On Winter Writing and Solitude and Nordic Noir

This week I’m teaching Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, which is just about my favourite book; students will read only one excerpt from this poignant, tragi-comic, closely observed, skinny little book. So I hope that will be sufficient for them to see in Nelson what I see (and what so many see): the preeminent CNF author of our time, and perhaps of all time.

Not that there isn’t substantial competition.

Take the British writer Brian Doyle, whose work we are also reading this week.

And yes, here, “take,” literally, a long gulp of Doyle’s most famous essay, “Joyas Voladoras,” about hummingbirds–and everything else that matters:

“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.”

Well.

Both Nelson and Doyle articulate the same brutal truth in their writing, identifying it over and over in different contexts:

We are alone.

And, also, we are not alone.

I hope this won’t be too much for first-year Creative Nonfiction students as we struggle through the end of a dark, typically very wet winter. We had a weather reprieve this week, so I’ll be adding photos, both here and to our class materials. Snowdrops and tree buds, for encouragement.

Friend in Newfoundland, Ottawa, and Toronto, who are struggling with very different climactic conditions, have gently suggested that I shut up about the glories of Giant Snowdrops in January.

My CNF crime fiction tie-in is that I have just re-read, with somewhat less pleasure this time, the always-interesting Wendy Lesser’s book on Scandi Noir.

I’m using her book as the model for my own, so there are complicated dynamics of envy and imitation in my re-read.

But also: I’m less interested in Swedish crime fiction than she is, and I found her treatment of Danish writers rather cursory.

And she leaves out Iceland entirely, on the reasonable basis that it’s not part of Scandinavia.

But I’m thinking about Nordic Noir is a less, perhaps, geographically contiguous way?

It’s a mood.

It’s long dark winter nights and even longer bright summer days.

It’s careful gun control but also a plethora of novels about imaginatively gruesome serial killers.

What is going on with all the Nordic Noir mass murders and serial killers? There isn’t much of a Canadian parallel to this, although in other ways there are deep affinities between these crime fiction traditions.

A confession: I avoided Nordic Noir, for the most part, for years. The books, while gorgeously translated, are much too graphic for my tastes; so are the TV and film adaptations. I admire, for instance, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy and the brilliant and mercurial Lisbeth Salander, and I watched the first film in both its Swedish and English-language incarnations, but there is a sadism in these books that I don’t want to read again. Once was plenty.

More recently, however, my mother-in-law persuaded me to try the TV adaptation of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Department Q, and–yes, sadism, again–but it was also compelling. She doesn’t recommend the book series as a whole, which she thinks gets weaker as it proceeds, but she has given me a list of other writers Danish and Norwegian crime writers to read.

I’m going to try Karin Fossum again. And I’m catching up on the last two Sara Blaedel novels. And then I should probably force myself back to Henning Mankell for a bit, but I was so very irritated by a certain ubiquitous Englishman’s television portrayal for a time that it put me off the character, entirely.

Other recommendations?

Not Nesbø. I just can’t. But he has legions of fans.

I will read and write more about Camilla Läckberg, because there was a fascinating literary scandal a while back: an accusation of ghost-writing that has been explained as a very close collaboration between writer and editor.

The Canadian Nordic Noir tradition has some intriguing authors and TV shows: I’ve been reading a lot of Giles Blunt and I’ll try the adaptation soon. Like the Scandi crime writers, Blunt does not shy away from both brutal and aestheticized violence. There’s an image of a young girl’s corpse in a block of ice that is unforgettable. For me, though, these haunting images raise discomfiting ethical questions that I need to unpack a bit in some writing I’m doing on Blunt, Bowen, and the depiction of Indigenous murder victims.