The Nordic Translation Series

Modern lit from Northern Europe
From 1965 to 1970, the University of Wisconsin Press published its Nordic Translation Series. This collection of books presented works of literature from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden in English translation, thereby introducing English-language readers to the modern authors of those nations. The books in this series include novels, short stories, drama, and memoir. Each book typically has an introduction by a university professor that provides a brief biography of the author and some explanation of the historical context behind the work. 

I believe 16 books were published in the series. Eleven of those books are now available for free download. The University of Wisconsin Press has released these translations as open access books. They can be found at the UW Libraries website. Old Books by Dead Guys has previously reviewed all eleven of those books, and presents an overview of the series below. Though not every book in the series is a masterpiece, each volume presents a welcome glimpse into a corner of the world often neglected by English-language readers. Scandinavian literature (a subset of Nordic) has enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years, mostly due to mystery novels and thrillers. The books listed below, however, represent some of the highbrow literary luminaries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who are revered in their native lands. Click on the titles below to read the full reviews.

Denmark 🇩🇰

We Murderers: A Play in Three Acts (1920) by Guðmundur Kamban (1.5 stars)
Kamban was born in Iceland. He moved to Denmark for college and remained in Copenhagen for most of his life, although he lived briefly in New York, London, and Berlin. His play We Murderers is set in New York. As a result, it doesn’t in any way come across as particularly Nordic or Scandinavian, which begs the question, why would anyone translate it for this series? Isn’t the purpose of this series to educate Americans about Nordic culture? Instead, this is a pedestrian marital melodrama involving a jealous husband and a wife with a straying eye. There is a touch of Eugene O’Neill in this, but it would be early-career O’Neill, as seen in such forgettable plays as Welded, Diff’rent, and The First Man. A century after it was first staged, this drama reads as rather pretentious and overly melodramatic.

Finland 🇫🇮

People in the Summer Night (1934) by Frans Eemil Sillanpää (4 stars)
Sillanpää won the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature, the only Finnish author so far to have done so. This novel paints a vivid portrait of a rural community in Finland. Comprised of 48 short chapters, the structure of the novel is more of a montage than a linear narrative. The story takes place almost entirely over the course of one summer night, when Finland is lit by the strange midnight twilight of Northern latitudes. A large ensemble cast of characters act out the intimate dramas that contribute to the collective history of this fictional rural community. Sillanpää’s style strikes a delicate and satisfying balance between pastoral romanticism and naturalist realism.

The Woodcarver and Death (1940) by Hagar Olsson (2.5 stars)
Olsson was a member of a minority Swedish population in Finland that produced its own body of literature in the Swedish language, of which this novel is an example. A quiet young woodcarver decides to leave his widowed mother’s home and make a pilgrimage to his birthplace. Obsessed with thoughts of death, the pointlessness of life, and the futility of religion, he hopes the journey might help him to discover some meaning to life. This book calls to mind some of the soul-searching wanderer novels of German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse, such as Siddhartha or Narcissus and Goldmund, but drearier and less interesting. This novel is a bit too contemplative and navel-gazing for my taste.

My Childhood by Toivo Pekkanen (4.5 stars)
Unlike most of the works in this series, which have a decidedly modernist style, this partial autobiography by Pekkanen is a straight-up work of old-school naturalism. For most of this narrative, Finland was under the rule of the Russian Empire, and Pekkanen was born in a coastal town near the Russian border. After his father dies of a stroke, Pekkanen and his mother struggle with poverty and hunger that only worsen with the coming of World War I and the Russian Revolution. This powerful and poignant memoir explores timeless and universal themes of coming-of-age through a story that is specific to its time an place. One learns quite a bit about Finnish history and Finnish life in the process. While there are harsh and brutal aspects to this story, it is also suffused with familial love and a resilient hope for the future.

Iceland 🇮🇸

Fire and Ice: Three Icelandic Plays (1915–1955) by Jóhann Sigurjónsson, Davið Stefánsson, and Agnar Þórðarson (3.5 stars)
This trio of Icelandic dramas highlights three important figures in the history of Icelandic theatre, and their works included here depict three distinct periods in Iceland’s history and literature. Sigurjónsson’s The Wish is a Faustian tale of a driven young man who dabbles in black magic. Stefánsson’s Golden Gate is a humorous Christian folktale about an old woman striving to get her recently deceased husband’s soul through the pearly gates of Heaven. Þórðarson’s Atoms and Madams is a modern political satire involving imperialism and resource extraction. Because of its tripartite structure and the editor’s informative introductions, Fire and Ice is one of the more successful books in the Nordic Translation Series at educating the reader about the history and literature of the nation in question.

Norway 🇳🇴

The Fourth Night Watch (1923) by Johan Falkberget (4 stars)
Falkberget, a very prolific author of historical novels, is highly respected in his home country. As a representative of the regionalist movement in Norwegian literature, his writing exhibits similar characteristics to authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope or Emile Zola. This novel is set in the mining region where Falkberget was born, and the story takes place around 1807, about the time Norway won its independence from Denmark and entered a war against Sweden. The plot involves a realistic depiction of forbidden love, as well as contrasting characters of different social classes. Although this is not a religious novel, it portrays the significant role that Christianity played in Norwegian society during this time period. The reader learns much about Norwegian history from reading this book.

The Great Cycle (1934) by Tarjei Vesaas (5 stars)
While literary critics often classify Vesaas as one of Norway’s groundbreaking modernists, The Great Cycle is pretty traditional stylistically and reads like a naturalistic depiction of Norwegian rural life in a bygone era. This is a coming-of-age story about a boy born and raised on an isolated farm in the rural countryside. As he grows into adolescence, he chafes at the idea of being forced to take over the family farm. While the Norwegian setting is made intimately real for the reader, the life events and the feelings they engender are universally human. Though understated and modest on the surface, this excellent novel delivers a deep and powerful reading experience. It reads like a kinder, gentler variation on Knut Hamsun’s masterpiece Growth of the Soil. I consider this the best book in the Nordic Translation Series.

Werewolf (1958) by Aksel Sandemose (3 stars)
Sandemose was born in Denmark and moved to Norway as an adult. The “werewolf” of the title is only a metaphor, similar to the wolf of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. The story involves a successful but alcoholic writer who periodically comes into contact with a love from his younger days, whom he seduced when she was half his age. There are also some references to the Nazi occupation during World War II, but most of the novel is really about the characters’ love lives and sex lives. This is a work of modernist literature that goes overboard with its modernism, obscuring the narrative with self-indulgent and ostentatious artiness. Sandemose doesn’t present the story in chronological order, and the lives of these characters are a puzzle that the reader has to piece together. This might have been a more compelling story if it weren’t so deliberately difficult and pretentious.

Sweden 🇸🇪

Kallocain (1940) by Karin Boye (4.5 stars)
Though best known as a poet, Boye also wrote five novels, including this science fiction story set in a dystopian future. The narrator, a scientist, describes a highly militaristic society subject to a draconian bureaucracy called the Worldstate. The citizens of this land live underground under heavy surveillance. Written during the rise of the Nazis and Stalin’s reign over the Soviet Union, this novel is a warning cry against totalitarian dictatorships and the military-industrial complex. Boye, however, emphasizes the personal over the political by investigating issues of human nature: the need for love, the fear of intimacy, the allure of conformity, the poison of jealousy, the paranoia of betrayal, and the reluctance to acknowledge or reveal one’s true self.

Bread of Love (1945) by Peder Sjögren (3 stars)
This novel takes place during the Finnish Continuation War of 1941 to 1944, a conflict that formed part of the Eastern Front of World War II. It is based on some of Sjögren’s own wartime experiences. The narrator is one of a troop of 20 soldiers holed up in underground burrows beneath the ice and snow, surrounded by mine fields. This novel would have been better had it been a relentlessly realistic novel of war, but instead Sjögren softens the blow with overly poetical prose, a fairy-tale romance, and suggestions of supernatural forces toying with the destinies of man, all of which diverts the narrative from reality into the realm of fable.

Rose of Jericho and Other Stories (1946–1949) by Tage Aurell (2.5 stars)
Aurell grew up in Värmland, a rather rustic area of Sweden. Much like America’s William Faulkner, however, he writes about rural and small-town life in an experimental, modernist style that would appeal more to
big-city and university intellectuals than to the simple country folk he depicts in his stories. In general, Aurell’s writing is too abstract for my taste. These stories are often frustrating in their deliberate obscurity, but about a third of the nine stories assembled here deliver a moving story with characters that the reader really grows to care about. Overall, however, the book didn’t teach me much about Swedish country life.

Additional Books in the Series
The following books were also published in the Nordic Translation Series, but they are not currently available in open access editions (probably due to copyright and permissions issues). Old Books by Dead Guys has not reviewed them.

Two Minutes of Silence by H. C. Branner (Denmark)
This collection of short stories appears to be out of print. Only used copies available.

World Light by Halldór Laxness (Iceland)
An English translation of this novel is currently available from the publisher Vintage.

The Black Cliffs by Gunnar Gunnarsson (Iceland)
Out of print (in English, at least). Look for used copies.

Havoc by Tom Kristensen (Denmark)
An English translation of this novel is currently available from New York Review of Books Classics.

Jørgen Stein by Jacob Paludan (Denmark)
Out of print (in English, at least). Look for used copies.

The Hive by Camilo José Cela

Over 300 characters in post-Civil War Spain

Spanish author Camilo José Cela won the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature. His 1950 novel La Colmena, published in English as The Hive, is one of his most highly regarded works. Because of censorship under the Franco regime in Spain, the novel was first published in Argentina.

Doña Rosa owns a cafe/bar in Madrid. This establishment serves as the hub of the novel, where the denizens of its neighborhood rendezvous and converse. Spokes radiate outward from this hub, however, as we also get to see the characters in their homes, at work, or at other sites in the city, where the reader meets everyone’s spouses, siblings, and children. The novel contains over 300 characters who are all interconnected through a complex web of relationships. One would really need to construct some kind of chart or diagram to keep them all straight. That’s one of the things that I don’t like about the novel, because to some extent I feel that if the reader is required to do that sort of thing just to figure out what’s going on, then the author hasn’t really done their job. On the other hand, the reader really has to admire the ingenuity and intricacy of Cela’s complex literary construction. It’s as if French author Honoré de Balzac crammed all of the characters of his Comédie Humaine into the pages of one volume. The result is a collage of experiences that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The story takes place in 1943, shortly after the Spanish Civil War, which is referred to throughout the book simply as “the war.” Through the lives and interactions of these myriad characters, Cela creates a vivid document of what life was like in Madrid at that time. The novel is not critical of the Franco regime because Cela himself was a Francoist. I don’t believe Franco is even mentioned in the book; if so, no more than once or twice. The Hive was banned in Spain because of its sexual content, not because of any political commentary. The impressions of urban Spain that comprise the novel, however, do not paint a positive portrait of this time in Spain’s history. The overwhelming societal image one gets from The Hive is one of economic insecurity. Many of the characters are poor or struggling to get by. They must employ crafty strategies just to find the money for a cup of coffee or a cigarette. Everyone’s looking for an angle to survive and thrive. The women in this novel, in particular, are in dire straits, forced to work as prostitutes or attach themselves as mistresses to paying gentlemen. Married or not, just about every man in this book has a mistress. The depiction of morality and sexuality in this book is not judgmental but rather matter-of-fact in its bluntness and pragmatism.

The tone of the novel is darkly satirical. Among the 300 characters, Cela is representing realistic types of people one would find in Madrid, but he’s also making fun of them, caricaturing them. The feeling is something similar to one of George Grosz’s expressionistic cartoons of a crowded cityscape filled with ugly decadence. To really understand everything Cela has to say in this novel, I think you would need to have lived through ‘40s or ‘50s Madrid. I certainly don’t claim to have gotten all of it. The ending, in particular, left me scratching my head. Someone’s in trouble with the law, but why exactly? To an outsider like me, however, this novel really succeeds at imparting a vivid impression of what life was like in this particular time and place. When I read foreign literature in translation, that’s what I’m looking for. Through Cela’s artful kaleidoscopic structure, The Hive provides a full-immersion excursion into post–Civil War Spain and delivers a memorable reading experience.

El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten History of Hispanic North America by Carrie Gibson

Pride and prejudice, from the Spanish conquest to the Trump administration

Since Christopher Columbus first landed in the New World, Hispanics and Hispanic culture have had a profound effect on the development of North America. (Columbus was born Italian, of course, but exploring on behalf of Spain.) In the United States, however, this Hispanic influence has been downplayed in the historical narrative of the past five centuries, in favor of an Anglo-centric view of the U.S. as a nation founded by and for non-Hispanic whites. Journalist Carrie Gibson strives to correct that Anglo-biased view in her 2019 book El Norte, a history of North America that emphasizes the triumphs and tribulations of Hispanics in the U.S., Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, plus a tiny bit about Canada. (I use the term Hispanic here as Gibson does in the book, meaning of Spanish descent, regardless of racial identification.)

Gibson begins the historical narrative, not surprisingly, with Columbus and the subsequent conquistadores, Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico City, and the initial Spanish explorations in Florida and the Caribbean. A lot of this may be familiar to those with a basic knowledge of Latin American history, but Gibson fleshes out the main plot with plenty of interesting details. Then follows a couple centuries of settlement in the United States. In this section, there is an awful lot about the British, the French, and the early Anglo colonists, which makes one wonder at first what’s so Hispanic about this Hispanic history. Instead of paying the usual attention to the 13 colonies, however, Gibson concentrates more on Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, areas with a more prominent Hispanic presence. Heck, the Spaniards even made a play for Vancouver Island.

As the narrative moves forward in time, El Norte reads less like a typical American history textbook and more like a people’s history of the Hispanic ethnicity. Those Texan heroes who died at the Alamo, for example, are revealed to be unruly squatters who, wanting to establish slavery in Texas, rather impolitely attacked their Mexican hosts. The Mexican War of Independence from Spain is followed by the Mexican-American War, a conflict in which the United States was clearly the greedy, belligerent aggressor. The resulting treaty transferred half of Mexico’s territory to the U.S., after which the whites commenced unjustly driving out the Hispanics (after both stole the land from Native Americans, of course). Half a century later, the Spanish-American War was yet another imperialist power-hungry land grab by the U.S. that set in motion repeated waves of oppression and revolt in Cuba and Puerto Rico through the 20th century. The book ends with the first Trump administration and the devastation of Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria. We now live in an America where Trump’s biggest campaign promise is to drive Hispanic immigrants out of the United States, and Hispanics continue to be the targets of white xenophobic rhetoric (yet, oddly enough, a lot of them voted to give Trump a second term).

Without excusing the atrocities of conquistadores or Latin American dictators, Gibson celebrates Hispanics’ contributions to American history and culture. She gives credit where it’s due, as well as blame. She also highlights the resilience of Hispanics in the face of Anglo oppression and discrimination. On the one hand, you admire them as tenacious freedom fighters. On the other hand, the fact that they’ve repeatedly been forced to fight for their rights inspires sadness and anger. Nevertheless, El Norte is not a woke exercise in white guilt. Gibson provides a very objective and well-researched account of historical events. Just as we’re all familiar with the accomplishments of those white Founding Fathers of the Eastern Seaboard, the Hispanic history of America is a part of our national heritage that all Americans should know and understand.

Doctor Strange Epic Collection, Volume 1: Master of the Mystic Arts by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, et al.

Exciting occult adventures, fabulously illustrated

Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, when I was actively reading comics, Doctor Strange was a solid B-list Marvel hero. He has since been elevated to A-list status in the MCU, with the help of Benedict Cumberbatch. Doctor Strange made his debut in Strange Tales #110, published in July of 1963. Strange Tales was a Marvel anthology comic in which Doctor Strange got second billing behind a cover feature starring the Human Torch and the Thing, or Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. In 2018, Marvel collected the initial stories of Doctor Strange in one of their Epic Collection paperbacks. Doctor Strange, Volume 1 reprints the sorcerer’s stories from issues 110 to 146 of Strange Tales, ending in July 1966. The volume also includes Amazing Spider-Man Annual #2, which features a Spider-Man/Strange team-up. Marvel’s Epic Collection paperbacks reprint classic comics in full-color on bright white matte-coated paper.

Doctor Strange is the creation of writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko. Probably the second most important artist in Marvel history, behind Jack Kirby, Ditko was also the co-creator of Spider-Man. While the stories written by Lee in this early Doctor Strange run are perfectly good comic narratives of their era, it is really Ditko that elevates these comics into the realm of the exceptional. Doctor Strange might not be the most charismatic or flamboyant of Marvel characters, but his mystic adventures really allow an artist to let his imagination run wild. Judging from the fantastic visuals of these Strange Tales, Ditko’s imagination was virtually boundless. There had been plenty of other wizard heroes in comics prior to Doctor Strange, most notably DC’s Doctor Fate, but Ditko really took the mystic genre to a whole new level. With his mind-blowing depictions of parallel universes and alternate dimensions, Ditko came up with amazingly innovative graphics that set the template for decades of Doctor Strange adventures to come. The character of Eternity, who debuts in Strange Tales #138, is a work of pure genius. I always thought Ditko’s art for Spider-Man was a little awkward (although he did create some superbly original villains), but his art for Doctor Strange is really quite elegant and lyrical. Ditko’s work here combines the solid fundamental rendering skills of a classic newspaper comic artist (think Milton Caniff or Alex Toth), with the surreal and bizarre imaginings of a sci-fi/fantasy visionary.

The stories are quite exciting as well. Lee and Ditko find myriad ways to employ Doctor Strange’s power of astral projection, his cloak of levitation, and the Eye of Agamotto, so the magic never gets too repetitive. The half-issue length of each installment actually helps, since there’s no space to waste on filler or overly drawn-out plot lines. Within this run of Strange Tales, there is a continuing story that runs through the course of at least a dozen issues, which was quite unusual for the 1960s. The only drawback to that strategy is that it limits the number of featured villains, since Baron Mordo and the Dread Dormammu appear in almost every installment. Also appearing briefly in this run are Nightmare, Tiboro, Loki, Xandu, and the Demon (later called Demonicus).

Having never been a particular enthusiast of Doctor Strange nor an avid fan of Ditko, I was really pleasantly surprised by the exceptional quality of these comics. I have read quite a few of these Marvel Epic Collections, and these stories from Strange Tales hold up well amongst the best of what Marvel had to offer in the early- to mid-’60s.

Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins

Early Black sci-fi with prototype Wakanda

Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930) was an African American novelist, playwright, journalist, and magazine editor who was active in the Boston literary scene of the early 20th century. A trailblazing Black woman writer of her era, Hopkins was notable for confronting racial, political, and feminist issues in her writing. She was also a groundbreaking writer in another sense, in that her novel Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self was an early contribution to the burgeoning science fiction and fantasy genre. Of One Blood was first published serially from 1902 to 1903 in the periodical The Colored American Magazine, of which Hopkins was the editor. In recent years, a few publishers have released editions of the novel in book form, among them MIT Press as part of its Radium Age science fiction series.

A Harvard medical student, Reuel Briggs, is haunted by visions of a mysterious and beautiful woman he has never met, who appears only in his dreams. Soon after, however, he sees this apparition in the flesh, performing in a musical theatre production. The mystery woman, Dianthe Lusk, is a celebrated vocalist in a troupe of Black singers. Briggs and Dianthe’s paths cross again when she is fatally injured in a train accident. Lucky for her, Briggs has discovered the secret of life through his medical research and has unlocked the secret to bringing the dead back to life. He resurrects Dianthe, then supervises her recovery. In the process, the two fall in love. Also in the picture, however, is Briggs’s best friend Aubrey Livingston, who has also developed an obsession for Dianthe. Dianthe is a light-skinned Black woman. It is hinted early on that Briggs is also of mixed race, although he has been passing for white, so it would be acceptable under the societal norms of the time for he and Dianthe to marry. Livingston, on the other hand, is white and engaged to a white woman, but he wants Dianthe for his mistress and is not above resorting to treachery to possess her.

Then, for no logical reason, Briggs decides to join an archaeological expedition to Ethiopia (actually the Sudan in today’s terms), where his party searches for the ancient Nubian city of Meroe. There, Briggs discovers a civilization far more advanced than previously thought. In fact, this Nubian society predates Egypt as the cradle of Western civilization, art, and science. Hopkins’s fantastic depiction of Meroe, brimming with unapologetic Black pride, is a precursor to Wakanda of Marvel Comics and the recent Black Panther films. We now know that Africa was the homeland of all human life, and there were ancient African civilizations other than Egypt, but these would have been controversial views in 1903. Hopkins boldly puts forward these assertions and cleverly elaborates them with sci-fi/fantasy ingenuity.

Hopkins was certainly a skilled practitioner of the English language, but from a plotting standpoint, Of One Blood is not particularly well-written. Plot threads fizzle into nothing (Briggs’s talent for resurrection is totally disregarded) while others pop out of nowhere (at what point was one of the main characters reported dead?). Hopkins also employs a surprise twist that was unnecessary in the Star Wars saga and is equally unnecessary here. What makes the novel admirable and gratifying to today’s readers, however, is the inspiring and audacious (for its time) message of Black pride and racial equality. It’s hard not to get behind a novel that champions the brotherhood of all humanity, and Hopkins manages to make her point with a story that is unexpected and entertaining.

Call It Sleep by Henry Roth

Overpraised novel of Jewish immigrant life

As an avid reader of American realist literature of the early 20th century, Call It Sleep is a book that’s been at the edge of my radar for years. I had heard very good things about this 1934 novel by Henry Roth, so I was happy when I came upon a copy in a used book store. Ultimately, however, I found the novel quite disappointing.

David Schearl is a boy of about seven years old. He and his parents are Jewish immigrants from Austrian Galicia. They arrived at Ellis Island when David was a baby. The family lives in a tenement building in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. David spends most of his time at home with his mother or playing in the streets of his neighborhood while his father is at work. About halfway through the book he begins attending a cheder (Hebrew school) where a rabbi teaches him and other boys to read scriptures. David and his mother adore each other, while David is terrified of his father—a stern, violent, resentful man who is clearly the villain in this story. David’s immaculate view of his mother is disturbed, however, when he picks up inklings that she may be guilty of infidelity.

Although mostly written in the third person, Call It Sleep is told almost entirely through the eyes of David. The problem with that approach is that the story can only move as fast as this child’s mind can understand it. The reader constantly has to wait for the boy to catch up. The parents have an interesting story, but it’s lost in all the juvenile impressions and fears. So much of this book consists of children teasing and taunting each other, as children do, page after page and chapter after chapter. This relentless banter is interspersed with some of the worst stream-of-consciousness writing I’ve ever read, consisting largely of single words followed by exclamation points (Ow! Mama! No! Stop! Papa! Ain’t! Why? Crazy!). The preponderance of this interior monologue increases throughout the book until the final chapters devolve into gibberish. Then, after you’ve endured this slow-witted, whiny kid for so long, Roth wraps up the parents’ story in a stagey melodrama.

And if that isn’t enough, Roth indulges in paragraphs of ostentatiously artsy prose into which he’s clearly squeezed every last drop of juice from his thesaurus. These flowery passages only undermine the Depression-era urban realism of the story. Most of the characters, Mother excepted, speak like crass and vulgar oafs, but Roth feels the need to prove he’s a bard by waxing poetic to the extreme. Call It Sleep is a novel about salt-of-the-earth, working-class people that salt-of-the-earth, working-class people would never want to read. Instead, it reads as if it’s written for literary critics, who eat this kind of stuff up. I’m not inherently against modernism, when it’s done right. From the same time period and urban milieu, for example, I enjoyed the U.S.A. trilogy of John Dos Passos and Jean Toomer’s Harlem Renaissance novel Cane. When modernism is done wrong, however, it’s just a self-indulgent mess, as exemplified by Call It Sleep.

Overlooked in its day, Call It Sleep is now hailed as a masterpiece of Jewish-American literature. After reading it, I find that hard to believe. Because I’m not Jewish, perhaps I’m not fully qualified to review this book. As an outsider, however, I don’t feel like I learned much about the Jewish experience because the book spends way too much time inside a child’s mind. If you want to know about what life was like for Jewish immigrants in New York in the early 20th century, read Abraham Cahan’s far superior novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), or Will Eisner’s trilogy of graphic novels A Contract with God (1978), A Life Force (1988), and Dropsie Avenue (1995). Even Philp Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), though somewhat of a science fiction novel, offers a more enlightening view of Jewish American life (in Newark, New Jersey).

Can Such Things Be? by Ambrose Bierce

Haphazard hybrids of humor and horror

American writer Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) was a prolific and popular man of letters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An author of novels, short stories, poetry, journalism, and essays, Bierce is perhaps best known as a biting satirist and a pioneering writer of horror literature. Can Such Things Be?, published in 1893, is a collection of two dozen of Bierce’s short stories in the horror genre.

In general, Bierce’s horror stories aren’t as terrifying, gruesome, or macabre as those of his contemporary Edgar Allan Poe. Bierce’s work tends to be more uncanny than frightening, somewhat like a Gilded Age and Progressive Era precursor to The Twilight Zone. Bierce was born in the Midwest, fought in the Civil War, and eventually settled in San Francisco. His stories are set all over America, and he writes in the style of early American naturalism. The tales in Can Such Things Be? combine elements of horror and fantasy with a down-to-earth, local-color humor reminiscent of fellow San Franciscan Bret Harte. The results of this amalgamation of contrasting tones are mixed. Sometimes the horror and humor work against each other, but in some cases they come together quite nicely to form an enjoyable gallows wit. The best stories in this collection, however, are probably those in which Bierce dispenses with the humor and plays it straight.

I’m not very familiar with Bierce’s extensive literary output, having only previously read one of his books. Given his reputation, however, and the fact that many writers and critics have credited him with a profound influence on American realism, I expected a better book than this. Overall, I was disappointed with the hit-and-miss quality of the selections included here.

Rather than dwell on the negatives, however, I choose to accentuate the positive: The best stories in the book include “Moxon’s Master,” in which the invention of an automaton (robot) inspires some fascinating speculative discussion on artificial intelligence and atomistic consciousness. “A Resumed Identity” takes place during the Civil War, but involves an unexpected time warp plot element that would have made a great Twilight Zone episode. “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot” is a delightfully quirky tale in which Bierce manages to ingeniously tie together a duel held in a haunted house, an escaped murderer, and a woman with an amputated digit. “The Damned Thing,” about a vicious invisible beast, has an element of sci-fi to it that reads as if Jules Verne wrote horror. “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” is the most Poe-esque entry in the book, with its desolate landscapes and dreary graveyard atmosphere. This story is really a different style than the others and gives a glimpse of the macabre classic this collection might have been. The place name of Carcosa has been reused by subsequent horror and fantasy writers—Robert W. Chambers, H. P. Lovecraft, and even George R. R. Martin among them—presumably as a tribute to Bierce, even though the fictional city is barely mentioned in this brief story.

Despite my reservations about this volume, Bierce hits his mark often enough to make me want to seek out more of his work. Although the horror in Can Such Things Be? isn’t very hard-hitting by today’s standards, Bierce is a fine storyteller in the old-school vein of classic literary naturalism. His stories reveal a bygone error of American life, yet they were admirably daring and edgy for their time.

Stories in this collection

The Death of Halpin Frayser

The Secret of Macarger’s Gulch

One Summer Night

The Moonlit Road

A Diagnosis of Death

Moxon’s Master

A Tough Tussle

One of Twins

The Haunted Valley

A Jug of Sirup

Staley Fleming’s Hallucination

A Resumed Identity

A Baby Tramp

The Night-doings at “Deadman’s”

Beyond the Wall

A Psychological Shipwreck

The Middle Toe of the Right Foot

John Mortensen’s Funeral

The Realm of the Unreal

John Bartine’s Watch

The Damned Thing

Haïta the Shepherd

An Inhabitant of Carcosa

The Stranger

Curators: Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums by Lance Grande

Professional memoir, career guide, and museum lore

If I could go back in time and start another career, I think I’d like to be a naturalist of some sort, someone who explores the wildernesses of the world, studying plants and animals and discovering new species, like a modern-day Audubon, Darwin, or Humboldt. Nowadays, many of the people who conduct this kind of research work as curators for natural history museums. Lance Grande has occupied one such enviable position for roughly four decades at the Field Museum in Chicago. In his 2017 book Curators: Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums, Grande recounts his distinguished career in natural history and provides an enlightening look at the profession of scientific curation.

Grande has degrees in geology, zoology, and evolutionary biology. Before being hired by the Field Museum, he completed his PhD while working and studying at the American Natural History Museum in New York. Grande’s specialty is vertebrate paleontology, particularly fossil fishes, but, as he explains in Curators, his work at the Field Museum has also led him to research in other related fields. Grande discusses his field work hunting fossils in Wyoming and Mexico, his involvement with the acquisition, preparation, and display of the Field Museum’s famous Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil named SUE, and his redesign of the Grainger Hall of Gems exhibit. Grande also held a management position as head of Collections and Research for the Field Museum, so he discusses the administrative issues he faced while overseeing that department.

For the first several chapters, one wonders why the book wasn’t called Curator, singular, since it’s basically a memoir of Grande’s career. In the second half of the book, however, he discusses the work of his fellow curators at the Field Museum, the general workings of the museum and the various research initiatives they’ve launched, and broader issues in the museum field such as wildlife conservation and the repatriation of human remains. Grande also spends a few chapters looking back at great Field Museum curators of the past, such as herpetologist K. P. Schmidt, anthropologist Franz Boas, and geologist Bryan Patterson, whose father hunted the legendary man-eating lions of Tzavo (now immortalized through taxidermy at the Field Museum). These stories of past generations add further depth to Grande’s survey of the curatorial profession.

This would be an excellent book for a high school or college student interested in the natural sciences. It might very well provide the inspiration for students to explore careers in natural history, museum work, or wildlife conservation. For an older reader like me, it was just a fascinating behind-the-scenes fantasy-camp look into natural history museums—institutions that I enjoy visiting. The text is accessible to students and general readers, but not oversimplified. Scientific and administrative matters are discussed at an intelligent adult level, about on a par with National Geographic or Science News magazines. Professors and museum professionals aren’t likely to gain any scientific revelations from this book, but they might enjoy reading it for an overview of what’s been going on at the Field Museum. The book is also very well illustrated, with a color photograph of just about everything, everyone, and everywhere that Grande discusses in the book.

Scientific biographies and autobiographies are a genre that I typically enjoy, as I like to live vicariously through scientists’ explorations and discoveries. Curators not only succeeds as a scientific memoir but also has the added benefit of functioning as an illuminating glimpse into museum careers. Grande’s obvious enthusiasm and aptitude for addressing general readers results in an engaging and informative book that anyone with an interest in natural history will enjoy.

My Struggle, Volume 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Real life so real it’s boring

My Struggle is a six-volume autobiographical work by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard. Volume 1 of the series was published in 2009. Although Knausgaard himself is the protagonist of My Struggle, and his real-life family figures largely in these books, it is unclear how much of the text is fact and how much fiction, which may explain why the books in this series are generally considered novels. When Volume 1 was released, it made a major splash in the literary world. As the edition I read states, “My Struggle has won countless international literary awards.” After reading Volume 1, however, it is difficult to see what the big deal is. Knausgaard is very skilled at documenting life with detailed verisimilitude. Such talent, however, doesn’t preclude his highly descriptive prose from meandering pointlessness.

Knausgaard and I are the same age, and his tales of adolescence read very similarly to my own. He drinks and smokes with his friends, avoids his parents, tries unsuccessfully to find sex and love, wastes his time romancing a girl who really isn’t interested, dreams of being a rock musician, and builds his identity around selected bands that he likes. A third of the book is this long, convoluted story about an underaged Knausgaard expending a great deal of effort to sneak beer to a New Year’s Eve party, a party which ends up being lame anyway. If Knausgaard’s intention is to elevate regular, mundane life to the realm of literature, then at least he got the mundane part right. It turns out that growing up in Norway in the 1980s wasn’t that much different from growing up in Wisconsin. I don’t need to read about this life; I lived it.

More interesting are Knausgaard’s philosophical thoughts on matters like marriage, fatherhood, and death. He and I share some common ground in our views on such subjects. Sometimes when you find an author who sees things the way you do, it can be a revelation. “There are other people in this world like me!” In this case, however, the familiarity is just boring. For instance, roughly half the book is devoted to the death of Knausgaard’s father, dealing with his grief, getting through the funeral, and so on. That is something that most middle-aged readers can identify with, having lived through such events with their own parents. Leading up to the funeral, however, did I really need to read Knausgaard’s quotidian impressions of an airport, what he ate for breakfast at his brother’s house, or a review of the bands they listened to on the car stereo? I guess all this accumulation of prosaic observations is supposed to create an atmosphere of real life, as if to emphasize the common humanity shared by “normal people” who put their pants on one leg at a time like everybody else, but it all just feels like a colossal waste of time. Not until half way through the book does anything happen that’s beyond ordinary, and even after that, I spent about three hours of my life reading about Knausgaard cleaning a house.

This is the second book I’ve read by Knausgaard, the first being his 2020 novel The Morning Star. On the basis of these two books, I surmise that Knausgaard’s strategy is to lull readers into a sleepy security by inundating them in the bland minutiae of everyday life, thereby magnifying the intensity of a few startling occurrences with which he intends to shock them toward the end of the book. The Morning Star ended in a vague, inconclusive termination. Likewise, at the very end of My Struggle, Volume 1, Knausgaard hints at some unusual aspects of his father’s death but then never delivers the secrets, thus pressuring the reader to purchase the next volume. Whether a marketing ploy or simply artsy pretention, such deliberately half-assed endings just feel like a cheat. I have already purchased Volume 2 of My Struggle, because it was on sale for a low price, but now I’m not so sure I want to spend my time on it.