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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe Dark-Blue Winter Overcoat and other stories from the North by Sjon Hodgkinson and Ten Hodgkinson (editors) (view source)
Revision as of 10:35, 1 October 2017
, 10:35, 1 October 2017no edit summary
A compilation like this should be nigh on brilliant. It's not one author's best short works, it's that of a dozen. It's not from one snapshot in time, as some were written the year of publication and some in the 1960s. It's not from one tiny patch of author's desk or one set of laptop keys, but from the entire Nordic world, whether that be urban Scandinavia, the Faroes and other island groups, or Greenland. That is a world that's changing – as the Greenland-born author now living in Brooklyn, and the Iraqi blood on these pages, testify. It's a world where new roads and new building works mean a family living on the edge of the forest at the beginning of the story are being surrounded by other life by the end, and with the influence of centuries of folklore featured, a lot more than that changes – sometimes it seems to be even the characters' species…
The people behind this book should also know what they're doing where Nordic literature is concerned – one editor was unknown by me but is a fiction specialist and award judge, and [[:Category:Sjon|Sjon]] is the embodiment of modern Icelandic writing and literary appreciation. The publishers have also been responsible for giving us English speakers the likes of [[:Category:Dorthe MorsNors|Dorthe MorsNors]], who features early here, as the book skips gleefully from Denmark to Sweden and back before it makes its more exotic journeys. But those early tales are not exactly domestic – a young lad encounters a spooky tragedy on a home-made raft that certainly unsettles, and where the family group isn't what it seems, you get the likes of a man stuck both in a frustrating marriage and in a deer hunter's hide with a broken leg and no likely chance of being found.
But the book seems all too hellbent on proving me wrong as to the quality. Some pieces really are wilfully unenjoyable, and offer us weirdly fragmented glimpses of darkness for little rhyme or reason (there are three instances here), or darkness that at least has some merit in amongst its lack of joy (the title story, and the older 'The Dogs of Thessaloniki'). You're quickly reminded of how Sjon has been called a very Marmite writer, although I certainly found something in his last novel to entertain.
