My Life as an Explorer by Sven Hedin

Deadly treks through Asia with a Swedish adventurer

When Sven Hedin was a young boy in Stockholm, he dreamed of being an arctic explorer. As a young man, however, his early career led him to far Eastern Europe. There he realized that he could still be an explorer, but he directed his sights eastward to Asia instead. From 1885 to 1890, Hedin made two trips into Iran and several of the “Stans” of the Near East. He then organized a series of more extensive expeditions deeper into Asia, where his journeys took him to India, China, Tibet, and Nepal. Hedin’s main goal was to fill in the “white spaces” on European maps, to chart uncharted territories. He was one of the first, if not the first, European to set foot in many of the sites he explored. In fact, Tibet didn’t want Westerners in their country, so Hedin had to sneak in. Often he and his all-Asian crew would go two months without seeing another human being, and they once went two years without seeing another European. Hedin’s explorations made him the undisputed firsthand authority on the mountainous region known as the Transhimalaya. In his autobiography My Life as an Explorer, Hedin recaps his daring, adventurous, globe-trotting life. I believe the book was written in 1924, and the first English edition came out in 1925. Despite all the amazing achievements catalogued within, this is not even a complete career memoir because Hedin continued to explore Asia for another decade after this book was published.

While engaged in his expeditions, Hedin surveyed and mapped the terrain and gathered geographic, geologic, zoologic, and ethnographic information. The problem with My Life as an Explorer, however, is that you don’t really get to learn a lot about his discoveries in the places he explored. Hedin published that sort of data in more specialized volumes, such as Scientific Results of a Journey in Central Asia, 1899–1902 (12 volumes). My Life as an Explorer, however, is devoted more to tales of survival and adventure aimed at general readers: nearly starving to death or dying of thirst in the desert, nearly freezing to death in the mountains, nearly drowning in rivers and lakes, nearly suffocating in sandstorms, etc. You will be amazed at the scores, nay hundreds, of horses, camels, mules, and dogs, and even about a dozen humans, who perish over the course of this book. The tenacious Hedin plows ever forward, regardless of body count. The last quarter of this memoir, in which he recounts his third expedition to Tibet (1905–1908), is the exception to this adventure-only style of narrative. There he does go deeper into what he observed of Buddhist culture in his visits to Tibetan holy sites. The first half of the narrative is a bit slow, but the book finishes on a high note.

It’s not too easy to follow along with where Hedin is at any given moment or where he’s going. Many of the place names he uses aren’t current, though a Wikipedia search can usually clear up such uncertainties. The book includes a few simplified cartoony maps, but they don’t help much. Hedin’s detailed, professional maps are printed in other books like the Scientific Findings mentioned above. In addition to the maps, this autobiography is loaded with illustrations drawn by Hedin himself. With his sketchbook, he chronicled the people, places, and memorable moments encountered along the way. He’s a pretty good artist, but his drawings don’t come across very clearly on a Kindle Paperwhite. (He also took photographs, but they’re not in this book.)

Armchair explorers will envy Hedin’s travels but not his hardships and near-death experiences. If you like to read historical explorer accounts, this is a good one, though maybe too long and arduous for casual readers. Reading this autobiography makes me want to look into Hedin’s previously published reports of each individual expedition. They’re probably less exciting than this book, but I think one would learn more about the places visited.  

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 Woodcarver and Death by Hagar Olsson

Melancholy and the infinite sadness

From reading the introduction to this book, I learned that the nation of Finland has a minority Swedish population that has produced a considerable body of literature in the Swedish language. Author Hagar Olsson was born into this Finland-Swede community and became one of its prominent modernist writers. Her novel The Woodcarver and Death was published in 1940. It was translated into English by George C. Schoolfield and published in 1965 as a volume in the University of Wisconsin Press’s Nordic Translation Series. The UW Press has since released the books in this series as open access publications, available for free download from the website of the UW Libraries. This provides an opportunity to freely sample some works by modern Scandinavian authors who aren’t very familiar to English-language readers.

In The Woodcarver and Death, there isn’t much woodcarving going on, but there sure is much contemplation of our ultimate demise. The story opens in the home of a young woodcarver named Myyriäinen who lives with his mother. She works in a factory, and he carves little wooden figures that he sells. The father/husband of the family is deceased. The mother worries about her son because he doesn’t seem to have any friends, doesn’t talk much, and doesn’t do much other than carve wood. He appears depressed, and she worries that he may be suicidal, though her concerns remain unsaid. One day the boy decides to leave home and embark on a pilgrimage to his birthplace in another region of Finland, hoping that he might discover some meaning to life. He is undergoing an existential crisis and obsessed with thoughts of death, the pointlessness of life, and the futility of religion. The 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. Myyriäinen meets up with a group of pilgrims heading to a holy site to cure their illnesses. Among the crowd he befriends a father and his dying daughter. Although Myyriäinen doesn’t believe in religious miracles, he is touched by the faith of these pilgrims and decides to accompany them on their journey.

From reading Schoolfield’s introduction, one gets the idea that you need a doctorate in Finland-Swedish studies to understand what’s going on in this novel. Most of the story takes place in Carelia, or Karelia, a region on the border of Finland and Russia. Not long before Olsson published The Woodcarver and Death, Carelia was taken by the Russians in the Finnish Winter War of 1939 to 1940. Schoolfield informs the reader that Carelia is a region much romanticized by the Finns, and Olsson, as “the holy place of Finnish culture.” In this novel, Carelia serves as a bastion of the Eastern Orthodox faith. The essential purpose of the novel (as Schoolfield tells me) is for Olsson to champion the Eastern Orthodox faith as a superior alternative to Catholicism. Rather than focusing on the suffering of Christ, the Orthodox faith has a healthier attitude toward death (in Olsson’s opinion) as a natural part of the cycle of life.

Of course, I wouldn’t have gotten all of that if Schoolfield hadn’t spelled it out for me. For the typical English-language reader, this is basically a coming-of-age novel about a young man looking for the meaning of life. This young man just happens to be more morbid than most. Olsson demonstrates literary skill in her drawing of characters and in crafting the emotions and conflicts stirring inside Myyriäinen’s mind. For my taste’s, however this novel was a bit too contemplative, to the point of navel-gazing. This is not one of the better works in the Nordic Translation Series. It may be very meaningful to a Finnish or Swedish audience, but much is lost on the foreign reader.
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Rose of Jericho and Other Stories by Tage Aurell

Expressionist sketches of Swedish country life

From 1965 to 1970, the University of Wisconsin Press published its Nordic Translations Series, consisting of English-language editions of modern literature by Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, and Finnish authors. Eleven books from that series are now available for free at the University of Wisconsin Libraries’ website, where one can read the texts online or download free ebooks. One of these volumes, Rose of Jericho and Other Stories, is a collection of short fiction by Swedish author Tage Aurell (1895–1976). The volume includes nine short stories that were originally published in Sweden in 1946 and 1949.

Aurell grew up in the province of Värmland, a rather rustic area of Sweden, and wrote about rural and small-town life. Much like America’s William Faulkner, however, Aurell experimented with language to the point where his writings would probably appeal more to big-city and university intellectuals than to the simple country folk he depicts in his stories. In the level of obscurity within his prose, Aurell manages to be even more frustrating than Faulkner. In an attempt to capture a stream-of-consciousness interior monologue, Aurell frequently employs incomplete sentences, unfinished thoughts, and a liberal license with punctuation. His stories often switch back and forth between multiple narrative perspectives, providing disjointed snippets of information that create an effect similar to a cubist painting or collage. At times it’s difficult to ascertain exactly who is saying or thinking what, or even which character is dying in a given story. And in almost every story, there’s someone dying. As scholar Eric O. Johanneson explains in the book’s introduction, “Aloneness, illness and death, and sex are the three major motifs: the universal concerns of man.” Have no fear that these stories are relentlessly depressing, however, because Aurell does inject them with a sense of humor.

Aurell seems to be seeing just how little orientation he can provide to the reader while still delivering something that could be called a story. There often isn’t much of a plot in these selections, just the description of a situation that doesn’t go anywhere. According to Johanneson, again: “. . . some of Aurell’s stories are, in effect, as surprising and as inconclusive as life itself.” That’s a fancy way of praising the positive quality of Aurell’s writing: his realism. There’s nothing here in these stories that conforms to any artificial conventions of how a story should be told or what literature should be.

And sometimes Aurell’s strategy works, resulting in a moving story with characters that the reader really grows to care about. The title selection, “Rose of Jericho” is about a lonely older man who places an ad inviting a woman boarder to his country house for rest and relaxation in exchange for help with housework and garden chores. While the setup sounds picturesque, the relationship between the two characters is anything but predictable. Another effective story, “Gatepost,” interweaves a farmer’s tale of his lost calf with the inner thoughts of a man dying from a terminal illness. “True Confessions” is a poignantly realistic story about an aging widower’s relationship with his two grown daughters who have moved away to the big city.

The remaining half dozen stories left me less than impressed. In general, Aurell’s writing is just too abstract for my tastes, and I didn’t feel like I learned much about Swedish country life in the process. Readers with a taste for modernist, experimental fiction that bends formal conventions and embraces narrative ambiguity will enjoy these stories more than I.

Stories in this collection

Until the Ringing of the Bell

True Confessions

Rose of Jericho

Gatepost

The Whitsun Bride

Bachelor Party

The Old Highway

A Winter Day

A Summer Play

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Bread of Love by Peder Sjögren

Elegiac Swedish war novel

Bread of Love, a novel by Swedish author Peder Sjögren, was first published in 1945. An English translation by Richard B. Vowles was published in 1965 by the University of Wisconsin Press as part of their Nordic Translation Series. Eleven books from that series, including this one, can be read online for free at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries website.

Sjögren’s 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. During that conflict, Sjögren volunteered to serve with Finns and Germans in combatting the Soviet Union, and some details of the novel reflect his own wartime experiences. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who travels to the home of his fallen comrades’ mother to explain the circumstances behind the deaths of her two sons, a pair of brothers with whom he served. The war story is thus told through flashbacks and sometimes flashbacks within flashbacks. The narrator is one of a troop of 20 soldiers holed up in underground burrows beneath the ice and snow. Their entrenchments are surrounded by enemy mine fields, so every foray into the surrounding wintry forests brings the possibility of instant death, in addition to the lethality of the unrelenting cold. The plot concentrates on the narrator and three of his foxhole-mates, two of whom are the brothers in question, plus a Russian prisoner named Plennik whom they capture and befriend.

Sjögren illustrates the hardships of winter warfare in boreal regions with details that ring true to reality, as only one who experienced such conditions firsthand could. The story, however, is hardly indicative of the typical soldiers’ combat experience. The yarn that Sjögren weaves is a romantic tale that often harkens back to life and love before the war. Despite the bookending narrative framework involving the narrator and the mother of the two deceased soldiers, the real protagonist for much of the book is the Russian prisoner. At times Sjögren inserts suggestions of supernatural forces toying with the destinies of man, which divert the narrative from the realm of realism into the world of fable.

Sjögren repeats the mistake made by many modernist writers of wartime novels by making the narrative just too poetic to evoke the visceral experience of its setting. Certainly some soldiers who fight in armed conflicts do possess artistic souls, so one can’t be too surprised when the narrator describes frozen corpses or the sound of gunshots with the sensitivity of a lyrical poet. The delicate artfulness of Plennik’s love story, however, with its fairy-tale romance, dream sequences, and siren songs, does clash with Sjögren’s gritty scenes of the brutality and filth of war. It’s as if Sjögren, belying the indiscriminate killing of modern warfare, went out of his way to find the most complicated and operatic ways for a small group of soldiers to die. The result is a story that never feels grounded enough in reality to do justice to either the soldier or the lover.

Nevertheless, if you are interested in Scandinavian literature, Wisconsin’s Nordic Translation Series is a good place to look. Rather than Bread of Love, however, I would recommend The Great Cycle by Norway’s Tarjei Vesaas, Kallocain by Sweden’s Karin Boye, or People in the Summer Night by Finnish Nobel laureate Frans Emil Sillanpää.
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Kallocain by Karin Boye

Dystopian swan song

Though best known as a poet in her native country of Sweden, author Karin Boye also wrote five novels, the last of which, Kallocain, was published in 1940. In 1966, Gustaf Lannestock translated the novel into English as part of the University of Wisconsin Press’s Nordic Translation Series. Kallocain and ten other Scandinavian novels in the Nordic Translation Series can be read for free online at the University of Wisconsin Libraries’ Digital Collections website.

Kallocain is the memoir of Leo Kall, a scientist living in a dystopian future. The world he describes is a highly militarized society in which every resource and every action is directed towards the might of the Worldstate, a draconian bureaucracy that strives for military supremacy over the rival states threatening its borders. The architectural structures of this civilization lie largely underground in the form of bunkers, tunnels, and subways, though one can venture surfaceward to a rooftop terrace if granted a permit. As in ancient Sparta, children are taken from their parents at a young age and groomed for military service. The citizens, who call each other “fellow-soldiers,” live under constant surveillance, though they don’t resent it much since their every thought and action is devoted to the almighty state.

Besides his obligatory military duties, Kall works as a chemist in the Worldstate’s Chemistry City No. 4. With little material benefit to gain from his labors in such an austere society, Kall’s only aspiration is to gain respect by ascending to higher and higher rungs of the corporate-military ladder. He has developed a new type of truth serum that forces suspected criminals and traitors to reveal their innermost thoughts. Hoping to enshrine his name in history, he dubs his invention Kallocain. As a devoted servant of the state, Kall hopes that his chemical will be used to root out treasonous individualistic thoughts that poison the rigid communalism of the Worldstate. While questioning volunteer subjects during the testing phase, however, he exposes some contrary thoughts and opinions that cause him to question his values, his career, and his marriage.

Despite some similarities to Big Brother, Boye wrote Kallocain almost a decade before George Orwell published his novel 1984. The dystopia that Boye has conceived in Kallocain bears a closer resemblance to that of Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, published in 1924. Unlike We, however, Kallocain is more realistic, not at all satirical, and more authentic in its portrayal of human psychology and emotion. Published during the rise of the Nazis and Stalin’s reign over the Soviet Union, Kallocain can rightly be considered a warning cry against totalitarian dictatorships and the military-industrial complex. Boye, however, emphasizes the personal over the political. This is not a science fiction adventure story of resistance and revolution, but rather a metaphorical investigation into 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. Though set far in the future, Boye’s empathetic insights apply to real lives in today’s world.

While writing the novel, Boye may have been dealing with some of these issues herself. She committed suicide less than a year after finishing Kallocain. Her feelings of melancholy and dread are palpable throughout the book, which remains as a tragic testimony to both her personal struggles and her immense literary talent.
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The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson

The best Viking novel you’ll ever read
Swedish author Frans G. Bengtsson (1894-1954) was a poet, essayist, and biographer before writing his one and only novel, The Long Ships. The book was originally published in Sweden in two parts in 1941 and 1945 under the title of Röde Orm before being published in English translation in 1954. One of the most widely read books in Sweden, The Long Ships is an adventure novel set in the time of the Vikings, around 1000 AD. It chronicles the adventures of Orm Tostesson, also known as Red Orm, a Danish Viking who hails from Skania, a portion of present-day Sweden that was at that time under the rule of Denmark. When a young man, Orm is stolen from his home by maritime marauders who make him a willing member of their crew. His subsequent voyages take him from Moorish Spain to the British Isles to the Ukrainian steppe in search of treasure, love, and a peaceful home to call his own.

I am by no means a connoisseur of the genre, but The Long Ships is easily the best work of Viking fiction that I’ve ever read. It is much more lively and engaging than Poul Anderson’s historical novel The Golden Horn, for example. Pulp adventure writers who are known for this sort of thing, like Harold Lamb or Robert E. Howard, tend to get bogged down in the minutiae of armor and weapons in an attempt at historical authenticity. Bengtsson, on the other hand, doesn’t emphasize the visual trappings of the time period but instead really adopts the mindset of his Viking characters. He does a splendid job of thinking like a Viking, which enables him to come up with surprising details that delight the reader with their ingenuity. Though written around the time of World War II, Bengtsson’s prose has the gravitas of a 19th century masterwork but a clarity and timeless creativity that make it seem as if the book were published just last week. Some credit for this is due, no doubt, to Michael Meyer, who provides the English translation for the New York Review of Books edition. In the introduction to that edition, novelist Michael Chabon accurately describes the tone of the book by stating that it “feels at once ancient and postmodern.”

Bengtsson also has a great sense of humor, and the text is riddled with wry wit. The story takes place at a time when Scandinavia was somewhat reluctantly undergoing a process of Christianization. The topic of faith is treated irreverently throughout the book, as characters tend to adopt whatever beliefs—Christian, Muslim, or pagan—that will be advantageous to them, either in the acquisition of worldly goods or simply in the never-ending quest for good luck. Christian missionaries are sometimes depicted as selfless martyrs but also as schemers aiming to tally up the most baptisms, even if it means converting ignorant Vikings under false pretenses. The book also features a Jewish character who is portrayed in a positive light and accepted by the Vikings because of his ability to lead them to treasure. In addition to religion, Bengtsson finds humor in marital relations, courtship rituals, and gender roles. He humorously captures the chauvinism of 1000 AD without succumbing to the chauvinism of the 1940s. The female characters of the book are depicted as intelligent and strong-willed, with a resilient resolve towards the horrible hardships that women faced daily in the 10th and 11th centuries.

If The Long Ships has a flaw, it would be its somewhat excessive length. For an adventure story, the pace can get a bit lethargic at times. Though each chapter is engaging, after finishing one I can’t say I felt compelled to immediately start another. Still, in the end this pleasant surprise proved itself worth the effort and a very enjoyable read.
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Lives of Eminent Zoologists, from Aristotle to Linnaeus by William MacGillivray

The king of classification and his predecessors

Carl Linnaeus

William MacGillivray (1796-1852) was a Scottish naturalist. His name may ring a bell with birders because his colleague John James Audubon named a bird species after him, the MacGillivray’s Warbler. MacGillivray’s book, Lives of Eminent Zoologists, from Aristotle to Linnaeus, was published in 1834. I came across this book while searching for a biography of Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish biologist known as the father of taxonomy. For those seeking an education into this distinguished scientist’s accomplishments, this volume will serve you well. The entire second half of the book—13 chapters—is devoted to Linnaeus.

MacGillivray starts his book with two chapters on Aristotle, which are also quite interesting. Everything in between, however, is painfully boring. Even Pliny the Elder’s death at Pompeii from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius can’t liven things up, and the extremely long chapter on British naturalist John Ray, who must have been a personal hero of MacGillivray’s, is excruciating. MacGillivray doesn’t so much offer biographies of these figures as bibliographical histories. From his summarizing of what had been published in the field of zoology, it is remarkable how few books on animals actually existed prior to the 18th century. For many of the personages profiled here, zoology was merely a sidelight. Most were botanists first, perhaps because plants are much easier to examine than animals. Many were also physicians by profession, and several also studied for positions in the clergy. MacGillivray’s book was published before the theory of evolution was proposed, so it is taken for granted that species were created as is by God, and the author comments on his subjects’ piety almost as much as their scientific discoveries. The profiles in the book are not entirely adulatory. MacGillivray is quick to point out the mistakes made by his illustrious predecessors and the fact that many of them merely summarized prior research rather than engaging in first-hand research of natural phenomena.

Not so with Linnaeus, the book’s guest of honor. MacGillivray makes it clear that Linnaeus had a monumental impact on biological science. Linnaeus invented the system of classification and nomenclature that biologists still use today to assign plants and animals to kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. In one of his comprehensive texts, Linnaeus classified 7,000 species of plants and animals, nearly all those known to the Western world at the time. His accomplishments in botany were even more prodigious than his work in zoology. Linnaeus even applied his classification system to the mineral kingdom. While today species are arranged in an evolutionary family tree, Linnaeus, working prior to an awareness of evolution, classified plants and animals according to morphological characteristics, primarily for the purpose of identification. While much has changed since then, the overall systematic structure he established still remains in use. As MacGillivray points out, Linnaeus made his share of errors, some of which brought him ridicule even during his lifetime, but there is no denying his important and enduring contributions to scientific knowledge. MacGillivray details Linnaeus’s expeditions, his teaching career, his catalog of publications, and his family life (with nothing good to say about Mrs. Linnaeus). MacGillivray’s treatment may be too thorough for some readers, but those with an interest in natural taxonomy will find much food for fascination amid the copious detail.

The content on Linnaeus is worth a solid four stars; the rest of the book brings the overall rating down. If you just want to learn about Linnaeus, I would recommend skipping the first half entirely.
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The Soothsayer by Verner von Heidenstam

Serving two masters

Verner von Heidenstam

Swedish author Verner von Heidenstam was the winner of the 1916 Nobel Prize in Literature. His play The Soothsayer is one of only a handful of his works available in English translation. This quickie drama would have only lasted about ten minutes on the stage, but it was nevertheless published as a stand-alone book in 1919.

The Soothsayer is similar in style, substance, and duration to another of von Heidenstam’s plays, The Birth of God, which is also available in English. Von Heidenstam was a diehard romanticist, and he uses gods and characters from classical antiquity to convey a moral lesson. The play takes place in ancient Greece in the 5th century BC, around the time of the Persian invasion. The curtain rises on a man named Eyrytus, along with his wife, mother, and faithful old servant, worshipping at an altar to Eros, the god of love. His wife and family are the greatest joys of Eyrytus’s life, and he celebrates that fact by making offerings to Eros. However, Eyrytus was born with the prescient power of a soothsayer, and his destiny therefore falls under the jurisdiction of Apollo, among whose many titles is the god of prophecy. Apollo becomes irate when he sees Eyrytus devoting himself to Eros, and he demands that the young soothsayer make a choice between which of the two gods he is going to follow.

From there, the play essentially becomes a brief enactment of the proverb “you can’t serve two masters.” At only 48 pages long, there isn’t really room for a whole lot to develop out of that basic premise. Though it may be hard to get excited about a ten-minute play, this is still better than The Birth of God. At least The Soothsayer has one meaty scene for the actor who plays Eyrytus, and despite its brevity it does manage to get its point across with affecting poignancy. Von Heidenstam likely has more substantial works in his oeuvre, but if you want to sample the work of this Nobel laureate The Soothsayer is a quick and easy way to do so.
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The Birth of God by Verner von Heidenstam

Romantic longing for classical antiquity

Verner von Heidenstam

Swedish author Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1916. Though primarily known as a poet and novelist, he was also a playwright. His drama The Birth of God is a one-act play that would likely take up less than 15 minutes of running time on the stage. Nevertheless, it was translated into English and published in 1920 as a stand-alone book of 32 pages. This English translation is now in the public domain and available for free at HathiTrust.

A modern man, known only as Stranger, travels to Egypt. There, among the ruins of Karnak, he meets a seemingly ancient, possibly immortal man named Dyskolus, with whom he engages in conversation. In the background, idols of ancient Egyptian gods, with their animal heads, dance and occasionally speak. The Stranger tells Dyskolus that he has travelled the world looking for a god. He feels trapped by the “daily sham” of modern life and seeks true meaning and purpose. Dyskolus acts as an intermediary for the old pagan gods, who, now long forgotten, yearn for new worshippers to restore them to their ancient glory.

As you can tell from the plot description, with its heavy-handed symbolism and reverence for ancient Egypt, The Birth of God is about as romantic as romanticism gets. Because Heidenstam’s career crept into the age of modernism, his writing style is late enough in history to be called neo-romanticism. The Birth of God paints modern life, represented by the Stranger, as empty and meaningless, while classicism is held to be pure and profound. Modern man longs for a new deity to rescue him from his vapid life of industry and commerce. Heidenstam doesn’t really seem to be advocating that man should believe in these pagan gods; rather, he expresses an envy towards the ancients’ lives of superstition and worshipful purpose. There is veneration in this view, but also a hint of condescension: If only I could be as ignorant as these primitives, my existence would at least seem meaningful! The dialogue includes a brief mention of Giordano Bruno, a Dominican friar who was executed for heresy, perhaps suggesting that pantheism may be the answer to modern man’s spiritual crisis, but this thread is never followed up and the play just proceeds to an ending that’s not only rather simplistic and silly but also describes imagery that would have been difficult to pull off with the special effects of 1920. If a pantheism worthy of Bruno were established in modern times, it would have to be a pantheism that embraces science, yet Heidenstam seems to reject science along with the rest of modernity in favor of a nostalgia for more primitive superstitions.

If you are looking to sample Nobel Prize winners of the past, reading The Birth of God is probably the quickest way to get an idea of Heidenstam’s writing, since only a few of his works have been translated into English. Another brief play from 1919, The Soothsayer, is also available in the public domain. I’m sure there’s more to Heidenstam than what’s indicated by these 32 pages, but reading this play doesn’t really make the reader eager to invest a lot of time and energy into one of his longer novels.
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The Red Room by August Strindberg

Nothing if not (hypo)critical
The Red Room, published in 1879, is a satirical novel by August Strindberg, originally published under the Swedish title Röda Rummet. Arvid Falk, a young idealist, becomes disillusioned with his job as a civil servant and decides to pursue a career as a writer and journalist. Cheated out of his inheritance by his brother, an avaricious capitalist, Falk wanders into an artist colony where he befriends a bunch of creative misfits. This cadre of bohemian pals occasionally scrape up enough change to hang out at a club called The Red Room, where they debate issues of politics, religion, and art. Falk soon learns that the writing life does not live up to his idealistic expectations, as his talents are bought and sold like any other commodity. The fortunes of he and his friends rise and fall as they either do battle with or get in cahoots with representatives of industry, the government, the clergy, or the press. Liberals and conservatives change sides at the drop of a hat if it serves their own interests. Scruples are few and far between, and those who have them often suffer for it. The whole book is a facetious celebration of various species of hypocrisy—political, financial, artistic, religious, and even sexual.

Strindberg plays it all for laughs. The dialogue between the characters can get pretty absurd. It’s funny for a while, but without a more substantial story to ground the satire upon, it does grow tiresome. You never really care about any of the characters. They simply serve as symbols of different segments of Swedish society, and all are destined to act like buffoons. It’s difficult to tell them apart from one another; they display so little difference in personality. Even Falk, the “hero,” doesn’t inspire much sympathy. He disappears from the book for chapters at a time, in favor of some other protagonist, and the reader barely notices. Much of the time while reading The Red Room, I’ll confess my mind was wandering elsewhere. Strindberg’s sarcastic jibes at the ills of Stockholm society just didn’t hold much interest for me. I prefer a less absurd take on these subjects, like Balzac’s Lost Illusions or Knut Hamsun’s Shallow Soil, which still have a sense of humor but manage to temper their satire with good storytelling, emotional engagement, and some attempt at a philosophy of morals.

The Red Room is often credited as being the first modern Swedish novel. Stylistically, Strindberg is a naturalist in the vein of Emile Zola. His social consciousness in regards to class, his unabashed lampooning of religion, and his lack of prudishness in discussing sexuality attest to the book being ahead of its time. Still, some of Strindberg’s views are anything but modern. He has nothing good to say about women in this book, and his depiction of Jews is anything but positive. An appreciation of 19th century literature, however, often requires overlooking antiquated prejudices. One can see how The Red Room might be considered a classic in its home country, by Swedes who no doubt have a better understanding of the political and historical context behind the satire than this American reader. Although I wouldn’t recommend The Red Room, as a fan of naturalist literature I’m sufficiently intrigued by Strindberg to give him another try. He’s probably got a good book in him somewhere.

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Barabbas by Pär Lagerkvist

Searching for a reason to believe
Barabbas, a novel by Swedish author Pär Lagerkvist, was published in 1950. The following year Lagerkvist was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, due in no small part to the critical acclaim this book received. The novel is based on the biblical story of Barabbas, who is briefly mentioned in each of the four Gospels. In the time of Christ, it was customary to pardon one prisoner during the holiday of Passover. The Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, gives the people of Jerusalem the choice of whom to set free. They choose Barabbas, a convicted thief and murderer, leaving Jesus of Nazareth to be crucified.

Lagerkvist’s novel begins with the crucifixion of Christ. Barabbas, a free man, witnesses the event, and can hardly believe his good fortune at having escaped the fate of the man who is dying before him. He knows little about Christ or his teachings, but he finds the man strangely fascinating. Barabbas is tormented by the nagging thought that he should have been the one to die. He undergoes a drastic personality change, no longer enjoying wine, women, and theft as he used to. He seeks out information on Christ, and makes attempts to learn about the Christian faith, but he is not welcomed among the Christians. In many ways Barabbas is incapable of faith or religion. This is not a simple repentant-man-turns-over-a-new-leaf story, but something far more complex.

Having seen the 1961 film adaptation starring Anthony Quinn and Jack Palance, I approached the novel with some pre-conceived notions. Overall, the film is faithful to the general tone and message of the book, but it augments Barabbas’s interior conflict with sword-and-sandal action scenes designed to entertain. In the movie, Barabbas is trained to be a gladiator, but nothing like that occurs in the book. The Jack Palance character doesn’t even exist in Lagerkvist’s novel, and he wouldn’t really belong in it. If adapted for film today, Barabbas would be an introspective art-house indie film rather than an epic blockbuster.

What makes the novel so powerful is the fact that it can be appreciated from either a religious or secular perspective. Devout Christians will likely gravitate toward the novel’s examination of faith and find meaning in its underlying morality. Irreligious readers, however, can approach the book as a historical novel. Lagerkvist’s Jerusalem of two millennia ago is a free market of competing gods and prophets. Everyone is looking for something or someone to believe in and a sense of belonging. Rumors of Christ’s divinity and news of his death spread not like wildfire but in fits and starts, through second-hand testimony and overheard whispering in the streets. This is a far cry from the glorified depictions of early Christianity in romantic novels like Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur or Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis. Lagerkvist doesn’t even take a stand on whether Christ was the divine son of God or just a wise philosopher punished for his revolutionary teachings. He leaves that for the reader to decide, and chooses instead to focus on the faith of the followers. Despite its biblical setting, Barabbas is a modernist, psychological novel that explores the sort of existential themes one might find in a work by Albert Camus. Barabbas’s quest can be seen as analogous to modern man searching for meaning in an empty life.

Barabbas is a brief book that can probably be read in its entirety in under two hours. Nevertheless, it is a great work of literature, filled with stark, moving scenes that will likely stick with this reader for a long time to come.
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