Kjell Askildsen, Selected Stories. Trans. by Sean Kinsella. Dalkey Archive Press, 2014.
Written in an unadorned style, with flashes of pitch-black humor, Kjell Askildsen’s devastating stories convey in few words life and thought as they are actually experienced, balanced between despair and hope, memories and expectations. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest Norwegian writers of the twentieth century and among the greatest short-story authors of all time.
“Kjell Askildsen’s dry, absurd humor is not unlike that of Beckett…His short stories are packed with irony, and the dialogue is sharp and expressive” - Times Literary Supplement
A man. A woman. Intimacy. Distance. These are the elements, according to Norwegian writers Bjarte Breiteig and Øyvind Ellenes, writing in the literary magazine Vinduet, that make up a Kjell Askildsen story. And indeed, in Selected Stories, a collection of 11 of Kjell Askildsen’s stories translated by Seán Kinsella from Dalkey Archive Press, characters who approach each other yet are repelled by each other and by themselves are the thread running through the work. The four elements are like the last few impossible letters you are stuck with at the end of a Scrabble game. You can arrange and rearrange them and study the board, and while they will combine in umpteen ways, they will never resolve into one word you can lay out, cleanly.
Askildsen, at 84, is one of the grand old men of Norwegian literature. Frequently mentioned alongside other greats like Jon Fosse and Tor Ulven—also to be published by Dalkey Archive in its series of translated Norwegian modern writing—Askildsen’s first story collection From now on I’ll follow you all the way home was published in 1953. The last stories in the book are from the collection The dogs of Thessaloniki, published in 1996.
Yet a reader never has the sense that any time has passed between the writing of these stories. They take place, seemingly, in the same timeless void. The things which surround people are timeless, too: coffee, beer, funerals, injuries, and erotic desire. Language is unadorned, and this adds to the eternal flavor: if these stories appeared in a lineup, you wouldn’t be able to pick the 1960s stories out among a crowd of newer ones.
Seán Kinsella’s translation appears faithful to the original language, so unadorned and repetitive. This is a world in which characters only and ever “say”; they never murmur or croon or shout or whisper or state or assert. Things just are what they are. Norwegian is a fairly small language, with only around 60,000 words. English, by some estimates, has three times as many. The limited, uninflected way Askildsen writes therefore isn’t as notable a style choice in Norwegian as it is in English. Anglophones are likely to find his work notably minimalist—bare and spare. And while these characteristics really are Askildsen in Norwegian too, they’re not as extreme in the original. The translation therefore carries a strain of a nearly aseptic, technical, machine-like steely tone that the original doesn’t really to my mind have. No, what many Norwegian critics note about Askildsen is his empathy for his characters, which has developed over his decades as a storyteller.
The stories in this collection often take place during the brief, stifling Arctic summers of Norway, when the buttoned-up populace loosens its garments and drunkenly speaks a few words of truth for a change. Reading about people relating to each other in such a bare, naked manner is emotionally exhausting.
“Martin Hansen’s Outing” is the first story of the collection, and coincidentally Askildsen’s last published story, from 1999. A man spies on his young daughter and her friend, lies to his wife, gets drunk and injured, then suddenly tells his wife a truth. What does it change? Nothing. In the second story, “The Dogs of Thessaloniki,” a man and his companion try to talk to each other over coffee, wine, and cigarettes, and speak to each other of dogs they once saw mating in Thessaloniki, who couldn’t get free. The story ends with the man breaking a cane he used to lean on, while his companion sleeps on her side of the bed. In the story “A great deserted landscape,” the also classic Askildsen feature of uncomfortable, incestuous sexuality enters the story. A severely injured man is being cared for by his sister, while his wife is being laid to rest.
I asked her to fetch my sunglasses, I didn’t want her to misunderstand. She went to find them. It was only the two of us; the others were at the funeral service. She came back and put the sunglasses on me. I formed a kiss with my lips. She smiled. I thought: if she only knew. The sunglasses were so dark that I could look at her body without her noticing.
This is an Askildsen character: injured enough to be stuck inside himself, helpless to deny the dark impulses he also contains. Askildsen is, then, in Norwegian literature known as a pessimist. His work describes a certain kind of Everyman, a limited person, who nevertheless is a normal, everyday character in this society. The Norwegian literary critic Henning Hagerup in the afterword to the Norwegian edition of Askildsen’s “Collected Stories” claims to really have seen Askildsen types hanging around town.
If you go to places like Cafe Norrøna or Kaffistova here in Oslo, you will all the time run into figures who could have been taken out of an Askildsen novella: Old, tired, fairly penniless women and men who neverthelesss are well-dressed and who are scarfing down a cheap dinner of casserole or boiled cod as they maintain conversations about anything other than the acknowledged Great Topics.
Askildsen’s world is paradoxically both limited and limitless. Only a few things happen to his characters, everything out of ordinary life and nothing externally very dramatic. Yet within themselves, the characters are everything: they are infinitely good and bad, often at the same time; they have great tenderness for each other and are unspeakably cruel to each other too. They’re the world in a grain of sand. - Julia Grønnevet
When Ameir discovered that I was a nonbeliever, he was incensed. We worked in a kitchen in downtown Iowa City; it was mid July and sweat was plentiful. What began as a jocular conversation about the benefits of certain religious dietary rules had become an expression of more radical thought: the most just society, argued Ameir, would be a total theocracy populated only by faithful adherents. He was a master provocateur, somehow believing this sincerely while simultaneously saying it simply to goad me. What about atheists, I said. They don’t belong in any society, he said. So I began to make my case.
The ensuing debate was lengthy and passionate but likely unremarkable, having been played out by young students for centuries. But one of Ameir’s more compelling barbs connected, and has stayed with me for years. If you’re so certain there’s no God to judge you, he says, and no afterlife to reward or punish you for your deeds, then why are you still here? Here, in Iowa City, in the July heat, in a restaurant kitchen. The mundane Here and not the seductive Elsewhere. His challenge presupposed questionably that the forces holding me in this Midwestern college town (close friends, need for financial stability, general contentment, crippling postgraduate uncertainty, etc.) were moral obligations as opposed to practical ones. But the challenge stung, and the challenge lingered, because in truth I’d been contemplating escape. In truth I’d been wondering just what ties were holding me in place.
This May, Dalkey Archive Press is publishing a taut little collection of fictions by the Norwegian author Kjell Askildsen. Askildsen has been writing consistently since the 1950s, though these Selected Stories have been gathered from four collections published in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Askildsen is currently in his eighties. His writing has not yet been widely translated into English.
I think of this encounter with Ameir when I think of Askildsen. Selected Stories is a meditation on individual freedom, a book fraught with the day-to-day pressures of human life.
The nine brief stories collected within can all be described in terms of absences. The absence, for example, of experimental or ornate, “flowery,” prose. The absence of unnecessary characters. The absence of exotic or alien locales, or of complicated plot arcs. The emotional landscape is barren, bleak. The stories, on first glance, exhibit such stark similarity that it’s almost alarming. The first four take place prominently in suburban gardens and on the overlooking verandas. Very few of the protagonists mention work, none of them are seen working, and only one, in the three-page “The Nail in the Cherry Tree,” has a named profession. He is a poet. Only in the opening story, “Martin Hansen’s Outing,” is a young child involved or even mentioned. Parents are aging, ailing, or freshly dead. One senses that Askildsen is delicately, deliberately seeking answers to a particular set of nagging questions, and is never quite satisfied with what he uncovers.
Askildsen’s stories are thus constrained, quiet, and at times they even feel polite. But they are not simple.
It does at first seem odd, the overwhelming lack of employment. Where, after all, is this idle world in which one’s primary concerns consist of caring for guests and tending to the vegetable patch, a world in which several stories can begin with some variation of, “We drank morning coffee in the garden”? But it is precisely in this idleness that Askildsen is able to pursue his obsessions. He is fascinated by human pettiness. His characters lie in hundreds of small ways, grow unfairly annoyed with one another, expect much and offer little. They refuse to forgive, and never apologize.
“Martin Hansen’s Outing” sees the titular protagonist lie to his wife about having to meet his brother, just so he will be able to spend his evening drinking alone on the town. Elsewhere characters pretend not to hear their wives, berate grieving relatives for not having enough ashtrays, empty bottles of wine down the drain to create the illusion they got drunker than they did, and stand around in the middle of an upstairs room, simply to “let time pass.”
These antics are variously sad, cruel, and uncomfortably relatable. But Selected Stories is not just a comedy of minor indiscretions. Martin Hansen’s lie about his brother, for example, hints at further lies, and deeper infidelity. Martin comes clean and is asked by his wife “what’s the point of all this sudden honesty?” a question that keeps him up all night, wondering, “what does she know about me that I don’t know that she knows?” Askildsen convincingly plays out the multifaceted tensions and aggressions that arise between siblings and lovers alike. These stories, with very few words, evoke whole years or even decades of family history.
The peaceful, almost pastoral setting in which these stories take place does very little to abate the characters’ strife. Askildsen avoids lingering in his descriptions of nature. In “The Dogs of Thessaloniki,” the protagonist casually takes stock of what is perhaps the collection’s most vivid depiction of Norway’s natural splendor: “I had the fjord and the distant, wooded hillsides in front of me. The murmur of hushed conversation and the gentle gurgle of the water by the shore put me in a drowsy, absentminded state.” Otherwise one gardens in order to ignore one’s family, walks in the woods as a means of hiding from one’s spouse, discusses the weather to cover up all the things one ought to say but refuses to, or can’t. “A Lovely Spot,” a story about a married couple visiting the family summer home, repeatedly employs the title phrase as a sickening joke to illustrate just how incapable the couple is of genuine communication.
—Isn’t this a lovely spot, she said.
—Certainly is, he said.
One of Askildsen’s more acute concerns in these stories is the nature of adult male sexuality, which to him contains subtle underlying elements of violence, rapaciousness, and exploitation. Martin Hansen stares out the window at his daughter’s 15-year-old friend and finds that “it wasn’t difficult” to close his eyes and picture himself “taking her.” Another character reads a “rape-like scene” in a novel, and “felt [himself] aroused.” He develops an intense sexual interest in his new sister-in-law, commenting several times on “how easy it would be to lift her up.” None of the male characters act on these darker urges. But the urges are there, contributing to the sense that the thoughts and actions bubbling up to the surface in Askildsen’s stories–the lies, evasions, and little betrayals–are just superficial manifestations of the forces really at play.
In fact the depictions of male desire reminded me often of the work of J.M. Coetzee, whose aging, overeducated protagonists are often disgusted by and at odds with the power their lust still holds over them. But where Coetzee’s protagonist philosophizes and self-interrogates, reining in the influence of his phallus as if it were an excitable beast on a chain, Martin Hansen and his compatriots are much less interested in self-study. There is very little guilt or shame to be found within these pages. Defending his curious, evasive behavior while home for his father’s funeral, Bernhard, the protagonist of “The Unseen” declares, “I can’t help the way that I am. If I were to kill a person, for instance, I couldn’t help it, but I’m not about to kill anyone, that’s not how I am. Everything that I do, I do because that’s how I am, and it’s not my fault that I’m the way that I am.” Only in “The Unseen” is this idea so explicit, but a soft fatalism envelops every one of Askildsen’s stories.
I have, on several occasions, attempted to comfort myself and close friends in the wake of a breakup with the observation that, individual human desires being as they are so fleeting and disparate, it’s really something of a miracle that any romantic relationship manages to last at all. I acknowledge that the verity of this observation, as well as its usefulness as a soothing agent, are open to debate. But it strikes me now that if youthful romance is “miraculous,” then a lifelong committed marriage must be an exercise in impossibility. Two unlike and unlikely lives, welded together by tradition, eros, child-rearing, desire for fiscal responsibility.
At very least, this might be the thought of many of Askildsen’s characters, who view marriage as a form of oppression in direct opposition to their freedom. Martin Hansen (who, it seems, makes for the perfect prototypical Askilsenian protagonist) wonders for some time just why it is he lies to his wife, and eventually lights upon the realization that “my non-disclosure and falsehoods were prerequisites for my freedom.” Another character lies about visiting his sick father in order to get away from his wife for a few hours. He, too, is attempting to reassert control over his life: “Later on, as he was driving out of town in the direction of R, he felt almost cocky, and he thought: I do as I please.”
“Do you remember the dogs of Thessaloniki,” asks the protagonist’s wife Beate in the story of the same name, “that got stuck together after they mated… All the old men outside the café shouting and screaming… and the dogs howling and struggling to get free from one another.” This unsubtle little allegory makes it clear that all parties feel equally choked by the marital bond, and also brilliantly depicts the overwhelming agitation – the howling and the struggling – hiding beneath all this small talk over coffee in the garden. But how to break free? Beate’s husband, out for a walk earlier in the story, confides: “I noticed I was reluctant to go home, and suddenly I thought, and it was a distinct thought: if only she were dead.”
What, exactly, is this sort of freedom that manifests itself in such childish, petty ways? Why is it so important to establish one’s autonomy through minor deceptions, just so that one can go smoke cigarettes down by the fjord? It turns out that marriage isn’t the real culprit. What these characters want, more than anything, is to be free of all obligations, to be owed nothing and owe nothing in return.
It’s no coincidence that friendship is almost completely missing from these stories. The closest thing any protagonist has to a friend is described as “a man my own age who lives in the area, with whom I have a somewhat forced relationship, because he once saved my life.” This same character explains to his sister that he has no girlfriend because “I prefer women who don’t make any demands of me, but who give, take, and go.” In “The Unseen,” Bernhard is shown contentedly allowing his sister and her fiancé to carry on a conversation without him: “It had grown darker, their faces weren’t completely distinct, he felt almost unseen. Almost free.”
So it’s appropriate that so many of these stories are about family visits and homecomings: the homecoming is the time when one’s current self is weighed against old expectations and aspirations, when weddings and funerals shake up or reify the accepted family dynamics. Longtime conflicts, neglected or forgotten, seethe and push against expectations of civility. In an environment of increased pressure, it’s hard not to dream of escape.
But Askildsen’s stories don’t ever build to a level of tragic, operatic family collapse. The conclusions are anticlimactic, the conflict is rarely resolved. There is generally a return, or a resignation. There is an uneasy acceptance of the fact that one is trapped in the same situation as before. “The Grasshopper,” a story of admirable subtlety and palpable sadness, ends with the husband finding his wife–with whom he has of course had some quarrel–alone and afraid in their bedroom. “I thought you had gone, she said. Where would I have gone, he said.”
Where would I have gone?
Is this question meant to illustrate his entrapment? Where would I have gone: there’s nowhere else I can go. Or is it an expression of preference?
Askildsen’s Selected Stories present a world in which one can never truly escape from one’s obligations. There is one character who gets close. His wife is dead and he is ambivalent; he speaks with her father and feels “something approaching satisfaction thinking about how, now that Helen was dead, he was no longer my father-in-law, and Helen’s sisters were no longer my in-laws either.” In all this loss of ties he seems to lose his humanity as well. Contemplating life alone on a large, empty estate, he closes his eyes and sees “that great deserted landscape, that’s painful to see, it’s far too big, and far too desolate, and in a way it’s both within me and around me.” There’s only one place we’re certain to be freed from our debt: the grave.
We walk a line, always, between obligation and isolation. Can you make peace with what you owe to your partner? What do you mean when you tell her, where else would I have gone? — Adam Segal
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