Crimefest Day 2: Fire and Iceland

"You never hear anyone telling Norwegian jokes anymore, and I think it's because of the money," Swedish crime writer Åsa Larsson said during today's Crimefest 2012 panel on Scandinavian crime fiction.

"Now it's the other away round," Norwegian crime writer Thomas Enger replied. Norway's oil wealth has apparently muted at least one outward expression of Sweden's superiority to its neighbors.

But the panel was not all doleful observations and good-natured gloating. Gunnar Staalesen gave a plausible answer to a question I'd long had about Scandinavian crime writers: Why did Satanism and the fear thereof figure in a number of their crime novels in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, Jo Nesbø's The Devil's Star, Helene Tursten's The Glass Devil, and Åsa Larsson's Sun Storm (a.k.a. The Savage Altar) among them? Tursten appeared to take umbrage when I put the question to her a few years ago, apparently thinking I implied she had copied Nesbø. I implied no such thing, and I'll chalk Tursten's impatience up to fatigue from a gruelling tour schedule.

Larsson said a church figured in her book simply because, while secular now, she had had a religious upbringing; churches were simply a part of her background. But Staalesen suggested that a real-life wave of church burnings in the 1990s by a black-metal musician who wrote about Germanic neo-Paganism might have brought Satanism to the fore as an issue of public concern.

The intriguing thing about the resulting novels, at least the three I named, is that Satanism and satanists tend to be suspects and sources of fear rather than the actual villains of the piece. The books do not decry or praise Satanism, they merely take it up as one aspect of Swedish and Norwegian social and spiritual life.

I asked Staalesen after the panel whether an amusing, geographically specific metaphor for oral sex in the English translation of his 1995 novel The Writing on the Wall was an accurate rendering of the Norwegian original. He did not remember the line, which he'd have written seventeen years ago. But he did say the metaphor would work just as well in Norwegian as in English.

Finally, Ragnar Jonasson paid tribute to the trail blazed by his fellow Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indriðason. That Arnaldur did not publish his first novel until 1997 indicates how new Icelandic crime writing is. "Prior to that," Ragnar said, echoing a battle that crime writing has had to wage in a number of countries, "crime fiction was looked down upon by the public."

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 The panel's moderator was Barry Forshaw, who really has written the book on Scandinavian crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A clever, practical title change

I've written from time to time about title changes, whether in translations or between U.K. and U.S. editions of books in English. One of my longer comments concerned the Swedish novel published as Sun Storm in the United States and The Savage Altar in the United Kingdom.

On aesthetic grounds, the American title for Åsa Larsson's fine book is superior. The British title sounds like the name of a fourth-rate Black Sabbath tribute band.

A reason lies behind each title, however. Sun Storm, an accurate translation of the original Swedish, refers to the Northern lights, which appear several times in the book in descriptive passages. Savage Altar is presumably an allusion to the murder that drives the plot, which takes place in a church, though not at an altar.

The French publisher, Gallimard, took a similar tack to what Delacorte Press did in the U.S. and went with the Northern lights theme. The result was fortunate. The French title, Horreur boréale, is a play on aurore boréale, French for aurora borealis, or Northern lights. Consider that the h is silent in French, and you have one of the cleverer changes in book titledom.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Another thing about titles

I've just posted a comment about Åsa Larsson's Sun Storm. The novel was published under that title in the U.S. and as The Savage Altar in the U.K.

Leaving aside the question of which title sounds better (I think the answer is obvious), the divergent decisions on what to call the book provide a revealing look at two opposing philosophies of titling.

Sun Storm, an accurate translation of the original Swedish title, refers to the Northern lights, which appear several times in the book in descriptive, but not narrative, passages. The British title is presumably an allusion to the murder that drives the plot, which takes place in a church, though not at an altar.

There you have it: One title refers precisely to a feature that plays no direct role in the book's events. The other refers to the central event, but it does so imprecisely. Two titles, two schools of thought, one more item for the gripe session over title changes that drive you nuts (or not).

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Åsa Larsson, "Sun Storm"

"It had turned a little milder. The thermometer was showing minus fifteen ... "

The weather is cold, the body dismembered, the setting a church. The novel, of course, takes place in the south of France.

That's a joke, dear readers. With setting, killing and temperature like the ones I've described, Åsa Larsson's Sun Storm could only have taken place in Sweden. The question is relevant because among this novel's accomplishments are its creative spins on themes common in recent Nordic crime fiction.

Take the church, for one. Religion, its rejection by the public, and the fear of Satanism bubble close to the surface in a number of Nordic crime novels, Helene Tursten's The Glass Devil and Jo Nesbø's The Devil's Star among them. One could easily conclude from such books that citizens of the Nordic lands have an uneasy relationship with their churches. Usually, however, the theme is not central to the novel. A clergyman might be a victim or a suspect. Satanists might be suspected of a murder because of their earlier attack on a church building. But the books don't examine how believers believe, how practitioners "do" religion.

Here, the attacks on abuses committed in religion's name are more sustained and direct, both in matters of administration and of religious practice. And the protagonist, Rebecka Martinsson, is a former church member still bound by ties of memory and vestigial belief to the church people among whom she conducts her investigation.

Also, the weather is even colder than one might expect. Nordic crime novels tend to take place in or near their country's biggest cities. Sun Storm, by contrast, pulls Rebecka Martinsson from her Stockholm law office to her (and Larsson's) home town of Kiruna, in Sweden's far north. The novel is more one of action and character than of setting, but the setting does make for several differences. Drinkers drink at home rather than in bars. Place names sound Finnish rather than Swedish. There are references to the Sami, the ancient people of the far northern region where Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden meet. Intergral to the novel's main themes? Perhaps not, but they do contribute to its feel, as does the little girl a lock of whose hair freezes, much to her delight, on a typically cold day.

The novel abounds in such nice touches. A tyrannical police inspector gets his comeuppance not in some fantasy revenge scenario, but in a quiet snub. Large chunks of explanatory information are presented in engaging and clever ways. Themes that shout their way off the page in other novels are dealt with quietly here, almost daringly so. And Rebecka Martinsson's friend, accused in the killing of a charismatic religious leader, is handled far more convincingly than the cover blurb's description of her as "beautiful and fragile" might lead a reader to believe.

I have the tiniest of quibbles over a melodramatic touch or two, but I'll happily read Åsa Larsson's The Blood Spilt, currently available, and The Black Path, scheduled for publication this year.
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Sun Storm, a literal translation of the novel's Swedish title, is called The Savage Altar in the U.K. The sun storm of the U.S. title is the aurora borealis, or Northern lights, evocatively and suprisingly described several times in the novel.

The book won Sweden's award for best first crime novel in 2003 and was short-listed for best crime novel. The Blood Spilt won for best crime novel of 2004.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Title changes that drive you nuts (or not)

Why do publishers change a book's title when translating or reissuing it? Why does Åsa Larsson's Solstorm become Sun Storm in the United States but The Savage Altar in the United Kingdom? How about The Smell of the Night and The Scent of the Night? Again, same book.

And could political sensitivities lie behind the change in title of Matt Beynon Rees' first crime novel set in the Palestinian territories? The Collaborator of Bethlehem in the U.S. became The Bethlehem Murders in the U.K. (The British edition also changes Rees' name, dropping Beynon.)

Sometimes a change is easy to understand. Fred Vargas' Have Mercy On Us All made a better English title than a literal translation of the French original would have been: Leave Quickly, and Return Late. And Cornell Woolrich's story "It Had to Be Murder" is more easily found these days under the title of the movie that Alfred Hitchcock made from it: Rear Window.

OK, readers, what title changes delighted or infuriated you — or made you scratch your head or roll your eyes?

And here's a special Detectives Beyond Borders quiz: Adrian Hyland's wonderful Australian debut novel, Diamond Dove, will be published in the United States as Moonlight Downs. Why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007