northern treasure

'Every growing thing has received its peculiar impress: the delicately blown breath of the first cold. The stubbles straggle wanly sunwards, and the falling leaves rustle to the earth, with a sound as of errant silkworms. It is the reign of Autumn, the height of the Carnival of Decay, the roses have got inflammation in their blushes, an uncanny hectic tinge, through their soft damask.' -From Hunger by Knut Hamsun

so, my mom lent me her kindle for my time over here, for which i am very grateful. i've been in a scandinavian books phase, since i guess that's what my mom was into and had already downloaded. i read the millennium series (girl with the dragon tattoo, etc.), by swedish author stieg larsson, rather frantically. i couldn't put it down, as the saying goes.

below is an address to an n.p.r. piece about these and other scandinavian books in the same genre, and how "[their aim] was to investigate society ... to use detective fiction to "wield a scalpel" to lay open the soft "belly" of the "morally debatable" bourgeois welfare state, exposing the cancer that was eating away at Swedish society."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129081110

i didn't know a whole lot about how sweden works before reading this, and i'm not sure how much i really understand in the grand scheme now, but i definitely came away from the books rather surprised to have read much more than just a murder mystery/crime novel. what i read covered topics as wide ranging as bsdm, sexual violence against women, government intrigue, mathematics, fantastic sums of money, female heroines, psychology, journalism, and of course, a criticism of swedish society and politics. though the writing is far less poetic than Hamsun's (truthfully, not poetic at all), i do recommend the books highly.

Hunger was as painful as it was beautiful to read. it is a psychological study of a quite literally starving writer in turn of the century oslo (then called christiania), written in first person. it's a short but haunting story with no hopeful end. but intermingled with heartbreaking accounts of poverty, sickness, cold and mental illness, there were exquisite sentences like the example above. it caught me so deeply that i had to reread it several times and just sit and stare at the words for a while before finally writing it down. i think it had something to do with the fact that it is presently season-changing time.

so, now i must be on to some new book on the kindle screen. don't know what, yet. i am contemplating.