Stig Sæterbakken (1966–2012), one of Norway’s most acclaimed and controversial novelists and critics, whose latest novel����Dalkey Archive Press released in 2013, took his own life last year. A translator and a champion of literature, he translated Nikanor Teratologen’s����from Swedish into Norwegian. Here, Teratologen (aka Niclas Lundkvist) shares his insights into the man and his remarkable oeuvre.

The title of this article is taken from one of the first pages of Stig’s��Through the Night. The father of the family, the book’s ill-fated protagonist, speaks these words after his son takes his own life. And it is now that I truly appreciate their import. Because I don’t know. What do we have to talk about? What is there to say when sorrow cuts through your entire being and all you want to do is fall silent, lie down, and draw a blanket over your head in the vain hope that the thoughts of what’s been lost won’t grind down your own inborn lust for life? Should one say what the suicide’s teenage sister says in Through the Night when she finally breaks her torturous silence? “HELVETES JÄVLA SKIT” (HELL FUCKING SHIT).

The news, which came on the afternoon of January 25, that Stig had taken his own life, was a heavy blow for his friends, and an even heavier one for his wife and daughters. Stig was a good-hearted, sharp-witted man, a celebrated author, a gifted translator, an excellent literary critic, and a loyal, magnanimous friend, whose sudden disappearance has made me very sad, and reminded me how extremely grateful I am for all that he’s done for my writing; gratitude that, of course, I’ve already expressed to him. His essays and articles about my work are probably the best that have been written on the subject. He’s produced masterful translations of two of my books,��Att hata allt mänskligt liv��(To Hate All Human Life) and��Äldreomsorgen i Övre Kågedalen. It was largely thanks to him that Dalkey Archive Press has now published the latter in Kerri Pierce’s excellent translation under the title��Assisted Living.

Today I re-read Stig’s��Umuligheten av å leve��(The Impossibility of Living, 2010), a text of only fifteen pages that was published in a very limited edition, and remembered the strong impression it made on me when I first read it, and how I’d told Stig via mail about that impression. On the title page, there’s a black and white picture of Stig as a little boy, standing outdoors, looking into the camera. Stig writes:

Most unfortunate: that the boy looks so anxious as he’s standing there. As if he’s looking right at something terrifying, so terrifying that it’s impossible to look away. Is it his own future into which he’s staring? Everything that lies before him, literally speaking, continuity’s unbearable repast, existence’s inedible banquet—

Or, in reality, is it an old man standing there? One who’s looking not forward, but backward, one who knows that life’s already over, that what could’ve happened has already happened, and that it wasn’t pleasant, all that happened, and that all that’s left is to relive the whole thing one more time (see Kierkegaard)? And that the one thought that’s buzzing around in his skull is: This won’t work! Fucking hell, this won’t work!

At 22:34 the evening before he died, Stig sent me a few words in answer to my question about whether he was feeling better now compared to earlier in the month: “Not much. As you’ll soon understand. Glad our death-condemned paths crossed each other, Niclas, and thankful for the chance to work with your incomparable prose. It’s only too bad we never met and got to live it up together. Heilige/Stig”

I didn’t see his parting salutation until the news of his death reached me twelve hours later. When the protagonist in��Through the Night��confronts the most horrible and grievous things he can imagine in the Slovakian nightmare house, he says:

There’s nothing here. Apart from me. Everything is dead, I’m the only thing alive. I can do what I want, but that’s about it. Everything I’ve believed in and taken part in, they’ve only been my own illusions, created in order to conceal the emptiness I’ve lived with, where there’s nothing to be found, where there’s never been anything to be found, other than what I’ve been forced to imagine in order to endure it. [. . .] We live apart. We convince ourselves that we share our life with someone, but we don’t, we live alone, surrounded by others, who also live alone. None of what’s inside me will ever be a part of them. What they have will never be mine.

In the most insightful text I’ve read concerning Stig’s life and death, Stig is cited in an interview as saying the following:

To lift us out of our isolation, that’s perhaps what the greatest books do for us—the fact that they introduce us into an otherwise unattainable fellowship, into a greater connection, where our individuality, and therefore our isolation, is destroyed for the sake of something greater. And where we lose ourselves, more than we find ourselves. That’s the great thing about it.

That’s how it is with Stig’s texts, including the darkest of them. “The Impossibility of Living” circles in its naked pain and deep sorrow around the theme of suicide as liberation, and alcohol as a surrogate for the self-chosen death:

The need to become intoxicated bears a close affinity to the desire for death. Which itself is in the same family with an incurable ���Դ�ä�󾱲���𾱳� [inability], [. . .] vis-à-vis the realities of adult life.

For who should it be, if not the child in me, who constantly awakens the thought in me that suicide is always a possible way out, if things get too bad?

Having been a child is the greatest sorrow of our lives. We go around and carry with us a dead child, and so it is until we die. In that sense it’s already too late to commit suicide, because when someone goes so far as to wish for his own death, he’s already dead.”

Just hold the course as you steer down Absurdity’s Way, which ends in Suicide sooner or later. Let chaos reign, Parnasses rage. The cosmos collapse. Ambition wither away. Time flow backward. Petals fold up, flower buds implode and go to seed again.

Despite the fact that it was impossible to go on living, just as it has been for so many other sensitive and intelligent people who have died by their own hand, Stig lived for forty-five years. He gave people happiness and warmth, and despite everything, experienced much happiness—many of his books, such as�������Ի���Sauermugg Redux, are cheerful amidst the blackness. He’ll live on, in an ocean of tenderness, through his work and also in our memories of him.

“And then it shines: we’re all dust. Wait for me at Niemandswasser.” “The rest is silence.”

Translations from Through the Night by Seán Kinsella, other translations by Kerri Pierce.

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Titles Available in English Translation:

��(translated by Seán Kinsella)

��(translated by Seán Kinsella)

(translated by Seán Kinsella)

(translated Stokes Schwartz)

(translated by Seán Kinsella)

Sæterbakken was the author of the novels Incubus, The New Testament, Siamese, Self-Control, and Sauermugg (the latter three constituting the “S-trilogy”), and two collections of essays, Aesthetic Bliss and The Evil Eye.

was published by Dalkey a couple years back in Stokes Schwartz’s translation. It was reviewed in the by fellow Dalkey author Jim Krusoe (whose is most hysterical), who had this to say:

First published in 1997, “Siamese” is Saeterbakken’s third novel and the first of his “S” trilogy (because they all start with the letter S), and while the level of barrenness here is fairly stupendous, it seems also to be earned. Edwin, the co-narrator and the former director of an old-age home, has himself come to the end of his life. He is blind, paralyzed, incontinent, self-centered and stuffed with unpleasant opinions that he’s only too happy to share with us and with his wife, Sweetie, the other narrator.

Seated in a chair in a dark room of his apartment on an island of Orbit gum wrappers and dried gum (chewing Orbit is the one pleasure he has left other than torturing his wife), Edwin fulminates and decays. Sweetie comes and goes. There is rumored to be a servant. The building’s superintendent arrives at the start of the book to replace a fluorescent bulb (he also fixes the light in the fridge, gratis, and adjusts the freezer setting). He will return at the end to become a lodger. In between is the struggle between Edwin, fixed like a stone in his chair, and the fluid, ridiculously accommodating Sweetie. Each defines the other.

In other words, we are traveling here though the bleakest territory of Beckett, the haunted compulsions of Thomas Bernhard, the desperation of Saeterbakken’s countryman Knut Hamsun. But missing are Beckett’s closely reasoned wit, Bernhard’s rigor, even Hamsun’s frantic grasping. Instead, Saeterbakken holds up for our edification a nasty and petulant individual who never was all that much fun in the first place.

As it turns out, Kerri Pierce, a recent Rochester transplant and fellow Plübian who has translated including by Nikanor Teratologen, which contains an afterword by Sæterbakken. Since Kerri was a friend of his, I asked her to write something up for us about his passing:

When I got the news that Stig Sæterbakken had committeed suicide, my first thought was—the world is a less interesting place. Although I never met Stig personally, I worked with him on a number of projects. He wrote the Foreword and Afterword to two works I had the joy of translating, Tor Ulvens Replacement and Nikanor Teratologen’s Assisted Living respectively. He was always ready to help if I had a question about a word or phrase and I, in turn, had occasion to help him when he needed someone to proofread a text in English. Over time, I came to consider him a colleague and a friend, as well as a brilliant writer in his own right. It’s strange to think that his last e-mail to me will be left unreturned.

For more information about Sæterbakken, check out and

More than simply igniting controversy, however, Sæterbakken has established himself as an accomplished poet, essayist, translator, and fiction writer with more than a dozen publications to his credit. His novella Siamese, which was translated into English earlier this year, is the first installment in Sæterbakken’s “S-Trilogy” (so-called because all three titles begin with the letter ‘s’). Sparsely narrated in unadorned, clipped prose, Siamese tells the story of Edwin and Erna, an elderly couple whose relationship embodies a sort of degenerating symbiosis, a mutually antagonistic and passively spiteful codependency from which neither can escape.

Edwin, the former administrator at a retirement home, is now almost completely blind and living in self-imposed isolation in his and Erna’s apartment bathroom. Subsisting almost entirely on gum and flat cola, Edwin has forced his body into the most fetid deterioration, a squalor sustained—and in some respects, supported—by his hapless, nearly deaf wife whom he harangues and berates as a matter of sport. Isolated as he is—dependent on Erna for everything from changing his catheter to spoon-feeding him the occasional meatball—Edwin takes every opportunity to exert the substantial control he has over Erna, and by extension, his waning life. “It’s my world in here,” he states proudly.

Here, my word is law. I know this room like the back of my hand. It’s as though I have a map of the room in my mind, and I’m intimately familiar with all its sounds, I hear even the slightest movement…It’s true, nothing that anyone does in here escapes my attention. I need to know their positions and what they’re doing at every moment. And whenever anyone else is here, anyone aside from Sweetie, that is, I immediately have the upper hand, immediately score a decisive victory over nature, over what nature’s taken away from me, now wholly at ease, empowered. It’s me who dominates the situation.

Despite all her slavishness, Erna too finds ways of exerting her dominance over Edwin. While her husband opts for more obvious aggression and emotional abuse, Erna’s manipulations and quiet acts of defiance remain almost entirely undetected by her husband. For instance, Edna’s deceit about Edwin’s trusted physician, Dr. Amonsen. Although the doctor has long since moved away, Erna continues to pass along medical advice to Edwin under Amonsen’s authority. “He’s always seen Dr. Amonsen as his savior. His faithful defender.” she explains.

. . . I’ve always lied to Edwin when he asked about Amonsen. I didn’t know what else I could do . . . When Edwin asks me to ask Dr. Amonsen about something, I always let a few days go by before I tell him what Amonsen’s reply was. And as long as I say it was Amonsen who told me this or that, Edwin accepts it immediately.

In the course of tracing Edwin and Erna’s increasingly confrontational power struggle, Siamese explores the truly elemental fears and desires that motivate all of us—the fear of death or inadequacy, the frailty of the body, the need to feel in control, the desire for power. The couple’s relationship is one that also has the potential to be read as a larger, historical allegory. Consider a speech called “My Heart Belongs to Europe. Therefore It is Broken,” that Sæterbakken gave in 2005, during which he discussed the former Norwegian alliance with Denmark. “Our union with Denmark lasted over 400 hundred years,” he said. “The Danish rule is often referred to as the ‘400-year-night,’ an expression taken from Ibsen’s Peer Gynt”:

Recent research, however, has cast doubt over our conception of this long lasting oppression that we, obviously being the weaker half of the Siamese twin Denmark-Norway, experienced during the union…[A] considerable part of the culture we think of as being fundamentally Norwegian, as symbols of Norway as a nation, has been given us by foreigners, Danes mainly, the influence from Danish culture, especially through trading, goes much further back in time than those 400 years of Danish reign.

Without delving too far into Sæterbakken’s assertions about Norwegian cultural history, one can still appreciate the symbolism that he seems to allude to here, and apply it to Edwin and Erna’s relationship in Siamese. The metaphor of two mutually dependent and mutually destructive countries can perhaps expand the scope of this hermetic novel and give it more resonance for readers familiar with Scandinavian history. No matter how it is interpreted, however, Sæterbakken’s novel presents a challenging and frequently disturbing portrait of the balance of power and wages of control in any codependent relationship.

Larissa Kyzer is one of our regular reviewers, in part because of her great interest in Scandinavian lit. (Click her name above for a list of all her reviews.)

Siamese sounds pretty intriguing. And I wonder if the rest of the so-called “S-Trilogy” will make its way into English . . . (BTW, what is is with Norwegians and trilogies?)

Since his literary debut at the age of 18, Norwegian author Stig Sæterbakken has made a name for himself by challenging convention. At times, this challenge has manifested as an interrogation of the Norwegian nation’s sense of identity and its relationship to Europe. At others, it has revealed itself more questionably, such as during the 2009 Norwegian Literary Festival on “Truth,” when Sæterbakken, the festival’s artistic director, invited universally reviled Holocaust denier David Irving to be a speaker at the event. (In his New York Times review of Siamese, author Jim Krusoe suggests that Sæterbakken might have been reasonably motivated in this instance, inviting Irving in order to “see what would happen when an agreed-upon truth was forced to confront a pernicious, stubborn falsity.”)

More than simply igniting controversy, however, Sæterbakken has established himself as an accomplished poet, essayist, translator, and fiction writer with more than a dozen publications to his credit. His novella Siamese, which was translated into English earlier this year, is the first installment in Sæterbakken’s “S-Trilogy” (so-called because all three titles begin with the letter ‘s’). Sparsely narrated in unadorned, clipped prose, Siamese tells the story of Edwin and Erna, an elderly couple whose relationship embodies a sort of degenerating symbiosis, a mutually antagonistic and passively spiteful codependency from which neither can escape.

Edwin, the former administrator at a retirement home, is now almost completely blind and living in self-imposed isolation in his and Erna’s apartment bathroom. Subsisting almost entirely on gum and flat cola, Edwin has forced his body into the most fetid deterioration, a squalor sustained—and in some respects, supported—by his hapless, nearly deaf wife whom he harangues and berates as a matter of sport. Isolated as he is—dependent on Erna for everything from changing his catheter to spoon-feeding him the occasional meatball—Edwin takes every opportunity to exert the substantial control he has over Erna, and by extension, his waning life. “It’s my world in here,” he states proudly.