Having recently read a few Norwegian novels, I’d grown curious about the land their authors had sprung from and was delighted to have my request for aHaving recently read a few Norwegian novels, I’d grown curious about the land their authors had sprung from and was delighted to have my request for a digital copy of this book approved by Net Galley. This is a beautiful text, likely best appreciated as a coffee-table volume. There are some stunning photographs of natural wonders—particularly of the many deep fjords that extend the country’s coastline to 29,000 km/18,000 miles, making it the longest in Europe—as well as fine ocean views of several traditional towns and sea-facing sections of cities. Included, too, are photos of flora and fauna; statues, monuments, museums, buildings of historical, cultural, and architectural significance; fish markets and the fishing industry. Oslo gets its own chapter, with its distinctive neighbourhoods well represented. Unfortunately, a few of the images appeared quite dark on my iPad.
In reading this, I had hoped to gain a better sense of Norway’s counties and regions, but I only managed to do so by performing my own online map searches to connect names with locations. Why the author/editor Claudia Martin didn’t include a single map is beyond me. Another problem is that a few counties/jurisdictions had their boundaries adjusted and names changed in January 2020. For example, two former counties—Hordaland and Sogne og Fjordane— were merged to form Vestland (which is centred around Norway’s second largest city, Bergen, in the southwest). Likewise, at the beginning of the current decade, Finnmark was merged with the neighbouring county of Troms to form the new, most northerly county: Troms og Finnmark. Martin confusingly uses only the older county names throughout this book, which is apparently a reissue of the 2020 edition. The appropriate updates were not made.
There is some specialized vocabulary, as well: “vernacular” to describe architecture (I’d only ever heard or used the word in relation to language); “orthogonal” to describe a right-angled street layout; “staved” medieval churches, built of upright wooden planks; and “koine,” a common language that arises naturally when two languages or dialects mix.
I’ll leave off with a few interesting facts gleaned from this informative text:
• Norway has 1600 glaciers. (By comparison, according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service, Canada has 267 named glaciers. If the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland are excluded, however, Canada has more glacier cover than any other nation on Earth—roughly 200,000 square kilometres.)
• Most fjords are deeper than the coastal sea into which they empty. (Lysefjord, for example, is up to 30 times as deep as the water at the sea end.) Fjords have shallow “sills”—underwater ridges—at their mouths, which were formed from the collected debris of the grinding glaciers that created the steep inlets.
• The centre of the tiny village of Ulvik, situated at the end of a sidearm of Hardangerfjord, a major fjord in Vestland, was burned down by the Germans in 1940, in retaliation against Norwegian resistance fighters. (If I ever knew that German warships had used the fjords to penetrate the interior of the country, I’d completely forgotten.)
• There are approximately 55,000 islands off Norway’s coastline, most of which are columns of rock—i.e, “stacks”—populated only by seabirds.
• Norway has sovereignty over the Svalbard Archipelago, 930 km/580 miles north of Tromsø and well north of the Arctic Circle. The world’s most northerly town, Longyearbyen (named for an American mining magnate), is found on the largest island, Spitsbergen. Longyearbyen has a permanent population of 2100, of which 60% are male. There are very few people over 65. In fact, a person is only allowed to live there if he’s employed in the place—mining dominates—or if he’s independently wealthy. Otherwise, he’s deported.
• The abandoned Russian ghost settlement of Pyramiden is also found on Spitsbergen. The Russians extracted coal in the area from 1910 to 1998. When they left, they didn’t take their statue of Lenin. It still stands. Tourism to this site is now being encouraged! Yes, really. The hotel has been cleaned up and reopened.
Overall, I found this book visually pleasing and informative, but there are some problems with it. I recommend it—with a few reservations....more
This is a book that demands a lot of mental work and, at slightly more than 400 pages, a considerable time investment. While I don’t exactlRating: 2.5
This is a book that demands a lot of mental work and, at slightly more than 400 pages, a considerable time investment. While I don’t exactly regret reading it—which is something, I suppose, I was far less impressed with it than most. I’d like to have more to show for my time than I do. This is a fragmented, chaotic, and even careless book roughly organized around the topics of travel and anatomy. As advertised, it is not a traditional or conventional novel—perhaps not a novel at all. It’s a collection of loosely connected stories (many of them inconclusive), anecdotes, facts, a lot of pseudo facts (information that masquerades as having a foundation in reality), ruminations, and attempts at playfulness, cleverness—some of them self-conscious or self-referential. It seems that Tokarczuk did a fair bit of consulting of Wikipedia and who knows what other sources to create her book. (She marvels at the online, collaborative encyclopaedia more than once in Flights.)
Whatever the case, a lot of the “information” Tokarczuk presents in her book is just flat-out wrong. Dark matter, for example, does not account for three-quarters of the universe. According to NASA, it makes up about 27%, while 68% of the universe is dark energy. Any basic anatomy or neurology text will tell you we do not, as Tokarczuk alleges, owe our short-term memory to the hippocampus. The hippocampus is actually involved in long-term memory storage. Atatürk, whose reforms came in the 1920s, was not responsible for the cruel removal of dogs from Constantinople/Istanbul to an island in the Bosporus, where they would die of thirst and starvation. This came in the early 1900s, according to humanities and law professor Colin Dayan in her 2016 book With Dogs at the Edge of Life (Columbia University Press) and other sources.
Is Tokarczuk’s carelessness with facts in this book intentional—some sort of deliberate “post-modern” disregard for accuracy— or is it a result of translator or editorial carelessness? I don’t know, but I don’t see how it serves her “meditation” on travel and anatomy. After I encountered several such errors, I mistrusted the author. Why was I struggling to parse her sometimes tedious lectures on “travel psychology” and discussions of imaginary psychological syndromes that had no foundation in reality? The book increasingly became a sort of futile game I didn’t care to participate in. While I enjoyed a couple of the longer stories Tokarczuk included—for example, the story of a New Zealand biologist (whose work involves the extermination of invasive species) returning to her native Poland to facilitate the assisted suicide of a former lover, and another about a despairing Russian wife and mother, who rides the subway for days on end to escape her hopeless home life—for me, this book just didn’t come together. The idea that things in motion aren’t ultimately as subject to entropy as things at rest just seemed silly. A book that initially struck me as stimulating and clever soon lost its lustre. Flights turned out to be less than the sum of its parts and certainly overhyped....more
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