Visiting book stores is always on my vacation itinerary. On holiday in Norway this summer, I dropped into the Litteraturhuset, which means House of Literature, in the western city of Bergen. I browsed creatively curated shelves and then started one of the books I’d bought as I had an excellent latte in the Litteraturhuset café. As I read and sipped, I wondered whether the men and women chatting in Norwegian over beers at the next table were writers.
The main Litteraturhuset is in Oslo and was opened in 2007 by a private foundation. The Oslo Litteraturhuset and its sisters that opened more recently in Bergen and several other Norwegian cities have shops, cafés and spaces for readings, workshops and conversation. The Oslo Litteraturhuset even has an apartment for writers in residence.
The shops focus on books in Norwegian. But in Bergen I found plenty to read in English, including translations of the work of Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian who won the Nobel literature prize in 1920.
It was Hamsun’s spare, modernist “Hunger” that I read with my latte. In this 1890 novel, Hamsun sketches a few moments in the life of a desperate and despairing writer trying to make art in a world that seems less and less human. In this passage, the nameless narrator-hero contemplates suicide:
"I ought to write a few letters, have everything ready, get prepared. I would wash myself with great care and fix up my bed nicely; I would lay my head on a few sheets of white writing paper, the cleanest thing I had left ...."
Those clean white sheets are a powerfully poignant image.
“Hunger” is set in Oslo, which was known as Kristiania in 1890. The city is portrayed as vividly as any of Hamsun’s characters. I had visited Oslo before Bergen and as I read “Hunger” I recognized some of the streets and plazas Hamsun describes. Back in Oslo on the last night before flying home, I went for a walk along the city’s main street, Karl Johans, which runs from the central train station to the Royal Palace and still has grand buildings from the 19th century that Hamsun would recognize.
I searched “Hunger” in vain for signposts to the man Hamsun would become long after he wrote the novel. Hamsun embraced fascism during World War II, when Nazi Germany occupied Norway. Norway’s history of anti-Semitism and a rise of violent, racist white nationalism in more recent years make places such as the Litteraturhuset centers, with their emphasis on democratic ideals and peaceful discourse, all the more important.
The Litteraturhuset mission includes introducing “a range of international voices into the Norwegian public sphere.” In Bergen, along with the Hamsun, I bought "An Orchestra of Minorities", a 2019 novel that is symphonic in its drama and ambition. It was written in English by Chigozie Obioma, a Nigerian.
I’d like to visit Nigeria. Surely I will find great book stores in the homeland of Obioma, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Segun Afolabi and so many other astonishing writers.
Obioma, who has lived in Cyprus, Turkey and the United States, retells the Odyssey in “An Orchestra of Minorities”. His narrator is the hero’s chi, the guardian spirit of the Igbo moral universe. Obioma tackles alienation, a theme that also interested Hamsun. Obioma writes near the tragic denouement of his novel:
“It became clear to him now that it wasn’t he alone who harboured hatred or a full pitcher of resentment from which, every step or so in its rough journey on the worn path of life, a drop or two spilled. It was many people, perhaps everyone in the land, everyone in Alaigbo, or even everyone in the country in which its people lived, blindfolded, gagged, terrified. Perhaps every one of them was filled with some kind of hatred. Certainly. Surely an old grievance, like an immortal beast, was locked up in an unbreakable dungeon of their hearts. They must be angry at the lack of electricity, at the lack of amenities, at the corruption. They, the MASSOB protesters, for instance, who had been shot in Owerri, and those wounded the past week in Ariaria, clamouring for the rebirth of a dead nation – they, too, must be angry at that which is dead and cannot return to life. How about everyone who has lost a loved one or a friend? Surely, in the depths of their hearts, every man or woman must harbor some resentment. There is no one whose peace is complete. No one.”
Neither Obioma nor Hamsun wraps up their novels neatly. They leave it to the reader to decide whether mankind can be redeemed.
Norway’s Litteraturhuset says it strives to be “a house where literature meets society, a house enabling free, public conversations, a house for authors, and a house where children and young people are introduced to literature.” I was at home there, exploring what artists of the word all over the world share, and what they can tell us about what humans share across borders and time.