Norway special
This article is part of the 18/2019 Eurozine review. Click here to subscribe to our reviews, and you also can subscribe to our newsletter and get the bi-weekly updates about latest publications and news on partner journals.
Norway is guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2019 (16–19 October).
Eurozine will be in Frankfurt to promote the cultural journals network and is organising
a panel at the ‘Weltempfang’ on how to ‘break the bad news’ of climate crisis.
More information
Syn og Segn takes a long, fond look at Norwegian agriculture;
Vagant relishes Houellebecq’s anti-utopianism;
Ny Tid reviews contrasting histories of imperial Britain;
and Le Monde diplomatique focuses on plastic, popes and poetry.
Syn og Segn
3/2019
(Norway)
Syn og Segn takes a long, fond look at Norwegian agriculture
In a focus on Norwegian agriculture, contributors to the quarterly Syn og Segnare concerned by the trend away from small, locally adapted farms towards larger, fewer and more specialized agribusinesses. All share the perception that locally rooted, small-scale farming enterprises are valuable, in a human as well as an environmental sense — Erik Halvorsen’s title is ‘Yellow carrots and the two-degree limit’ — and should receive political support and public recognition in order to shift the emphasis away from industrialized farming.
Love of the land: Halvorsen and also Sigrid Sørumgård Botheim, Astrid Brekken and Magni Kristin Moe Westgård write about their love of the land, animals and rural communities. Siri Helle enumerates praiseworthy, locally produced foods: ‘the luxuries that should be everyday fare.’ And Torbjørn Tufte argues for making agriculture central to the national economy: ‘the time has come for guarding agricultural land and thus guaranteeing Norway’s potential for producing its own food.’
Iceland: In an interview with Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson, president of Iceland, we learn something about the history and strong constitutional role of the Icelandic presidency. Iceland has had two changes of government in three years; Jóhannesson — formerly an academic historian — comments that ‘it was useful that I knew a great deal about the position and could intervene should it be necessary’. He goes on to discuss his interest in family cohesion, support for effective mental health care and concern for identity issues: ‘nowadays, around ten percent of Icelanders are born outside the country’.
More articles from Syn og Segn in Eurozine; Syn og Segn’s website
Vagant
1–2/2019
(Norway)
Vagant relishes Houellebecq’s anti-utopianism
The current issue of the quarterly Vagant — 180 pages devoted to writing on culture — features a dossier on the arch-pessimist of contemporary letters, Michel Houellebecq. On a thorough if unsystematic mission to undermine any pretence to righteousness, the former agronomist’s take on agricultural politics is ‘interesting’, according to Mats O. Svensson. Houellebecq argues that ‘things were better when cows ate green grass and … ecological farming was not a topic for the middle classes and the EU didn’t stick its nose into honest French farmers’ affairs’. Svensson relishes a comment by Houellebecq’s protagonist in his latest novel Serotonin: ‘Knowing ecology is handy for shutting up the Greens’.
Houellebecq cont. Amidst the critical analysis and comment, odd takes on Houellebecq and his books catch one’s attention. Joni Hyvönen picks up the theme of cigarettes: smoking is a protest against the right-thinking, and nicotine is ‘the drug of drugs’, pure addiction without baroque hallucinations or compulsions and an invaluable stimulus for a lonely man. And Vagant editor Christian Johannes Idskov has compiled a ‘Houellebecq alphabet’, from ‘air conditioning’ to ‘zapper generation’.
Also in the issue: Art and the northern environment; singing 18th-century songs as a way of life; and escaping capitalism’s grip on our lives.
More articles from Vagant in Eurozine; Vagant’s website
Ny Tid
10/2019
(Norway)
Ny Tid reviews contrasting histories of imperial Britain
The monthly Ny Tid’s core aim is to provide a forum for essayistic reviews of international titles. The current issue features non-fiction, although film is also extensively covered — notably, the contributions to the Kosovo Documentary Festival — as well as photography.
British history: Edoardo Campanella has read Jacob Rees-Mogg’s The Victorians: Twelve Titans who Forged Britain and Simon Heffer’s The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880–1914, noting that he is dealing with two very different books on the British Empire. Rees-Mogg — the Conservative MP mockingly referred to in the UK as the ‘Honourable Member for the Eighteenth Century’ — rehashes Brexit mythologies; his biography of eminent Victorians (eleven men, one woman: Victoria herself) is ‘an extreme manifestation of nostalgic nationalism’. Heffer, by contrast, shows up the ‘devastating effects of late imperialism’, focusing on ‘the superficial pomposity and national self-confidence … that served as a smokescreen for internal division and discontent.’ He writes with ‘a quality and depth of knowledge that place him in the first rank of historians’.
Ecology: Philosophy dominates a selection of books with green themes, from essays on Heidegger as an ‘ecological thinker’ to Félix Guattari’s speculations about the wasting of the Brazilian rain forests — which he sees as the final goodbye to the enlightened trust in human rationality.
More articles from Ny Tid in Eurozine; Ny Tid’s website
Le Monde diplomatique
10/2019
(Norway)
Le Monde diplomatique focuses on plastic, popes and poetry
Over thirty per cent of plastic packaging in Norway is recycled, whereas globally the share is only nine per cent, with seventy-nine per cent ending up in landfills or being dumped in the environment. Every year, Norway sends 30,000 tons of plastic waste to Germany and Finland. But what happens afterwards? Is the waste recycled into new plastic products, or does it end up in south-east Asia?
‘So far there has been no evidence that the environmental merits of plastic recycling are any greater than the other alternatives, such as burning for local central heating’, writes journalist Frida Skatvik in the Norwegian edition of the monthly Le Monde diplomatique.
Catholicism: Many progressive Catholics placed high hopes in Francis, only to be disappointed. This resistance to reform has its roots in the deep-seated anti-modernism of Catholic institutions, writes Ola Tjørhom. ‘In view of the crisis of the past decade, the Catholic Church needs a leader that is perceived as radical without actually being so’. The election of Francis as Pope, ‘represents a step in the right direction, but as a solution to the Church’s many problems, it is far from sufficient’.
Poetry: Critic Arnstein Bjørkly re-reads the early poems of Jan Erik Vold. ‘Ever since his first book in 1965, [Vold’s] contribution to poetic renewal has been to move the boundaries of meaningful expression, to insist that he describe a reality and attach his name to it, to dare to put his world centre-stage and to exploit language’s critical potential.’
More articles from Le Monde Diplomatique in Eurozine; Le Monde Diplomatique’s website
