalie Skram
by Janet Garton
Born in 1846 into a relatively prosperous family in the bustling port of Bergen, Amalie Skram had an unusual early life for a middle-class woman in the mid-nineteenth century; at the age of eighteen she married a ship’s captain and sailed the world with him and their two sons. Her adventurous life came to an abrupt stop when in 1877 she filed for an acrimonious divorce. Soon after she embarked on a literary career which brought her into contact with Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Georg Brandes and eventually Erik Skram, with whom she fell in love and who became her second husband in 1884. From then on she earned a precarious living as a writer, living in Copenhagen and writing novels, many of which have become enduring classics. She died in 1905 at the age of 58.
Amalie Skram
Norvik Press has published three of Amalie Skram’s novels, Lucie (1888), Fru Inés(1891) and Betrayed(1892), all translated by the indefatigable US translators and Skram enthusiasts Katherine Hanson and Judith Messick. The novels are similar in that they all have as central characters women who have been damaged by the contemporary double standard of morality, which encouraged men to be promiscuous whilst punishing women who wanted any sexual freedom – but at the same time they illuminate very different perspectives. Lucie is a girl who has transgressed the norms and is the kept mistress of a civil servant in Kristiania; he falls in love with her and decides to make her a respectable married woman – only to be defeated by her irrepressible high spirits. Fru Inés is a woman trapped in a loveless marriage and longing for sexual fulfilment, but finds when she tries to break free that a dreadful fate awaits her. And Ory in Betrayed is an innocent young girl who marries a ship’s captain, but can not accept or forgive that he has known other women; her probing drives him to despair. The settings of all three novels reflect the author’s wide knowledge of the world. Lucie is set in the Kristiania she knew so well, and brings to life the streets and buildings of that time; Betrayed gives a vivid picture of life on board a sailing ship, and includes a visit to a London full of dance halls and oyster restaurants. Fru Inés takes place in Constantinople, and the sights, sounds and smells reveal Skram’s intimate first-hand knowledge of the city.
Collage of Amalie Skram book covers
As a long-time admirer of Amalie Skram’s writing – I have written a biography of her and published several volumes of her correspondence – I am delighted to say that I am about to start work on a new translation. This is of a very different work than the ones above; it will be the first two volumes of a four-volume series called The People of Hellemyr (1887–98), which is set amongst fisherfolk in and around her native Bergen. It follows the lives of a desperately poor farmer and his family as they struggle to lift themselves out of poverty – a study of lives lived against the odds and the fatal flaws that are passed on from generation to generation.
Kerstin Ekman
by Sarah Death
Kerstin Ekman, doyenne of the Swedish literary scene, has been entertaining and enchanting her readers with a wide sweep of works for over sixty years. This month she reaches the grand age of 90, and she is still busy writing.
Norvik Press is delighted to be the publisher of five of her books. Her extended autobiographical poem Childhood, translated by Rochelle Wright, is a distillation of so much that we learn of Ekman’s life and times from her wider oeuvre. ‘You have to admire the persistence of time/ that it doesn’t grow tired and get stuck’, she writes, and indeed the theme of time thundering onwards is central to her ground-breaking quartet of novels set in a small southern Swedish town, sometimes collectively called ‘Women and the City’ but also known as the Katrineholm quartet, and originally published in Sweden between 1974 and 1983. These were translated into English for Norvik Press by Linda Schenck (three volumes) and me (one volume), both of us long-standing devotees of the author’s work. The series is essentially a women’s eye view of the changes wrought in ordinary people’s lives by events and innovations of the past century and a half, not least the impact of the coming of the railway to a small rural community, where progress and tradition clash. Ekman’s multi-generational cast of characters (who can forget Sara Sabina or Tora, Jenny, Ingrid or Anne-Marie?), artfully woven plots and fine evocations of time and place make this series thoroughly deserving of its ‘modern classic’ label.
The Katrineholm quartet
Our profound response to special reading experiences lies at the heart of Kerstin Ekman’s latest work, which is being published to coincide with her landmark birthday in August: Min bokvärld (My World of Books, Albert Bonniers förlag, 2023) is an exploration in twenty-four chapters of the reading experiences close to Ekman’s heart, from childhood to the present day. At the time of writing only the table of contents was available, but it is a great indication of the treasure trove in store. One of her choices felt particularly appropriate to me as her reader and translator: The Golden Bough, the classic study of mythology, magic and comparative religion by Scottish anthropologist and folklorist James Frazer. I have more than once found myself consulting it in a quest for details of myths, legends and archetypes that I came across in Ekman’s writing.
Cover of Minbokvärld
From Homer’s Odyssey via a good many nineteenth-century European classics to twentieth-century works by the likes of Philip Roth, Doris Lessing and Ray Bradbury, this is a revealing and substantial bookshelf selection. Emily Brontë sits alongside Albert Camus; Sweden’s Moa Martinson and Norway’s Cora Sandel rub shoulders with Thomas Mann and Russian greats. It is gratifying to see other Norvik authors finding a place here: Herman Bang, Hjalmar Bergman and – naturally – Selma Lagerlöf. Ekman nominates Lagerlöf’s complex Bannlyst, a cry of pain from the aftermath of the First World War that grapples with moral dilemmas still relevant today. Part of Norvik’s prizewinning ‘Lagerlöf in English’ series, this novel was translated for us by Linda Schenck as Banished.
In a pleasing footnote of literary continuity, it is intriguing to see that Kerstin Ekman shares some of her choices with the youthful Lagerlöf, whose discovery of the wonderful world of reading is described in the author’s semi-autobiographical Memoirs of a Child(1930). Ibsen, Dickens, Tolstoy and Turgenev feature on both their lists of favoured authors.
Kirsten Thorup
by Janet Garton
Kirsten Thorup (b. 1942) is the author of a large number of novels – and some plays and poetry – over the last fifty years which have earned her a central place in Danish literature. Her themes and settings are extremely varied and often experimental in terms of narrative perspective and plot. An early success came with Lille Jonna (Little Jonna, 1977), the first in a series of novels about a girl growing up in a rural family on the island of Funen; academically gifted, she battles to gain a good education – which leads to estrangement from her family and roots. The novels reflect the author’s own background and her experience of a similar alienation. Thorup’s most recent work is Indtil vanvid, indtil døden (Unto Madness, Unto Death, 2020), the first novel of a planned trilogy which narrates the trials of Harriet, the widow of a Danish soldier who has died fighting for the Germans on the Eastern Front in 1942. In order to understand his death she travels to Munich that same year, and tries to reconcile the brutalities of the Nazi regime which she witnesses at first hand with her loyalty to her husband’s memory and beliefs.
Kirsten Thorup. Photograph: Lærke Posselt
A few years ago I translated one of Thorup’s novels from 2011, Tilfældets Gud (The God of Chance, 2014). The novel is about two very different women: Ana, a successful Danish financier who is on holiday in Gambia to recover from over-work, and Mariama, a young beach-seller who accosts her on the beach outside her hotel. Ana feels an immediate bond with the girl; she has found ‘her platonic other half which she had been separated from at the dawn of time’, and decides to help her to go to school, eventually moving to London in order to bring her over to educate and foster her. But the situation becomes extremely complicated because of Mariama’s family’s demands and Ana’s own unacknowledged neediness, and the philanthropic urge ends in catastrophe for both.
The silos in Copenhagen, where Ana lives
In this novel Thorup takes up the fraught question of global inequality and our attempts to redress it; what are we doing when we provide so-called aid, and is our help really altruistic or just a sop to our bad consciences? Can our model of what constitutes a good life be applied to other cultures, or are we destroying a functioning social structure and leaving people rootless? The urge to help in the face of extreme deprivation seems laudable, yet it can so easily turn into another form of imperialism.
To order the Norvik Press books highlighted in this blog, please follow the green hyperlinks or request the titles you would like at your favourite bookshop.
The month of March marks both International Women’s Day, on 8 March, and Women’s History Month. In honour of these occasions, this blog profiles our pioneering women writers. We are very proud to have played a part in facilitating access to their work for English-speaking readers – frequently through women translators, and with cover designs by women – and can think of nothing better than inviting them all to a literary dinner party!
Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865) would be the ideal dinner party guest, as she would be very well-placed to supervise all the cooking! We recently re-issued The Colonel’s Family, originally published in two parts (or should that be ‘courses?!’) in 1830–31 and translated by Sarah Death. The novel, which is narrated by a no-nonsense cook-housekeeper with a warm heart and an eye for human weaknesses, now comes to you with an utterly delicious new cover. Pudding, anyone?
Camilla Collett (1813–1895) is a pioneer in Norwegian literature. Translated by Kirsten Seaver, her novel The District Governor’s Daughters portrays a bourgeois society in which marriage is a woman’s only salvation, and follows sympathetically the struggles of one intelligent young woman to break out of this mould.
Amalie Skram (1846–1905) is not for the faint-hearted. Her oeuvre includes Betrayed, Fru Inés, and Lucie, as well as her correspondence: Skram had access to the leading figures of the time, from radical writers and critics to politicians, so there’s plenty to whet one’s appetite!
Victoria Benedictsson (1850–1888) would be an esteemed guest at the party. Her first novel, Money, was published in 1885. Set in rural southern Sweden where the author lived, it follows the fortunes of Selma Berg, a girl whose fate has much in common with that of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Ibsen’s Nora. The seating plan would need to allow for everyone wanting to converse with Benedictsson about the radical literary movement of the 1880s known as Scandinavia’s Modern Breakthrough.
Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940): definitely a seat at the head of the table for her! Reading Lagerlöf is life-changing. A good place to start is with our Lagerlöf in English series. You can thank us later!
Elin Wägner (1892–1949): feminist, suffragist, pacifist and environmentalist, Wägner was the author of a prodigious amount of journalism, political pamphlets and prose fiction as well as an acclaimed biography of Selma Lagerlöf (see above!). The edited volume Re-Writing the Script: Gender and Community in Elin Wägner shows how Wägner’s texts outlined bold alternatives to the Swedish welfare state, and how her combined focus on gender and environmentalism anticipated much more recent ecocritical works. The title of her novel Penwoman, about the Swedish women’s suffrage movement, speaks for itself and applies to all the other guests at this soirée.
Hagar Olsson (1893–1978) and Karin Boye (1900–1941) would absolutely be seated together, and we would recommend reading them together, too: Chitambo and Crisis are the perfect modernist pairing.
Kerstin Ekman (b. 1933) provides a literary smörgåsbord to choose from. She is the author of Childhood, and of our recently reissued Women and the City tetralogy. Begin with Witches’ Rings: the central character is a woman so anonymous that her name is not even mentioned on her gravestone. You can read excerpts from Ekman’s other work published in translation by our friends over at Swedish Book Review.
Dorrit Willumsen (b. 1940), author of the novel Bang, came to visit us here at Norvik Press for a chat with her translator, Marina Allemano, about their shared fascination in the (endlessly fascinating!) life of Herman Bang. Bang is welcome to join the party too: he will make a most excellent speaker in the after-dinner slot.
Kirsten Thorup (b. 1942) is unafraid to tackle meaty topics in her work. In The God of Chance, translated by Janet Garton, she unflinchingly explores the problematic relationship between sponsor or donor and recipient. Scenes move from colourful depictions of life in a luxury hotel in Africa, cheek by jowl with desperate poverty, to elite designer flats in Copenhagen, and finally the bustling multicultural community on the streets of London.
Suzanne Brøgger (b. 1944) surely takes the prize for best title with her prose collection, A Fighting Pig’s Too Tough to Eat. Brøgger’s writings transgress genre and have often prompted comparison with her fellow countrywoman, Karen Blixen. This collection traces her development from social rebel to iconoclast and visionary.
Vigdis Hjorth (b. 1959) is an eminent guest. A House in Norway tells the story of Alma, a divorced textile artist who makes a living from weaving standards for trade unions and marching bands. When a Polish family moves into her apartment, their activities challenge her unconscious assumptions and her self-image as a “good feminist”. Is it possible to reconcile the desire to be tolerant and altruistic with the imperative need for creative and personal space?
Happy Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day!
Where has the summer gone?! With the reading-hammocks being folded away and back-to-school beckoning, this week we’re highlighting two resources: our new ebook catalogue, and recommendations for university reading lists.
Hot off the (digital) press, our 2020 Ebook Catalogue collects together all the Norvik titles that are currently available for you to download and enjoy instantly on your Kindle or other e-reader device:
Kirsten Thorup’s timely The God of Chance, translated by Janet Garton
Jógvan Isaksen’s Walpurgis Tide, translated by John Keithsson – a slice of Faroese eco-crime
We hope to digitise more of our backlist in future, too.For those returning to campus – in-person, or remotely – we recommend some autumnal poetry: Hans Børli’s We Own the Forest: And Other Poems presents a dual-language text with facing-page English translations rendered by Louis A. Muinzer. This work by the ‘lumberjack poet’ – a phrase I’ve never had occasion to write before! – is ideal for Norwegian classes. Students of Finnish may also be interested in our forthcoming selection of poems by Pentti Saarikoski, A Window Left Open, jointly translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah and also in a dual-language format.
The Nordic Council Literature Prize award ceremony will be held November 1st, and we at Norvik Press are looking forward to it with mounting excitement, especially as we have published works by two authors on the shortlist: Kirsten Thorup, nominated for Erindring omkærligheden and Vigdis Hjorth, nominated for Arv og miljø.
Norvik Press published Thorup’s The God of Chance in 2013, a story about Ana, a career-driven Danish woman, and her chance meeting with Gambian teenager Mariama. This meeting is life-changing for Ana; she sees something special in Mariama, and the girl soon becomes the family Ana never had. Because of this, Ana turns their relationship into an all-consuming personal project for herself. However, bringing Mariama into her life proves not to be easy for Ana, who has her own demons to battle, and her life quickly starts to unravel. The God of Chance is a story of opposites that depicts the gulf between European affluence and Third World poverty. Thorup is known for writing socially engaging novels that often take the perspective of the outcasts and the marginalised – and The God of Chance is another brilliant example of this.
Hjorth is the other Norvik Press published author on the shortlist. Her novel A House in Norway is one of our most recent novels. Alma, the protagonist of Hjorth’s story, is an artist who wishes to live a peaceful and undisturbed life that leaves her lots of creative space, but this peace is disturbed when she sublets the apartment in her house to a Polish couple. Alma wishes to be tolerant and open-minded, but finds that she cannot overlook the clash between cultures. A line can be drawn from the theme in this novel to Thorup’s The God of Chance; both of the main characters seemingly welcome foreignness into their lives, but only as long as it can be held at a safe distance, and when it comes too close, they cannot seem to deal with it after all.
Hjorth visited London for the book launch for A House in Norway in February this year, and delighted us all with an animated reading and a lively discussion of the book. On our SoundCloud page, you will find an audio clip from the launch of her reading from the Norwegian version of A House in Norway, accompanied by the translated extract.
That was the final straw. She didn’t get out of the car, but turned it around, drove home as fast as she could, impatiently, she could feel her heart pounding in her throat, blood roaring in her temples, all the clichés, this was how deep outrage felt, that was enough, there had to be limits, she couldn’t get home quickly enough, she had to get back while her body and her mind still felt as they did now, before it subsided even a little and she started having the slightest doubt; this time she called no one, she didn’t want to be talked out of anything or calmed down now that she was in full flow without any inhibitions; she couldn’t get home fast enough to express it, she forced the car up in the drive, parked it and ran outside and could smell burned rubber, she registered that Alan’s car wasn’t there, but even if it had been there she would still have done what she did, she ran up and banged on the door again and again because she knew they were in there, her car was in the drive and all the lights were on, she hammered on the door and didn’t stop until it was opened a little, and Alma pushed it open and stormed into the small hallway and glared at the Pole’s anxious face and her hair in old-fashioned curlers and she was wearing a singlet, of course she was, in the middle of winter. That’s enough, Alma shouted, this time you’ve gone too far, she yelled, you bloody well move out now!
We wish our authors the best of luck for the ceremony!
You can now read Kirsten Thorup’s The God of Chance, translated by Janet Garton, on your Kindle. More Norvik e-books to follow in the near future. Please let us know what you think! (norvik.press@ucl.ac.uk)
We are delighted that two authors whose work has been published by Norvik Press have been nominated for this year’s Nordic Council Literature Prize.
Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth has been nominated for her novel Arv og miljø (Inheritance and Environment, Cappelen Damm, 2016). A House in Norway, Charlotte Barslund’s translation of Vigdis Hjorth’s Et norsk hus, was launched this week by Norvik Press.
One of this year’s Danish nominees is Kirsten Thorup, for her latest novel Erindring om kærligheden (Remembrance of Love, Gyldendal, 2016). Kirsten Thorup’s Tilfældets Gud was translated as The God of Chance by Janet Garton, and published by Norvik Press in 2013. Listen to Helen Cross discussing The God of Chance on BBC Radio 4’s ‘A Good Read’.
Warmest congratulations to Vigdis Hjorth and Kirsten Thorup!
“a distinguished novel by one of Denmark’s foremost writers … compellingly readable” Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement
Norvik Press is looking forward to hearing Helen Cross discuss The God of Chance by Kirsten Thorup on BBC Radio4’s program A Good Read on July 16 at 4.30pm.
The God of Chance focuses on the relationship between Ana, a high-flying Danish career woman from the international finance sector whose work is her life, and the young teenager Mariama, two women whose circumstances are completely different. Ana first meets Mariama selling snacks on a beach in Gambia, and the girl gradually becomes a substitute for the family she has never had. The novel moves to Copenhagen and then to London as Ana brings Mariama to Europe to be educated; the girl finds the cultural shock and living with Ana intensely difficult, whilst Ana’s obsession with her leads to her own carefully controlled life descending into chaos.
Translated by Janet Garton for Norvik Press in 2014, The God of Chance was originally published in Danish in 2011 and is the latest by the prize-winning Danish author Kirsten Thorup. She is well known for her series of four novels about little Jonna from the provinces, which are also about growing up into the rapidly-changing Danish society of the late twentieth century; and Bonsai (2000), an unflinching account of the scourge of Aids and its devastating effect on an ordinary family.
If you would like to purchase a copy it is available in all good bookstores.
