The Season to Be Jolly

Seeing as how Christmas is coming up quickly, I thought I spend this post talking a little bit about just that. Obviously, it is a Christian tradition that has long since also been appropriated as a secular holiday (Santas and Elves often playing a more prominent public part than baby Jesus), and even as such it comes with traditions, both communal and personal.

Obviously, here in Sweden, the big celebration takes place on Christmas Eve (unlike the more Christmas Day-centred celebrations elsewhere). On this day, Swedes meet up, eat good food (usually a smorgasbord of ham, meatballs, sausages, herring, salmon, cheese, and whatnot, although this pescetarian needless to say stays clear of the first three) and get a visit from Santa, who delivers presents (not in socks, but in person).

One of my own (fairly recent, but nevertheless strong) personal traditions is to watch Tim Burton and Henry Selick's wonderful animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas on the day of Christmas Eve (i.e. before meeting up for the family get-together). For some reason, it simply wouldn't seem like Christmas without Jack Skellington's wonderful lament.



Music is, of course, also an important part of setting the mood. This year, I have made a playlist over at Spotify, entitled JJ's Xmas Playlist. It includes cornerstone tracks like "Fairytale of New York" by The Pogues, the above-cited track from The Nightmare Before Christmas and some classical Christmas songs like "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" in different interpretations. Feel free to check it out and enjoy it from beginning to end!

Unfortunately the Spotify playlist does not include a track I always put on every Christmas Eve (much like The Nightmare Before Christmas), simply because it is not available at Spotify. The song in question is "For Christ's Sake", i.e. IQ's instrumental version of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" (available on the CD Seven Stories into 98). For those of you not lucky enough to have the currently out-of-print CD, you can always listen to the song here.

Anyway, it's a busy season, and I won't keep you all.

Merry Xmas & a Happy New Year!

I'll see you in 2011.

Dipping My Toes in the Canals of Dutch Literature

After reading Nene Ormes' Udda verklighet and John Ajvide Lindqvist's Låt den rätte komma in (Eng. Let the Right One In), I have somewhat uncharacteristically stuck to books in Swedish for my recreational reading this autumn. Having said, I should also state that I have not only been reading Swedish books, but also translations. In particular, I have been dipping my toes in the canals of Dutch literature, something which I think was long overdue. I have had a number of Dutch books in Swedish translation waiting on my shelves for quite some time (and while quite a few remain, the number has been reduced, at least), and what I have read so far has been really enjoyable.

My first Dutch literary acquaintance was Cees Nooteboom's novel Paradijs verloren (translated into Swedish by Per Holmer as Paradiset förlorat; Eng. title Lost Paradise). This short novel is divided into two halves (eventually connected through chance meetings); where the first half deals with the story of Alma, a young Brazilian woman who makes a pilgrimage to Australia with her best friend Almut after having suffered a particularly savage rape experience. This part of the novel focuses on questions of art and culture, both of which are also tied into the Romantic dream of aboriginal mythology and cosmology. Alma desperately seeks her childhood dreams of the presumably pure innocence of the these categories, which in reality can never quite be captured in such terms.

The second half of the novel deals with ageing literary critic Erik Zondag, whose reluctant visit to a retreat we are invited to join. Literature and the human condition are here fore-fronted by Nooteboom, and the chance meetings that bring his two narratives together serve to highlight this as well. All in all, it is a very interesting novel and I will definitely be reading more of Nooteboom's oeuvre.

Second out was another Dutch writer of the old garde, who sadly passed away at age 83 on October 30 this year, Harry Mulisch. I had a few books by Mulisch waiting on my shelves, but after a recommendation from a friend, I opted to begin with De Aanslag (translated into Swedish by Ingrid Wikén Bonde as Överfallet; Eng. title The Assault). It is the story of how a single horrible event, generated through a number of chance occurrences, shapes the entire life of the protagonist Anton Steenwijk.

On an evening in January, 1945, Anton's life is turned upside down when an infamous policeman and known Nazi collaborator is shot dead in front of the house of his neighbours, the Kortewegs, who move the body so that it is placed in front the Steenwijks' house. As a result, Anton loses his parents and his brother, and is placed in the care of his uncle and aunt after a harrowing experience.

Divided into five sections, set in five different time periods respectively (1945, 1952, 1956, 1966 and 1981), the novel follows Anton through his life and more specifically focuses on four chance encounters which all relate back to the traumatic events he so clearly is trying not to think about. These are accidental meetings with people who in one way or another played a part in that fateful evening's events (e.g. the son of the murdered policeman, the resistance fighter who shot the policeman, and the daughter of the neighbour who moved the body). The book is a depiction of the Second World War in the Netherlands, and its far-reaching impact on the Dutch people, as well as a crime novel or psychological thriller of sorts. Mulisch's writing drew me in, and made me contemplate difficult and sometimes troubling moral issues. He is most definitely an author I would urge anyone to read, and whom I will surely return to myself as well.

Finally, I am currently reading Anna Enquist's short story collection De kwetsuur (translated into Swedish by the aforementioned Per Holmer as Blessyr; Eng. title The Injury). Thus far I have read three out of ten stories, and they are quite impressive little pieces and highly recommended. Situated in different periods in Dutch history, these tales nevertheless focuses on individual humans and their life stories, or perhaps more accurately episodes of some kind of significance in these life stories.

When I am finished with Enquist's stories, I will most likely take a break from the canals of Dutch literature, as well as from my current reading trend (i.e. reading in Swedish), since there are many other things that call upon my attention. But rest assured. These canals will be revisited, because they have proved to be a very rich literary vein and they deserve much more than the mere dipping of toes.

The Devil is in the Details, or: The Irreducible Nature of Narrative

Yesterday, I had an interesting online discussion with a Canadian acquaintance of mine. It started off as a discussion relating to what I am working on for my thesis, but swiftly covered a lot of surrounding areas.

At one point, Joseph Campbell's classic book The Hero with a Thousand Faces was brought into the discussion. While I find Campbell's ideas (as well as those of many other structuralist thinkers like e.g. Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Julien Greimas, and Claude Lévi-Strauss) interesting, I noted that there lies a problem at the heart of this kind of thinking, namely that it can easily reduce everything too much. It is not difficult to reduce the elements of narratives to the point where we can say that there only exists a very limited number of stories in the world and that any given narrative is just an interpretation of one of these stories. However, narrative (be it in literature, comics, film, music or otherwise) is in some sense irreducible. Reducing a narrative alters it, and altering it makes it into something other than what it was.

Consider the old saying, "the Devil is in the details." As it turns out, I would argue, narrative too is in the details (whether or not this, in fact, would imply that all narration is satanic or that narrative is the Devil's tool, this literary Satanist will leave unsaid). This is why abridged versions like Reader's Digest or summaries like York Notes strictly speaking does not work. Oh, don't get me wrong, I am sure that York Notes have saved many a stressed out student on more than one occasion and that there have been many people who have enjoyed abridged versions in their day, but it nevertheless raises the question of what they have read.

Reading (or watching) narratives is not simply a process of taking in information. It is about making a journey of a kind – an inner journey that can only take place in the meeting between the reader (or viewer) and any given narrative. Maybe one could even argue that any such encounter is temporally bound within the reader's (or viewer's) life span; that is, that who we are at the moment of the encounter most likely affects how we interpret that encounter – how we read the narrative.

Once again, this is not to say that the structuralists were wrong, or that the study of genres, types and the grammar of narrative is a vain effort, far from it. It is rather, perhaps, my way of saying that we need to remember that, while this repetition of a few stories keeps playing out before us, each narrative is in some sense its own entity. And perhaps we need to look not only on the components that make each narrative like another, but also on the (sometimes very fine and minute) differences that set them apart.