Eat Your Heart Out, Kafka

OSLO —  Inviting scents of cinnamon and cardamom waft from the crowded cafes along Karl Johans Gate where businessmen and bellboys, shoppers and students, take time each day to sip strong coffee and linger over a good book.

It is a sensuous indulgence that can be seen in town and country across Scandinavia, where decades of economic prosperity have fostered comfort and culture, giving rise to educated societies that have both a hunger for intellectual diversion and the literary talent to feed it.

Writers at the top of national bestseller lists in Norway, Sweden and Denmark--many of whom also are finding unprecedented acclaim among bookworms the world over--have turned on its head the assumption that creative geniuses must suffer for their art.

It seems in this small corner of the world--which has produced far more than its share of international triumphs, such as “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” “Sophie’s World” and “Hanna’s Daughters”--that wealth and security can provide their own inspiration.

Not since the 19th century fame of Hans Christian Andersen and Henrik Ibsen have writers from these chilly, wind-swept lands on the periphery of Europe enjoyed the international stature that they have achieved over the past decade.

Many of the contemporary storytellers distinguishing this region as a land of letters attribute their success to a kind of cultural welfare that frees the mind and imagination from the mundane considerations of mortgages and doctors’ bills that burden their colleagues elsewhere.

“When people are rich, they have time and money for concentrating on culture and art,” says Jostein Gaarder, whose 1991 history of philosophy seen through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl, “Sophie’s World,” has sold a phenomenal 20 million copies worldwide.

Like other novelists from this region, Gaarder, a Norwegian, credits a supportive environment and a rich literary history for the renown he and others enjoy not just in their homelands but increasingly in once-impenetrable markets overseas.

“British and American publishers are usually so arrogant,” Gaarder says with characteristic fervor, quickly apologizing if he has given offense. “Then came [‘Smilla’ author] Peter Hoeg, and they could no longer ignore us. My own situation is completely different since ‘Sophie’s World.’ My publisher calls me now to ask if I know about any other interesting novels.”

Government programs in the five Scandinavian countries, including Finland and Iceland, provide indirect subsidies to writers by guaranteeing publishers that the state will buy a significant share of each novel’s first run for public libraries, taking on much of the risk involved with publishing works by unknowns. All bookstores also are obliged by law to have in stock all titles by national authors published within the past two years.

Only the Brits Buy More Books in Europe

Book prices are fixed, as in most of Europe, which deprives readers of the cut-rate deals offered by big bookstore chains in the United States, to no discernible detriment to local reading habits. In fact, more titles are published and more books are purchased per capita here than in the rest of Europe, where people already read much more than Americans do. According to Svenska Bokhandel, the Swedish booksellers association, Scandinavians trail only Britons in per capita book sales in Europe.

Scandinavian countries also confer their own lucrative and prestigious writing awards to national authors, helping the most promising to divest themselves of their day jobs.

Gaarder, a former teacher, has another novel being translated for the U.S. market. “Maja,” which he describes as “edu-tainment,” blends art history, modern mystery and natural science. The novel explores human evolution by tracing a contemporary woman’s ancestry to the figure in the late 18th and early 19th century paintings by Spanish artist Francisco Goya, “The Maja Naked” and “The Maja Clothed.”

“People want to learn but find textbooks too difficult. They want to read about these subjects within the framework of a story,” says Gaarder, a youthful 49-year-old who gleams pixieish with enthusiasm for his latest mission.

Norwegian novelist Erik Fosnes Hansen, whose fictional evocation of musicians aboard the Titanic made “Psalm at Journey’s End” a bestseller throughout Europe, agrees that the mental relief provided by social democracy is probably an element in Scandinavian writers’ success.

“Socialized medicine and national insurance provide everyone with a sense of safety and security,” says the 35-year-old author with three ambitious works behind him. “Even if you get a serious illness, you don’t have to worry about ending up with huge bills to pay.”

However, Danish writer Carsten Jensen, while agreeing that the literati of Scandinavia are isolated from the pain and hardship prevalent in most of the world, doubts that the comfort factor has much to do with creativity.

“I don’t think you can make a connection between good writing and affluence because there are societies where there is nothing but misery that produce great literature,” says Jensen, whose “I Have Seen the World Begin” is still on the paperback bestseller list in Denmark four years after publication. “Look at the boom in Indian writers. This is a country with a lot of problems, but it consistently produces great literature.”

Jensen ties Scandinavia’s strong literary heritage to the region’s international outlook, a natural consequence in small nations where people are compelled to travel the world to trade and seek alliances.

Indeed, the international renown enjoyed lately by the region’s writers is notable more for its magnitude than its uniqueness. In the nearly 100 years that Nobel prizes for literature have been awarded, 15 Scandinavian authors have been honored, compared with 11 from the United States, which has more than 10 times the population of this region.

Writers Have Movie Star Status

Writers in Scandinavia are held in much the same awe as movie stars in the U.S. and are often recognizable to readers because of the revered tradition of public readings. Jensen, although professionally overshadowed by Hoeg, a fellow Dane, has taken part in more than 100 literary evenings at bookstores and community halls over the past few years.

Scandinavian writers also are more prominent outside their homeland these days because those who are successful realize they must capture readers’ attention on a bigger stage.

“Scandinavian societies are so small that even once you’ve become very visible in these countries, there’s a limit to how much more you can do,” says Hansen, referring to a market of only 24 million people spread across five countries, each with its own language.

Still, people here are avid readers and have a preference for their own literature, he says, accounting for what are phenomenal per capita sales of the most successful native works. “Psalm” sold 100,000 hardcover copies among Norway’s 4.4 million people, a figure that would be impressive even in the huge U.S. market.

“Scandinavians like to read. Maybe it has something to do with the weather,” the author muses on a blustery day.

Hansen’s latest novel, “Tales of Protection,” appeared in Norwegian bookstores last year and is being translated into English for release in 2001, says Elisabeth Dyssegaard, who edits Hansen, Hoeg, Gaarder and a host of other Scandinavians for Farrar, Straus & Giroux in New York. Like “Psalm,” which was published in 30 languages, Hansen’s new book presents an international cast with seemingly little connection to the Nordic region. Yet the author nonetheless considers his style to be “Scandinavian in essence.”

True to the intellectual heritage of the region, his characters are travelers and thinkers who want to know more about the world around them--even if their hearts remain loyal to home.

“Ibsen lived 34 years of his life abroad. So did [Karen] Blixen,” he says, referring to the Dane who published under the name Isak Dinesen. “So you can’t really say this more international outlook is new. But in the postwar era, it is new. There is less of the isolated Norwegian intellectualism that dominated the early part of this century.”

“Psalm at Journey’s End,” first published in Norwegian in 1990, was intended to tell of the personal shipwrecks in the lives of the novel’s five main characters. Even in its first English release in 1996, it was a literary forerunner to the movie “Titanic,” which similarly sought to put flesh, blood and emotion into one of the world’s most enduring disaster stories.

“Tales of Protection” is an exploration of serendipity that looks at lucky coincidences and what Hansen calls “synchronicity.”

“Having written so extensively on disaster, I thought it would be interesting to write about disasters that didn’t happen, those saved-by-the bell and by-the-skin-of-your-teeth experiences,” he says of his latest epic.

Swedish writer Marianne Fredriksson, a former journalist, amassed a loyal audience at home with a dozen novels over the past 20 years but was surprised by the U.S. and European acclaim for her latest work, “Hanna’s Daughters.” A multi-generational saga in the style of the late James A. Michener, the 1994 novel released in the United States in 1998 conveys the sweep of 20th century Swedish history in the course of recounting three women’s everyday lives.

“I guess every woman who reads it sees a bit of herself in it, or perhaps her mother or grandmother,” the author, ensconced in her writing bungalow amid flowers and fruit trees, says in surmising the appeal of “Hanna,” which sold 1 million copies in the United States.

Although the 73-year-old Fredriksson has nothing in the works at the moment--”I’m waiting for a new idea to strike me”--the success of “Hanna” has generated foreign interest in her previous works. Ballantine, which brought “Hanna” to U.S. readers, also translated and released another Europe-wide bestseller by Fredriksson, “Simon’s Family,” late last year and is reading other earlier works, says her agent, Bengt Nordin.

Foreign triumphs, especially in the lucrative German- and English-language markets, create opportunities for other rising stars in the region, says Nordin. “When you have a star like Marianne, it’s easy to attract others,” he says, adding that publishers have lately been courting Scandinavians at European book fairs.

Nordin also represents two of Scandinavia’s hottest crime writers: Lisa Marklund, whose fictional sleuth is a female reporter on a Stockholm newspaper, and Henning Mankell, who has had three of his eight Kurt Wallander detective novels published by New Press. Another, “The Fifth Woman,” is due out in August.

Hoeg has produced four novels since “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” his inaugural thriller set in Greenland that became a movie starring Julia Ormond and Gabriel Byrne. He’s published nothing, however, since 1996. Even other luminaries on the Scandinavian literary circuit are unsure what the Copenhagen recluse is working on.

“He doesn’t even have a phone,” reports Dyssegaard, who is of Danish origin herself.

But Hoeg’s out-of-nowhere success with “Smilla” did more to open the outside world’s doors to Scandinavian writers than any single work for the better part of the departing century. As raw and chilling as the Arctic climate, “Smilla” brought the region’s environment, ethos and emotion to foreign cultures the world over and tuned the global ear to a new Nordic voice.

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Williams was recently on assignment in Oslo.