Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "oslo"

It’s a glamorous life being an international author. For example, I got to go to Norway in the dead of winter when there was two feet of snow in the streets.

And I loved it.

You see, when your home is in the Middle East, experiencing some Arctic conditions are rather welcome. The Norwegians are a lovely people for whom books are a genuinely collective experience across society. And the reindeer meat is really good.

My second novel A Grave in Gaza appeared in Norwegian translation last month and my publisher Forlaget Press flew me to Oslo to do some interviews with local journalists. They timed the publication for a little before Easter, when all Norwegians traditionally buy a pile of crime novels and take them to their remote cabins in the forest for the holiday. Just to be sure that they’re isolated and feeling creeped out….

It’s my second publicity tour in Norway and I must say that the Israelis and Palestinians who reviled the Oslo Peace Process really blew it. Those Norwegians know what they’re about. Everything runs well. Everyone’s polite and interested. They laugh easily. They aren’t hypercritical.

It makes you wonder how they got involved with the prickly types who inhabit the Middle East in the first place.

I met Thomas Mala, my exuberant main man at Press, at Oslo’s central station. He walked me along the relaxed pedestrian street leading past the Parliament and the National Theater up to the Royal Palace. At the bookshop on the corner opposite the theater, he showed me a little surprise: a window filled with my books and two enlarged copies of the cover. I’m not the most egotistical man in the world, but this felt good.

In the lovely Continental Hotel the next morning, I met up with Thor Arvid, a good-natured and quietly intellectual fellow from Press, who introduced me to the journalists I’d be meeting. Not that the first one needed introduction. Last year I’d met Fredrik Wandrup, culture correspondent at Dagbladet, the country’s main newspaper. A new father, he exuded contentment. The previous night he’d been to see Bob Dylan perform in Oslo. “It takes a while to figure out which song he’s playing,” Fredrik said. “But I liked it.”

Next up was a very sympathetic reporter from Klassekampen, which means “class struggle.” Its circulation is rising due to disgust with the bankers who flushed the world economy down the toilet. It also has a reputation for a hard line on the Palestinians. Still, even though my books don’t blame everything on the Israelis, Guri Kulaas understood my aim – to put a human face on the Palestinians, who’re so often seen only as stereotypes -- and she wrote a warm article.

Of course one of the pleasures of traveling to promote my books is meeting the people who publish them. Håkon Harket is the chief of Press in Oslo and a more cultured, thoughtful fellow I can’t imagine. He was generous enough to take me out to the Munch Museum in an Oslo suburb.

Munch is one of my favorite artists. Last year I visited the National Gallery in the center of Oslo, where some of his great works are kept, including Madonna (the most astonishing work of art) and The Scream. There’s more than one Scream, but the one at the National Gallery is better than the version at the Munch Museum.

Håkon walked me through an exhibit of Munch sketches for a series called Alfa and Omega. He was able to place these marvelous works of art in fascinating context from the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard through the plays of Henrik Ibsen.

Alfa and Omega, in Munch’s telling, seemed personifications of Adam and Eve, though somehow even more doomed. He drew the series with elements of expressionism and of the ancient Nordic myths.

He failed to mention brown cheese, however. As a Norwegian he really ought to have done. It’s almost as important to Norway as Odin and Freya and Thor ever were.

So when I was asked what I’d like in return for speaking at the Norwegian Publishers Association about my experience working with publishers around the world, naturally I said: brown cheese.

My speech went down well (although when I made a joke about wearing a Viking helmet with two horns, a gentleman in the audience protested that the real Vikings didn’t wear such helmets: “The Vikings weren’t horny,” he said.). They gave me a kilo of brown cheese, which looks and tastes like caramel chocolate, although its aftertaste is like a cheddar. They also gave me an existential novel by Dag Solstad, which I hadn’t asked for. (They’re publishers, after all.) I’m looking forward to reading it.

The speech was at the Litteraturhuset (Literature House), a central venue for book events and a gathering place for Norwegian publishers. Also home to the best reindeer meat, courtesy of chef Tore Namstad. It’s a very succulent meat with a liver aftertaste. If you’re shocked that I ate an innocent reindeer: next time I’m in Norway, I plan to eat whale.

I went out to Håkon’s place in a beautiful Oslo suburb called Jar for dinner on another night. The snow there was four feet deep, which made me feel that I’d got off lightly with the blizzard that had dumped itself on me downtown that morning. We ate with Håkon’s old friend Henning Kramer Dahl, a fascinating poet and translator who has introduced some major modern writers to Norwegian.



Along the edge of the Royal park from my hotel is the Ibsen Museum. The great playwright returned to Oslo for the last 11 years of his life. You can see the desk where he wrote every morning, which – for a writer and a lover of Ibsen’s plays like me, at least – has an almost mystical fascination.

Ibsen fact: he was five-feet-three. At the Museum you can see his extremely tall top hat and his high-heeled shoes. Clearly little Henrik had a complex. I took it as a reminder that a writer can have all the success in the world, but happiness has to do with accepting oneself.

Two other people I met in Norway about whom I’ll be writing more soon:

Scott Pack. The most innovative man in publishing? I think so. He’s the editor in chief of The Friday Project, part of Harper Collins. Among other ideas he’s been scanning the blogosphere for blogs to turn into books. With Tama Janowitz’s latest, he issued a limited signed printing of 1,000 copies, the buyers of which can send off for a free weird doll photo from Tama’s collection.

Monica Kristensen. After 30 years of polar exploration, she’s eaten polar bears and eaten her dog teams. She’s confronted a macho world. She’s earned a Ph.d in glaciology from Cambridge. Now she’s written a series of crime novels, though they're not yet in English (UK and US publishers, take heed). More on her to come.

Every couple of days a little alert pops up in my email account letting me know that I can read my books for nothing in Norwegian. My Norwegian’s not so great and I can read my books for nothing any time. But that’s not the point.

Scandinavia is a major center of so-called Cyberpunks who have willfully misinterpreted an old hacker adage that “information wants to be free” to mean “go ahead and steal things from which someone else expects to earn his livelihood.” Such Cyber types have, among other things, loaded electronic versions of my novels in Norwegian onto the internet so that anyone can take them without paying.

It’s a little odd. Anyone who’s been to Scandinavia will see that the locals are perfectly willing to pay through the nose for things which ought to be cheap. Even if they actually bought my novel, it’d still be cheaper than the train ride from Oslo Airport to downtown Oslo or a sandwich and soda by the fjord. And everyone’s so nice. Maybe that’s the problem–they’re trying to be nice to information. As long as they believe that the information wants to be free, then they’re only helping the information out by taking it for nothing…

It’s all the thin end of a disturbing wedge for creative artists such as yours truly who support their families entirely from their endeavors as authors, artists, musicians – and who for the most part would be somewhat better remunerated were they to choose to drive a bus for a living.

Information wants to be free but, as the original coiner of that phrase noted, information also wants to be expensive. If information is the catalogue of the Library of Congress, make it free. Sure, let’s have free access to recipes from Renaissance Florence and the geology of the Grand Canyon.

But not art. Art doesn’t want to be free. Art wants to be labored over by a person whose mind isn’t distracted by other things. Art wants to be made as good as it can be. Art wants creative dedication, it doesn’t want to be zapped out by people in a hurry who have to do a day-job, too.

Art, needless to say, is not just information.

Of course we can all justify a little theft. When I was a teen, I used to steal books. But only from big chain bookstores and only from authors who were long dead. The one time I broke those self-imposed rules, I nearly got tossed out of university for lifting a copy of a book written by my tutor’s wife from the college library before the librarian had even got around to cataloguing it. Anyhow, I gave that one back, because my education was free, so I was content for that particular bit of information not to be.

Others use Ebay to salve their conscience. For example, some penny-pinching Scot is offering for sale on Ebay Advance Uncorrected Proofs of my novels. These are sent out free to reviewers and booksellers before the books appear on the shelves. They’re clearly marked “Not for Resale” in big letters on the cover.

It could be that this person in Scotland would’ve behaved differently had the words “Nae fer resale” appeared in dialect on the cover. But I suspect that this person thinks that selling something dishonestly on the internet isn’t really dishonest. If that person were to walk into a second-hand bookstore and face a bookseller with his clearly marked “Not for Resale,” he’d feel a little ashamed at asking money for it. In selling just as in the writing of offensive anonymous comments, the internet is a shield for our worst behavior.

Well, as they say in Scotland, dinna fash yersel. I’ll manage, even if there are a few such novel proofs flying about. But think of poor Stephenie Meyer. Her blog mentioned not so long ago that someone had posted an early draft of her next novel on the internet and that hundreds of thousands of people had downloaded it.

(An aside: why on earth would anyone read an early draft of a novel unless they had to do so? Novels aren’t flash fiction. They take a long time and lots of work to make them right and until they’re right the reading of them can be pretty dire.)

Hey, you say, she’s not short of cash. Well, what’re you, a communist? Robin Hood?

Okay, Meyer’s no doubt quite rich as a result of her strange subgenre. But she’s not Goldman Sachs. She isn’t marketing worthless things to people, intending for them to lose millions of dollars and enrich her in return. She’s being paid for the enriching experience of reading for those who buy her books.

When I mentioned to some friends that this sort of thing went on with books, they were surprised. Each of them noted that they had taken music and movies from the internet in just the same way. Each also said that they figured Roman Polanski was rich enough to let them have a free look at “The Ghost Writer.” That Bono would still be able to afford fancy sunglasses if they ripped off his latest album.

But remember, Cyberpunks are anarchists. Do you really want them to define the way you live? When was the last time you read a good book by an anarchist?

As the recently deceased Malcolm McLaren always noted, even The Sex Pistols with their claim to be anarchists were only in it for the money.