by Tomas Espedal, Translated from the Norwegian by James Anderson (Seagull Books)

“The Ballad of Denmark Square”

A car crashes into another car and two lovers die,
everything you want to die, is there on Denmark Square.

There is a grave site on the slope above Fjosanger Street.
There is a petrol station on Michael Krohns Road.

There is an empty apartment on Ibsens Road. Here lived a
Charlotte once.

On Denmark Square. Without Denmark. Without Charlotte, without Josefine,
without Olga, without Stine, without Suzanne, without
Pia, without Mette, without Amalie, without Maja, without Janne;
what do you actually do here on these streets without names?

Without the city. Just a place where cars meet as the cars
speed by. Just streets, no city. No forest.

No trees, No field or marsh. No animals. No
river. Just this endless stream of traffic that

flows that trickles that rumbles that meanders past.
That flows in –fast-flowing streams past the nothing square.

Tomas Espedal has created such a unique genre in Norwegian literature. Part of his work is all about confessions from his inner self and the daily occurrences in his life. The other part is about the poetic nature of each phrase. He tries to find his own truth through looking at himself. Nothing is definable in his writing.

In Bergeners (an allusion to James Joyce and his Dubliners) Tomas Espedal takes the reader to New York, where he is with his girlfriend. He travels to different major European cities as if he is on a journey. In a book that seems dedicated to place, Espedal often shows how difficult it is for him to be settled hence why he is constantly traveling.

He also meets with Dag Solstad in Madrid and gets advice on how to really look and see Goya’s black paintings. I am dying to go to Madrid now and look at them this way.

We must describe the city we live in, the times we live in, our discussions, our politics, our loneliness. We mustn’t lose ourselves in a made-up, hypothetical universe, a false literature, what we write must be truth, and we must describe what’s real with all we possess of earnestness and strength, I said.

The front and back cover of this book is also unique. The front photograph is from New York and it contains a half body of perhaps a writer or a student and the head is tilted a tad and to the front are some blurred windows. The back photograph is from a Berlin train station. Natural light is used. It is almost like you are observing, entering, and exiting all at the same time in different places when you look at them together.

by Juan Rulfo, translated from the Spanish by Douglas J. Weatherford (Deep Vellum Publishing)

Juan Rulfo was born in San Gabriel, Mexico and grew up during the Cristero rebellion in western Mexico. Rulfo is best known for Pedro Paramo. It is the novel that inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude. In his writing, Rulfo is fascinated with death and the meaning of death to those living.

The first story presented here is “El gallo de oro” (“The Golden Cockerel”). It tells the story of Dionisio Pinzon, who is unable to work because of his mutilated arm. He calls cockfights to make money. One day someone gives Dionisio a half-dead rooster. He buries the rooster in a hole and in a few days the rooster comes around, but then his mother dies. He leaves the town accompanied by his Golden Cockerel. He travels around putting his Golden Cockerel in fights around Mexico. He soon meets a singer nicknamed La Caponera. The Golden Cockerel dies in a fight shortly after and La Caponera comforts him and the two travel around together betting their lives away. La Caponera becomes Dionisio’s good luck charm and the gambling continues. Only when Dionisio loses his luck does he realize what is going on around him and once he realizes it, he can’t bear what has happened.

I really enjoyed discovering these lesser-known works in this book. One of my favorite short stories was called “A Piece of the Night.” It is about a prostitute who gets picked up by a gravedigger who is carrying a baby (not his baby though). The two of them walk through the night talking and just enjoying their time together and falling in love. When they find a hotel, the woman refuses payment and goes to bed alone. The way Rulfo writes this story is so relaxed and the shift into sleep and memory is fascinating. There is also a letter Rulfo wrote to his wife Clara in February 1947. I highly recommend this book to anyone especially if you are interested in Latin American literature.

Thank you Deep Vellum!

If historical fiction is straightforward, convinced of its own solidity, that the historical side coheres without the cracks of fiction, particularly the fractured narratives of post-modernity, then there is nothing to trust, naïveté or deception are in play. Done carelessly, plain facts mixed with the overwriting of a historical person to create the whole of a plot- and character-focused novel, leaves a thin fiction, easily undone by any inaccuracies and its leap over what is not and cannot be known.

Early on, it’s clear that Steen takes historical setting as an opportunity, a route opened to explore aspects of a man and life that reoccur in other lives and histories, in scopes miniscule and sweeping. The tale and its setting are neither a backdrop to make the novel stand out from others with a contemporary setting, nor a straightforward recounting. That Steen is aware that presumption comes along with writing about men and women who lived their own lives can be felt in glimmers and glimpses. Snorre himself offers Steen a chance to admit the complications. Snorre wrote histories and sagas, full of his own embellishments, and facing his death, he “began to wonder what his last words on earth would be. The ones he’d put in the mouths of various characters in Heimskingla [the sagas of Norse kings written by Snorre] would raise expectations of his own valediction.” There are consequences to writing the consciousnesses of those who once lived, and Steen sees that, in the risk of moral failing in writing a presumptuous historical fiction, there is room for moral accomplishment in writing a careful one. In his afterword, he writes “it is more odious not to engage in the fate of an individual, concerning the right of man, than not to do so.”

The fate is not only that Snorre has already been murdered, but that it was ever bound to happen: “On that same morning, a day’s ride away, it was decided that Snorre should die on Saint Maurice’s eve. Nobody breathed a word of this to him.” At this point we don’t know who decided this, or why. It feels as if no specific person or group did, simply that the decision happened, and then men were compelled to the actions to complete it. Even Snorre is dimly aware that something in the spirit of the world around him has turned on him, cursing Torkild, his smith, as he abandons the property, then spending his last days side-eying the rest of his people, wondering who will betray him next. It plays out as a dull paranoia: a rich, powerful man afraid of the weak and poor he rules over—but of course it isn’t paranoia.

As much as his murder is fate, is the inevitability of death, it is also the crushing weight of time, of history. This weight falls most heavily on Snorre, but if he were the only one burdened, the novel would not be the moral meditation that it is. Steen uses the perspective of historical fiction to take any life to its historical end. He does this with individual men, like a priest and his followers, stopped on their way to deliver a message to Snorre: “The ship they look foundered on the rocks off the English coast. The papal envoys drowned before help arrived. Here ends the story of the three messengers Snorre never met.” He does it with animals, whole species: “It had never flown. A short time later it lay still in the yard. It died without knowing fear, just as the last great auk would six hundred years later.”

Time and history manifest through Snorre’s memories, too. He is an aging man, given to dwelling—on his personal, political, and writing life. Steen drops the daily narrative to wander to age-old deals, plots, betrayals, affairs, and broken relationships. It is a historical recounting of facts and scenarios, while also a lyrical movement that suggests Snorre’s actions and interactions led him to this murder, even those not logically related. He may not have deserved to be murdered, but his personality made it inevitable. If along the way he had been a different man, a less cruel man, he would have more than these five days. This man made his son, Órækja, little more than a weapon, a crude and wild one that he can hardly control. Snorre does not himself kill, does not even necessarily order his son to do so, just points him in the direction of complicated situations that violence could, at least temporarily, resolve. Órækja reminds him of his own responsibility in this violence, so he drives him away, refusing him the love he craves. It is this that prevents this warrior son from being at Snorre’s side when his enemies are at the gate.

As the murder draws nearer, Steen begins to slow time down, with more departures from the day at hand, and scenes of action slow to a crawl. Snorre begins to disappear, already fading from the world, the historical Snorre replacing the man. Steen leaves him to spend more time with the men coming to kill him, telling parts of their stories. We watch Órækja almost stumble onto the plot. We realize that the woman he loves does indeed love him back, even for all she understands him. That Snorre is a cruel man is clear to everyone but him, though he has an inkling. At one point, he meditates on a legend he “never tired of.” It tells of a whale who killed all the sons of a priest, who then tortured and killed the creature. Snorre doesn’t know why he likes the story, dismissing that it is because “good” wins, but that it is unrelenting and brutal is a likely reason.

If Snorre has a place where he steps away from this version of himself, it is in his writing. This is his place of comfort. It is his legacy not based on harming or controlling others, though in his reliance on it as a retreat, that selfishness bleeds in. Writing became something other than a comfort; it was his way of hiding from the world. Remembering the last time he saw his son Jon before he too was murdered, Snorre too proud, too scared to open himself, focused on his writing “as if nothing had been said.” His life as a writer exposes his fears, his vulnerability held together with stiff, cold pride. That he wrote the historical fiction of his time links him to Steen, becoming unspoken compassion for him. Snorre as Steen creates him as a type of complicated man, unable to see his own confusion who can be selfish in the face of a God he believes in: “He invoked God’s name. He asked for God’s help, and then roundly abused him.” Steen exposes Snorre’s faults not to condemn, but to humanize.