Snow and Time

It started to snow over a week ago. First there was a thin layer over everything and everyone said it would soon melt, but then there came snow storms so heavy I couldn't see a thing when driving home in the dark. Pretty soon everything was covered, the car was frozen shut and difficult to extricate from the driveway, we saw other people's cars in the ditches on the way to work and everybody started wearing their winter boots again.

The view from our porch now

After the first batch of snow

In this part of the world my relationship with the seasons is turned on its head. In England I love the autumn but fear the winter. Here the winter seems like the natural state of things and the summer a weird hiatus. Already the moon is massive in the sky, even in the daytime, and the landscape glows in a dark blue colour all night. As many challenges as the ice and frost bring, I'm glad that I'll be here for another winter cycle.

There are no street lights where we live now. To get to our house you have to leave the road and walk down a small hill to the waterside. If we don't leave the lights on it can be difficult spot our home in amongst the trees.

In other news, today is my birthday. That means it's one year since the events I talked about in the first post here on this blog, and very soon it will be a year since we moved here. If I think back to those days before we set off on this trip it feels like a lifetime ago. I think one way to make life seem a little less short is to make sure a lot happens between one birthday and the next.

Lofoten

From the Hamsun centre we drove a little further South and boarded a ferry towards an archipelago named Lofoten. A couple of hours later we arrived in Svolvær, where the ferry's lights picked out circles of rock in the darkness. Just over a year ago we came through Svolvær on our boat trip North and had an hour or so to walk around the harbour. At the time I was really impressed by the look of the Lofoten Suite Hotel, and a year later this was where we stayed the night. Checking in, I thought I must be exhausted, because I found the receptionist helpful but very difficult to understand. Marthe explained afterwards that this was because she was speaking Swedish.

Lofoten Suite Hotel is the one in the middle.

A red-brown cylindrical building studded with massive windows, sitting above two restaurants right by the waterside, the Lofoten Suite Hotel is weird. The rooms have their own bathroom but they share a living room and kitchen with another hotel room. This wouldn't be so strange were it not for the fact that a lot of the walls are made of glass (one of the main views from the balcony was the interior of our bedroom.) It's a bit like We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, except you don't need special permission to draw the curtains. It was the off-season so we had the whole suite to ourselves, which was unbelievably luxurious, but if I ever stayed there again I'd want to be in a group of four so that I would at least know the people in the adjoining room.

All the towns in Lofoten were or are fishing towns and Svolvær is a mix of a modern port and a National Romantic painting. It's so much a place of water and boats that it made me wish my Dad was there, since he has more of a connection with the ocean.

On Saturday we drove through the middle of an enormous mountain and on to another fishing village called Henningvær, which sits on a constellation of small islands at the end of a long winding road and over a long narrow bridge. When local guidebooks compare it to Venice what they mean is that there's far more water than land. 

Driving back we kept stopping to try to take photographs, but the scale of the landscape in Lofoten really defeats amature photography. Even the sky seems bigger. 

Hamsun

Last weekend we drove South to an area called Nordland, where one of Norway's most famous writers, Knut Hamsun, grew up. Since 2009 there has been a Hamsun Centre in his home town of Hamarøy. I remember reading about it at the time it opened: this architecturally unique tribute to a writer, lying in a small village in the far North, where even most Norwegians never travel. I've wanted to go there ever since.

I seem to remember reading that the architect wanted the experience of moving through the five floors of the building to echo that of reading the writer's prose in some way. The structure is an asymmetric box with a staircase climbing through it at strange angles to platforms which are partly open. There is a small library, and each of the other floors is a multimedia installation dedicated to a different theme in Hamsun’s life and work, so you piece together some kind of picture through a series of fragments. 

Nature was profoundly important to Hamsun and one thing that definitely works in the centre's favour is the the way the outside landscape is incorporated into the experience of walking through the building. There is a roof terrace which gives a kind of overview of the region, though a clear view is deliberately obscured by a perimeter wall of tall cane. Then on each floor there are carefully placed windows and different types of terrace from which you get a "framed" view of an aspect of Hamarøy. 

Because the doors to these outside areas are open, cold gusts of air blow through the rooms in certain places. This slight element of discomfort sits quite well with Hamsun's history.

 

Until a few years ago Hamsun was relatively obscure outside Norway but he influenced a lot of 20th Century novelists. His first book, Hunger, foreshadows much of what Beckett and Auster would write and, published in 1890, is considered by some to be one of the first Modern novels. He would be a national hero, were it not for the fact that he collaborated with the German occupation. Although, unlike some other writers around this time (I'm thinking of Celine and Pound, maybe Eliot too), he claimed never to have been anti-Semitic, he was very pro Nazi. He went so far as to encourage Norwegian soldiers to desert. Even when the writing was quite clearly on the wall for the German war effort, Hamsun wrote and published a glowing eulogy for Hitler. The top floor of the centre is dedicated to a discussion of how one might reconcile Hamsun's work with his political affiliations. Projected onto two walls is a fascinating film featuring a series of Norwegian intellectuals taking a range of positions on both Hamsun's literary worth and his legacy.

What's most interesting to me about Hamsun's collaboration is how he got there, especially given that his early books were initially classed by the Nazis as degenerative literature. In the 19th Century he was in many ways radically left wing. Yet Hamsun didn't exactly become a collaborator through the proverbial reactionary drift. Like many European artists and radicals of the 19th Century, he detested Britain and its Empire. He looked instead to Germany as a country in touch with the traditions of the soil and as the home of the Peasant's Rebellion. Germany was the great European alternative.

By the time of the Second World War Hamsun was an old man, but he held on fiercely to the ideas of his youth. For him, his enemy's enemy would always be his friend. The rise of Germany had been his life long dream.