The Heart of the Fiords, from afar ...

When you (that is: I), as a Norwegian, in a Colombian bookshop, looking for books in English (and finding, to your great surprise, that said bookshop, even though belonging to a university which offers foreign language education, has no books of fiction whatsoever in any other language than Spanish), come across a novel with a very familiar cover picture of red-painted wooden cabins against a backdrop of clear, glacial-blue water and snow-covered peaks, bearing the title En el corazón de los fiordos (In the heart of the fiords), you have to buy it, right?

     Even if the blurb gives you a pretty good idea that this is not the kind of book you normally read, because this is not the kind of book you normally like?

     Of course I had to.

Since buying and reading the book in question I have learnt that it belongs to a (sub)genre called landscape. Apparently, this is a label given to books that are basically typical “women’s literature” (please pronounce this term with contempt, whether reading it in your head or out loud), in an “exotic” setting. Take a bad old-fashioned, soppy and predictable love-story, place it in a setting your readers are unlikely to have any intimate knowledge of, add a bit of “local flavour”, and voilà: landscape novel. These books have titles like The butterfly isle, The white masai(ess), The gilded fan, Highland storm – you get the picture. Think Victoria Hislop or Kate Morton (note that my associations are based solely on prejudice – I have not actually read any of these books or writers). Or Sarah Lark, judging by one of Z’s latest reviews.

     Can you tell I’m slightly sceptical?

Anyways: En el corazón de los fiordos is set in Germany and Nordfjord, in 1941 and 2010. The main characters are Mari, a Norwegian farm girl who falls in love with a German soldier (1941), and Lisa, a German photographer who travels to the exotic Norwegian West in search of her roots, and finds family secrets (in abundance) and a very annoying and unfriendly (and – obviously – utterly irresistible) Norwegian horse breeder (2010). And that should be enough information to give you a pretty good idea of where the story goes.

Three reasons I shouldn’t have read this book:

1. I’m usually exquisitely bored, and sometimes severely aggravated, by love stories.

2. I think there are far too many books about WWII, and only a genuinely excellent/ original/ different story could justify publishing yet another one. Genuinely excellent/ original/ different stories are few and far apart.

3. I’m from the part of the world the story is set in – the author of the book is not.

How long did it take before En el corazón de los fiordos began to irritate me?

     I’d say within the first five pages.

Before getting to why, I’m going to say some nice things about the book (I believe I’ve imbued this review with enough passive-aggressive negativity by now to be able to do this and still leave no doubt about my general feelings towards it).

     Firstly: This book is not really that badly written …

I willingly admit to being rather snobbish about language in fiction (and non-fiction, come to think of it), and I consider reading poorly written texts bad for my mental health, as it tends to make me grumpy, impatient and generally disillusioned with humanity. This book did not provoke many major outbursts of annoyance at its language. At this point, though, I have to mention that my edition of this book is a translation of a German original …

     (4. My edition of the book is a translation)

… and that reading in Spanish is still a much slower and more unfamiliar process for me than reading in English or Norwegian. It is therefore quite possible that my opinion of the language in the book would be another if I hadn’t read it in Spanish.(1) As for the development of the story, I found the book an quick and easy read: I finished the more than 500 pages in about ten days, which is quite fast for me, reading in Spanish. The story is fast-paced, with several story-lines developing in parallel, searches for answers leading to ever new questions, and intrigues piling up.

     Secondly: The love story (stories) wasn’t bad enough (note that I’m not saying it wasn’t bad) to really get me going. Taking my general opinion of this genre into account, I believe this can be considered a (kind of) praise.

     To sum up: rarely during my reading of this book did I feel a strong need to hurl it across the room. I did, however, feel a need to give the writer (and/or editor) a solid talking-to. And this is where I (finally) get to my big problem with this book:

     It is not really the story or the writing, it’s sloppiness.

The author of the book, Christine Kabus, is introduced on the cover as a German who since childhood has been deeply fascinated by Scandinavia. She travelled to Norway as an adult, and her enthrallment with the exotic landscapes led her to study the history of the country and learn the language. I realise everyone’s not a linguist, but in this case “learn the language” is obviously an exaggeration. Which leads us back to page five (which I mentioned way back at the beginning somewhere), and the first example of how just about EVERY word or sentence of Norwegian in this book is WRONG. We’re not talking about long pieces of text, just a light sprinkling throughout (as part of the “exotic, local flavour”), but enough to get quite annoying for a Norwegian reader. The few sentences of Norwegian all have grammatical errors, words are used in decidedly odd ways, no understanding of Norwegian definite marking is evident (sometimes there’s both a Spanish and a Norwegian definite marker, e.g. “el Dalselva”, at other times there are no markers), and words have been picked randomly from Nynorsk or Bokmål.

And then, there are the names …

(And here a warning for those of you who think this review is already too long (I agree and apologise): this section of grievances will be lengthy). A few of the characters in the book have “normal” Norwegian names, such as the protagonist Mari and her brother Ole, but they represent a small minority. One or two odd or unusual names in a book is OK, even interesting, but when the vast majority of characters have ill-chosen, attention-drawing names, it just becomes distracting. This is what I mean:

1. Very rare first names: Tekla (according to SSB, there are 14 people in Norway with this name), Faste (11), Gorun (8), Enar (4).

2. Invented names (i.e. names I have never heard and which give no hits on SSB’s name pages): Finna, Bori

3. “Misplaced” names: Thorvald the dog (actually, I don't believe I will ever own a dog, but if I did, I'd consider calling him – or, even better, her – Thorvald), Bjelle the horse

4. Invented, misspelt, or foreign surnames: Eklund, Jørgensson (why, when there is another family called Karlssen?), Kjøpmann (this one had me steaming – such a surname has never, as far as I know, existed in Norwegian. I don’t care how common they are in Germany!)

5. The family farm Karlssenhof (for those interested in an extended harangue on the absurdity of this name, see below)

6. Wrong and/or inconsistent spelling of actual place names.

There are also a few other things that don’t sit quite right. For example, the mother of one of Mari’s friends has ordered a new bunad for her for Midsummer. The idea of a (second) brand new national costume for a girl of about 18 sounds strange to me – as if you just buy a new bunad every couple of years as you grow out of the old one, like any other old dress ... The cost may have gone up since the 40s, but if it’s rare to acquire a second bunad today, I doubt a lot of people had the economic means to do so during the war. Besides, “ordering” it also feels a bit anachronistic to me – does this girl not have a mother or grandmother or aunt of second-cousin-twice-removed who knows how to sew? Further, the 2010 protagonist looks down on the Oslo Fiords (sic!) as her plane lands on Gardermoen – I assume she is really longsighted, the 17th of May is supposedly called “Barnedag” (is this true? I’ve never heard it …) and though there may still have been people in 1940 who were afraid of “supernatural” intervention if they didn’t finish the Christmas baking on time, doesn’t it sound a bit odd that they feared “trolls”?

     You might say that it’s hardly surprising to find a few inaccuracies in a book written by someone who is not a native, and that I shouldn’t let it ruin the story, but I can’t help feeling greatly aggrieved at this blatant disregard for the Norwegian language, the liberties taken at the writer's will, the the obvious lack of research and editing. I sincerely though a minimum of research was involved in the writing of a historical novel, and that books where subjected to proofreading and editing before being published. It’s obvious that the author is capable of research, from how she writes about the history of both Norway and Germany during WWII (though I can’t actually vouch for the accuracy of the historical background), so why not make the minimal effort of looking up Oslo on Wikipedia to find the correct spelling of Karl Johans gate? As for Norwegian names, their frequency in different periods can easily be found on SSB’s internet pages. And how effing hard could it be to find a native Norwegian-speaker to look over a few words and sentences, especially if you’ve traveled extensively in Norway and studied the language and history – she must have a contact somewhere who could have weeded out some of the most flagrant mistakes. Most of the details that annoy and offend me in this book could so easily have been fixed, and the failure to do so, by both author and editor, is in the end what really rubs me the wrong way.

My main reason for outlining why I shouldn’t have read this book is that I feel I am perhaps being a bit unfair to it, getting caught up in all these details. I can, despite my misgivings, see how this book could be liked – by someone who loves romance, who can’t get enough of the drama of WWII stories, who is infinitely excited by intrigue and dark secrets, and who isn’t Norwegian – in short, someone who isn’t me.

Nerdydice: 6

Antidice: 11 (for Norwegians)

Postscript:

To test my hypothesis that this book could have a different impact on someone distinctly not me, I handed it over to a Colombian friend who struck me as the perfect guinea pig for the experiment. She is a native Spanish speaker, and revealed a few weeks back that she quite enjoys easy-to-read, romantic novels. Further, she worked in Norway for a year, and therefore has first-hand knowledge of what it is like to be a foreigner there.

Result: She loves it, even though the Spanish translation is apparently horrendous (some of the weirdness in, e.g. the spelling of Norwegian place names, may in other words be the translator’s fault rather than the author’s). As a non-Norwegian, she recognised the depiction of particular quirks in the Norwegian character, and loved the descriptions of the country. She also liked the story, and the way it was laid out.

I suppose I can only conclude that perceptions of a book differ, according to tastes, background and circumstances – hardly a revolutionary finding.

Note on the absurd farm name Karlssenhof:

Firstly, it’s normally “Hov”, with a V, in Norway. It may have been “hof” in Norse, but I suspect the author of getting it mixed up with German “hoff”. Go far enough back in time, and the words have the same Germanic root, but “hoff” in Middle German meant “farmstead” and the word could be used to refer to a farm worker or owner to a farm, and so, I suppose, the combination with a personal name like Karl would mean something like “Karl’s farm” (though whether or why you would have a patronymic as the first element, I have no idea). In Norwegian farm names, however, the element “hov” or “hove” refers to a place of sacrifice to the pagan gods. Farms with this element in the name can be dated to Viking or pre-Viking times, when people still believed in the old Norse gods. The first element in a name ending in “-hov” is therefore usually the name of a god, e.g. Torshov. IT IS NEVER (ever-ever) A PATRONYMIC! You’d never sacrifice to a surname, even if this kind of name had existed at the time these farms were cleared (and even if they had patronymics, I doubt there were many Karls in Migration Period Norway …).

          To sum up: I find it hard to express how infinitely stupid I think this name is.