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Episode 15: "The Conqueror" by Jan Kjærstad, translated by Barbara Haveland w/ special guest Chad Post
116 Plays1 year ago
Having sorted some annoying technical issues, herewith Episode 3 of Season 2 (our way of apologizing for the delay in uploading this episode) in which we discuss The Conqueror by Jan Kjærstad, translated by Barbara Haveland and published by Open Letter Books.
And to kick off our series of guest hosts, Chad Post of Open Letter Books (and Dalkey Archive Press (and the Two Month Review)) joins to chat about The Conqueror, publishing writ large, publishing works in translation, and, well, to maybe have a go at a few different…peoples? (In fairness to Chad, Tom very much started it.) It’s a fun conversation and a really amazing book.
Titles discussed/mentioned:
Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf
kind of all of Knausgaard
also kind of a lot of Dag Solstad
Your Face Tomorrow (you really ought to know who wrote and translated this one)
Njál’s Saga
Egil’s Saga
Dickens, but specifically David Copperfield
W. Somerset Maugham, but specifically Of Human Bondage
Tirza by Arnon Grunberg, translated by Sam Garrett (and the forthcoming Good Men by Arnon Grunberg, translated by Sam Garrett (out 5/23/23 and click here to order from Open Letter)
The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor
all of Jean Echenoz: really, all of it
Click here to subscribe to our Substack and do follow us on the socials, @lostinredonda across most apps (Twitter and Instagram for now; we’re coming for you eventually #booktok).
Music: “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. And I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda. Hi, Lori. Tom, how are you doing?
00:00:21
Speaker
I am good.
Special Guest Announcement: Chad Post
00:00:23
Speaker
And on this episode, we have a bit of a special guest. We teased in the last episode that we'll be having friends of the podcast on to talk about some of the backlist titles. And this week, to talk about The Conqueror, we have Chad Post, publisher of Open Letter Books. Hey, Chad.
00:00:44
Speaker
Hey Tom, hey Lori, thanks for having me on. Thanks for, thanks for coming on. Um, yeah, so I mean, last season, Lori and I had a really great time talking backlist and we could probably do that incessantly, but we thought it'd also be fun for folks to hear from some other people, get some other perspectives and also frankly, like bring in other people and their recommendations. Um, now you didn't recommend this one, but, uh, we also figured you wouldn't exactly shy away from talking about one of the, one of your books. So.
00:01:14
Speaker
Here we are. No, I'm happy to talk about anything and everything as long as you want. This is a book that Tom introduced me to, and it's a great book. And I'm embarrassed to say that I'd never heard of the author or the book. Of course, I've heard of Chad Post an open letter, but it's going to be a fun discussion today, I think. I think so, too. Yeah, it's been it's been ages since I've read this. So really, really pulling out the pulling out the stops in my aging memory here. But it'll be fun.
00:01:45
Speaker
Well,
Role of Open Letter Press in Book Discovery
00:01:46
Speaker
I mean, that's kind of the point of backless we think is make sure that we can, you can pull anything up from any time and it's just a matter of the quality, right and frankly that's why I presses like open letter exists is to make sure books like this find their way into the world and, and kind of
00:02:02
Speaker
Yeah, kind of can work out there and be discovered or rediscovered at any time. On that note, Chad, could you tell us a little bit about the publication story around The Conqueror because it's
00:02:17
Speaker
I mean, from I think you've mentioned a little bit of it to me in the past and just other conversations, I mean, quite a while ago. But this is one of the earlier books that Open Letter published, right? Yeah, I was trying to remember if it was in the very first season that we did or the second. But it's one of the first two, like it's one of the first year of books that Open Letter published.
00:02:36
Speaker
And the way that it came about is actually through E.J. Van Lannon. E.J. Van Lannon was at Echo for a time and then worked at Delky very briefly and then left with me to come to Rochester to start Open Letter. And he was very obsessed with The Seducer, the first book in the trilogy, which I may still be mispronouncing his name, but we're always told to say it's sort of like Jan Sharstad,
00:03:01
Speaker
And anyone who's Norwegian can correct that as they want to do. But he had read The Seducer when Overlook brought it out and really liked it and then talked to Overlook about the other books and they weren't interested in publishing the follow-ups at all because The Seducer didn't do well enough for them to continue with the trilogy.
00:03:23
Speaker
which is sort of frustrating because, I mean, I think he was, he was in particular really invested and had me read The Seducer right away, which I did.
Acquiring and Publishing 'The Conqueror'
00:03:33
Speaker
I even remember where I was when I was reading it was at the Lettig House in Art Omi, north of Hudson in New York at the wonderful like Art Center and Writers Retreat. And I read it over the weekend. It's a pretty big book, but it was like very compelling, very engrossing. And we were able to get the rights into The Conqueror and The Discoverer
00:03:52
Speaker
with the idea that at one point in time, we would be able to do all three of them simultaneously or side by side. So he was the inspiration or like the driving force behind the initial acquisitions of it. And then it became like a trilogy that we really promoted and loved and really kind of made a good representation of what open letter wanted to do of kind of finding those
00:04:16
Speaker
those great authors that were either overlooked or were like in some way neglected and in this case like how bizarre would it have been to have like one volume that really does tease the whole enterprise since all three all three volumes maybe you can read them standalone-ish because they each are self-contained in a way but they provide three different perspectives with three different structures on one person's life so not to have the other two is almost like like a literary crime of sorts so we decided to do both of them
00:04:46
Speaker
And it was at a point in time when we were still doing paper over board books. So that's why it's like a really nice, cool book.
00:04:53
Speaker
which we don't have any stock of anymore. I think we have like two copies squirreled away in my office and literally in a drawer under a pile of other things so that nobody can sell them and nobody can take them and
Promotion and Appeal of 'The Conqueror'
00:05:06
Speaker
so that we have them forever. But that was back when we were doing the Paper of a Board and really producing, I mean, I think those books are absolutely beautiful and absolutely beautiful objects to hold.
00:05:17
Speaker
and Conqueror and Discoverer are two of the ones with like the coolest covers. Like they're very slick, sort of Nordic, Ikea, Scandinavian chic. And I love it. And I did fall in love with the books as well and absolutely adored them. And we even brought him over for a big tour at one point in time when the Discoverer came out. We had him come to Rochester, New York, and then I forget where we went from there.
00:05:44
Speaker
possibly Chicago as well. Like I wouldn't have been surprised if we had done something there, but I honestly can't remember. I found on our website, on our 3% blog website, a reference to the tour, but never any details.
00:05:58
Speaker
Chad, how did you find the translator for these books? I think her name is Barbara... Haviland? Barbara Haviland, yes. So the agency that was involved with this, Oushog, they were... That I know I'm mispronouncing, but I cannot remember how you do it right. But they had commissioned her.
00:06:19
Speaker
to do these, because they were looking at the books as being like truly global, like books that would sell into a lot of countries. And at that point in time in the early, like, I mean, still early 2000s, mid 2000s, there was a point where like a lot of these Scandinavian organizations, Iceland was an Iceland being another example, had like very strong literary centers. So Norla is the Norwegian
00:06:44
Speaker
I forget what it all stands for, but it's basically to promote Norwegian literature abroad and they would provide large grants to anyone to do translations. And at that point in time, they were paying like I think it was 85 to 100% of the translation costs for books to get to get translated.
00:07:02
Speaker
For Norway, despite the fact that like now it seems almost insane to say this, given like the rise of Nordic noir and Norwegian writers and, and, you know, the Knoss guards of the world. At that point in time, there's like zero interest, like Norla and Fili was the finished equivalent. They
American Interest in Norwegian Literature
00:07:19
Speaker
had basically given up on the US.
00:07:21
Speaker
They weren't getting, they weren't even sending information. They didn't really care because nobody in America cared about their books. Nobody was buying the rights. Nothing was really being translated. It was all just sort of like dead in the water for the most part. And so they funded the translation with the hopes that then if there was an English, they could get German, like German publishers, Spanish publishers, French publishers, all the publishers that exist in, in Western Europe.
00:07:47
Speaker
to be able to read it since they didn't really have any editors that were reading Norwegian. The same exact thing happened with the book The Pats, which was the first work of fiction that we published by Bragi Olafsson from Iceland. That book had been fully translated before we ever saw it, and it was all sponsored by this government entity. So it was a different sort of
00:08:05
Speaker
Rubric at that time, South Korea did a similar thing for a long time in which they were translating in full books that rather than doing samples, rather than like leaving it up to the will of the publisher, the things that they thought could travel and were saleable, they were investing in upfront to be able to then find publishers for later. So Barbara Haveland passed away not too many years after the discoverer came out, in fact,
00:08:33
Speaker
And so she, I don't, we had very minimal contact with her. We edited the book, but like she had been like sort of like done with it and it moved on more or less. So it wasn't, it wasn't a really close working relationship like we had with a number of other translators. It was more like from a distance and that it had already been sort of put together prior to our even acquiring it.
00:08:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's such a different model from I think the more contemporary or what you've been doing very recently with working with translators very actively, letting them curate parts of your list. And so I was just interested as to how you got
00:09:18
Speaker
Um, her to, to, I guess she didn't do it for you specifically, but she, and there was a UK press that was doing them adjacent to us as well. Yeah. It was Arcadia.
00:09:30
Speaker
And so there was like that sort of interaction there too. And Arcadia was run by Gary Pulsifer, who is really dedicated to doing a lot of translations, a lot of interesting stuff. He ended up selling the press to, I forget whom, it's now part of, of Macklehouse Press, but it was passed on from one place to another. And Gary, like, he was around the time that the Discover came out as well, was diagnosed with cancer and passed away.
00:09:59
Speaker
around that same time, like in the early 2012-ish, 2011, maybe a little bit before that. And so his press lives on to a degree and is still there, but that was very sad for his passing, but he was more involved in that side of things too.
00:10:18
Speaker
I mean, it's interesting also to bring up Arcadia because just looking into this a little bit and looking into the trilogy as a whole, the Arcadia editions, the seducer has a decent cover, but the conqueror and the discoverer form a woman's body when laid out side by side. So in theory, the seducer, you would think, would have a face or a head.
00:10:41
Speaker
and it doesn't. So having the two open-letter titles and the Overlook title almost function the same way as, I don't know, some sort of weird publishing cosmic kismet sort of thing, which is, it's interesting. Yeah, I thought all three of those tied together, but man. And then
00:11:02
Speaker
Maybe they do, but I definitely saw an image of the three laid out that looks really wild and actually rather unpleasant when all is said and done with how it forms. It's also interesting the time period you're talking about where now if you go into a well-stocked indie bookstore, you can't throw a stone without hitting a Nordic title from any number of presses. Verso at this point is publishing a ton of them as well, which is interesting.
00:11:33
Speaker
It's interesting how this perhaps more fruit in a way they didn't quite expect but it's also interesting that like the cultural organization of the country is making the call as to what to put out into the rest of the world which definitely has
00:11:48
Speaker
a shaping impact on how the literature from that country is perhaps viewed. Yeah, and I think that there's more to that story, I believe, that goes between Oushog and Norla to some degree because they ended up being not just a publisher, but they're also like an agency.
00:12:06
Speaker
So they're they're probably requesting and doing this based on like what makes most sense from their perspective as agents. And I forget who all they represent. But it's like the big swath of all of the like big Norwegian authors. And at the time, they're really the only
00:12:24
Speaker
really true, large agency and large publishers. So they were kind of like the one stop shop for a lot of stuff. So working with them would make a lot of sense within that context, less sense now that there are like other agencies, other publishers that are a little bit more branched out in terms of Norwegian stuff. But back then it was really like, they were, they were the big, I mean, they're still like one of the biggest publishers, but like they were, they were like kind of it. Well, and that's a good, I think,
00:12:50
Speaker
entree a little bit before, before we fully launch into the conquer proper. But maybe you could say a thing or two about, and I'm probably gonna butcher the pronunciation as well, or butcher your version of the pronunciation. Sure. Sure. Stead. But, um, from what little I can, you know, glean online, these, I mean, these books were sensations in Norway. Bestsellers had a massive impact on the literary landscape. I think
00:13:14
Speaker
Is it a conqueror that won the Nordic council? Okay. I mean, so obviously like these, these books were, you know, meteors, they blew up big, all that, but has anything, has any of his other stuff.
00:13:29
Speaker
come out in English that you're aware of? And where does he, I mean, I guess that and where does he kind of fit maybe in the Nordic or more specifically Norwegian like literary firmament at this point? There was one other book that definitely we had gotten a couple
00:13:48
Speaker
either I don't think there are full books in this case but a couple samples are longer and they're longer some more significant samples of a few of his other books but they were earlier ones at the time and EJ wasn't interested in them at all. I remember they weren't as like stylistically or structurally as advanced um but there is another book that came out from Norvik Press in
00:14:10
Speaker
question mark, because there's no date on this, but it's called, I guess, Burj, B-E-R-G-E, and it was translated by Janet Garten, who was also like a relatively new name to me, but that came out at one point in time, but I don't ever remember reading this.
00:14:26
Speaker
To be honest, I don't know what would have happened. I wrote about it on our website. And that's where it recounts, oh, yeah, we did these books way back when. Now this thing is coming out. And I don't know that I even ever saw it in person. But he was one of the literary, there's another guy that was very important at the same time who wrote a book called The Beatles.
00:14:50
Speaker
And he wrote a book called The Half Brother that was also published by Arcadia. And his name is alluding me. But I'm going to think about it in a second. But the two of them were like really quite popular. Oh, yeah, Lars Sabe Christiansen. Those were the two kind of big figures in Norwegian literature at that time in terms of being like
00:15:11
Speaker
the always nominated for the prizes or winning the prizes also like very readable like there's a there's an interesting kind of way of categorizing the region literature when i went i went like right before the pandemic i want to see was 2019 would have been the year before
00:15:27
Speaker
um norway had like a big um editorial trip for editors from around the world that i was part of and it was very interesting to learn more about norwegian literature i read a bunch of stuff that was in translation at that point like outside of the canoss guard world and um there is a
00:15:44
Speaker
historical trend among their writers where it is close to American storytelling but like with slightly different like advancement and structures and differences where it's not just exclusively that but there is like a real like a real uh interest and sort of uh adaption of like what we would consider like traditional you know strong storytelling so i think that their books always are primed for like
00:16:08
Speaker
being translated and being promoted because they fit they fit a certain notion without being they're like exotic but not too exotic they're not too any they make sense in some weird way as like storytelling narratives and so they they're that was that was part of it and he's part of that that modality where he's very good at storytelling at gripping you and being like
00:16:30
Speaker
plot driven and more, you know, quick versus like a French book at that time where the sort of perception was French books meander and they don't have a plot and they're about atmosphere. And these are more like gripping plotted sort of books, which the assumption was that would work better for the American audience. So he sort of fit in there and he, you know, has been overshadowed, I think.
00:16:52
Speaker
in a lot of ways by both the Kenoskard impact and then by also the crime stuff because the crime stuff is so large that that becomes like the thing that everyone's pushing that everyone's talking about and then you also have and we had published as part of
00:17:08
Speaker
Delky's inner actions with Norla Jan-Fasa, who I discovered through a sample translation and talking to them, we started doing Jan-Fasa books, and Fasa and Konoskart have sort of like, taken the air out of the room for like, literary Norwegian fiction to some degree. That sounds,
Perception of Norwegian Authors
00:17:25
Speaker
that sounds more harsh than I mean it to be, but they are sort of like, the ones that the reference points that, that people use, that are reading or talking about, than Jon-Nasbo.
00:17:33
Speaker
They'll use those kind of references for what Norwegian literature is. And I think that that leads in part to presses outside of ours not doing as many of these more literary serious Norwegian authors. This is all speculation. And we actually have two Norwegian books coming out this year or within the next six months that are authors that have never been translated. No, that's not true. One of them has been translated in English before, Johann Harstad.
00:18:01
Speaker
who was published by seven stories of the book called Where Are You Now Buzz Aldrin and we're doing a book of his called The Red Handler that's like about a fake made-up mystery novelist and then we have another one by Nina Luque that's called Natural Causes that's about a woman having
00:18:17
Speaker
an affair and both of those kind of, well Red Handler's very experimental in terms of its structure because it's a bunch of fake mysteries and a commentary on these fake mystery novels that are all like four pages long because the the author believed that people didn't want to waste their time reading so it's much easier to write like four page mystery novels in which everything's solved immediately and that way like people will read them.
00:18:41
Speaker
that's kind of like his his mo and then natural causes does it has a very cool like back and forth sort of structure with time um but it is you know it's a very moving very like interesting look at a woman at a point in her life and her like
00:18:57
Speaker
early mid 40s who's reassessing where she is and like what her life is, her career has been, what her life at home has been, what things are happening. And that fits very well too. Like all these are kind of like make sense within the marketplace. So yeah, so that's kind of like a little bit, a little bit. I think there's a lot more that could be said about like the true history of Norwegian literature, contemporary literature with that. But I think you have to go dig into stuff that was going on in like the late 90s in particular in the 90s.
00:19:26
Speaker
as a whole for what was kind of developing among the sort of trends of like that literary fiction that's not necessarily super experimental, but it's also not necessarily genre based.
00:19:39
Speaker
This is one of the things that's, I think, exciting about reading literature and translation, which is mostly what I seem to do, is just, you're barely scratching the surface, and there's so much more that you could get into, and there's so much other history and, I mean, publishing history of that, that you could really explore and kind of find your ways into some very odd corners. That, in some ways, are also a reflection on, you know,
00:20:07
Speaker
literary society that you, yourself, exist in, live in, read in, that certain things are not being published or the like.
00:20:16
Speaker
Well, one other example that's worth noting on that is that the biblioecis has been doing the Roy Jacobson books. And I believe that he has a long history of books written in Norwegian that were not necessarily being translated at all. So they have like a catalog to sort of pick through. And he's another one that's like slightly older than Sharstad, but not by very much, but also like has this career and has like a moment now in which things are making their way into an English speaking audience.
00:20:44
Speaker
Um, but that they, the key has been working and very well respected and very well, like beloved. Like he was a huge deal when I was there. And as though everyone was talking about like his new book that just come out, he came and gave a presentation the whole deal. Um, but again, like within our world, and I know it's sort of a cliche to say, but like.
00:21:03
Speaker
If people aren't paying attention, it's easy just not to know. We don't know that this guy is a really famous, important, really well-respected and talented author in Norway because nobody's bringing it out, nobody's making it visible. And that's kind of what the purpose of Open Letter was, is to find those people.
00:21:21
Speaker
Well, maybe as kind of a segue to get us closer to talking about the book, I'll just say that The Conqueror was the only book that I've read by this author just because I needed to prepare for the podcast, but it was a happy thing. But it feels to me...
00:21:43
Speaker
a little different than the other Norwegian literature that I've read, certainly not the crime stuff. And Jan Fassa, I love his stuff, but very different from that, but also very different than the Jacobson
00:22:02
Speaker
Stuff which i've read quite a bit of and have led book club discussions which is kind of historical fiction and very realist based i mean this feels realistic and isn't isn't kind of dreamy and and spiritual in the same sense that the faucet is but there's some kind of just cool quirky mix here i think of
00:22:38
Speaker
is a real marker of what sets him apart from other authors and quote kind of aligns him a bit with Kenoskard although with Kenoskard you only see this if you're able to like he's much he's also a giant writer a maximalist writer but you have to see it as like that whole but the three books seducer conquer and discover use three different approaches not just to like explaining the life of our main character Jonas Vergeland
00:22:51
Speaker
of elements in this work.
00:23:01
Speaker
I think is how I'm not sure how to pronounce that correctly either, but, um, the, uh, it has different perspectives on his life and on the crime of his wife being murdered, but they're also structurally very unique. So the seducer is set up as a few wherever there's a top level story, and then it will go back into a flashback back into a later flashback.
00:23:21
Speaker
close off like that first flashback, maybe go to another flashback, then get back to the present surface at the end of that particular movement. But it's very symphonic in that way in which you start here and you kind of move down, move back up and move down and then close out that key, so to speak, in like few music terms.
00:23:39
Speaker
by getting back to like that present story and sealing that off. So it works like that, like a symphony, like a piece of music, whereas Conquer is set up to be a circular mosaic. So it keeps looping around the same sort of scenes, but adding to them and expanding on them and expanding on them and expanding on them as it loops and loops and loops and circles and circles and circles, creating this kind of like mosaic pattern that I see as like kind of like a pie piece, like a trivial pursuit
00:24:06
Speaker
sort of like pie with the different slices in it that starts out in the middle and expands outward.
00:24:11
Speaker
And
Unique Narrative Structures in Sharstad's Trilogy
00:24:12
Speaker
then the discoverer is much more complex as like a visual, but it's twin narratives and they sort of loop next to each other almost like a helix, like a double helix, but it's more structured as two voices that are sort of interchanging and moving around each other instead of like something that's quite as like straightforward as the seducer with its ups and downs or the circular nature of the conqueror, this one more is twisted. But they each have that very distinctive
00:24:40
Speaker
overarching structure to them and then within that there is like the elements are like mostly realistic but yeah they end up with like this weird tone because it's almost like they're having they're being put into this larger
00:24:52
Speaker
structure, this larger piece. And that is present in a lot of, like, Knausgaard books, but they're like, his movements are much more glacial. Like, in my struggle in particular, like, it's like a few hundred pages, and then that shift happens, and once you read the next few hundred pages, you're like, oh, I see how, like, these two things are interlocked, or these things are put together in this way, or, like, the morning star, the, I guess not most recent book of his, but, like,
00:25:16
Speaker
the one from a couple of years ago, that too is like a bizarre structure in which there are various voices that are almost, it's almost like a reverse version of Bolaño's, oh my God, not 2666, the other one. Savage to Texas, Jesus. Savage to Texas, there's almost an inverse setup of that. But those are very, I find that very compelling. And I really like that about the Sharstad books in that they have this kind of
00:25:45
Speaker
visual structural element that is also dictating them, but I agree with you. They're like realistic, but although like the realism is also like, to be honest, like a little questionable, like how possible is it that this guy who's a, you know, a documentarian for like public television is like also like a superstar celebrity among like
00:26:06
Speaker
Norway is like common people like it just seems like it'd be like if Ken Burns like maybe if Ken Burns like possibly murdered his wife it would be like a big-name trial but really like I think that the vast majority of people know who this was so there is like an element of not surrealism per se but of like you're stretching things a little bit here
00:26:27
Speaker
Well, maybe the stretch seems more of a stretch to us because we don't live in Norway and I don't know. Maybe I'm totally wrong and I'm buying into stereotypes, but Norwegian seem like kind of a serious, very well-read and
00:26:50
Speaker
I would think they probably watch a lot of public television. So maybe their public TV people are superstars. I think buying into stereotypes is going to be the name of this podcast episode and we should just indulge from here on out.
00:27:06
Speaker
But I think that's a really great launching off point for talking about The Conquer, especially, Chad, your description of the visual elements of it. Because one of the things that kind of came up in our preliminary discussion of this via email is knots and how often knots recur through this novel.
00:27:28
Speaker
And frankly, the knotted structure of the telling is consistently moving back and forth through time. The stories are intertwining, doubling back on each other.
00:27:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's really rather entrancing in a way because the chapters are short, but there is heft to each one and you don't quite know what you're going to be encountering in the very next one, but it's likely to have something to do with you just read, but it could be taking place in
00:28:03
Speaker
Verglen's childhood, or it could be taking place right before the murder of his wife. But I guess to quickly, like a very brief 30 second synopsis, you know, Laurie knows I try very hard not to go for 20 minutes on this, but I always fail. Basically, the the Conqueror is
00:28:25
Speaker
telling the life story of Jonas Vergeland, who is a TV producer in Norway, known for a series Thinking Big, focusing on heroes in Norwegian history and all sorts of heroes, artists, politicians, military, et cetera. So it's kind of telling the heroic story of Norway.
00:28:47
Speaker
And it's telling his life story from the perspective of his having been arrested and tried for the murder of his wife and this incredible fall from grace.
00:29:03
Speaker
structurally, the stories are being told to a professor that's the most we get of his name, who has been contracted to write this biography and other biographies. And one of the things I really enjoy about this novel is it has such a sense of
00:29:20
Speaker
And I think this is a lot of what it's doing, a sense and critique of celebrity culture, whatever that celebrity might be, and what happens when these sorts of trials take place. As the professor
Synopsis and Themes of 'The Conqueror'
00:29:31
Speaker
interrupts the narrative every so often to kind of offer his perspective and explain what's going on, but he also talks about some of the
00:29:41
Speaker
supermarket biographies that have come out, referring to Berglund as a demon and these sorts of things. But also another one called the seducer, which directly referring to the volume that came before, that has a little bit of a different status in his mind. But the professor has been contracted to write this biography, and he's stuck. He has all this material
00:30:04
Speaker
None of his hypotheses make sense to him. And one evening, a woman appears. It takes a little while to identify that it's a woman. It's mostly just the visitor for quite a while and begins to tell the professor all these stories in order that he combine her telling with his own information to create Vergeland's life, essentially.
00:30:29
Speaker
And so, I mean, that's that's what this is, where we're getting dropped into different moments in Virgeland's development. I would have to imagine almost every single moment the man has sex in his entire life, because there is an incredible amount of sex in this in this novel or in this producer. Really? I believe so. Yeah. Wow. And that's that that that takes some I mean, that a per page sex scene count would be.
00:30:57
Speaker
Interesting in that regard. Jodis Bergland is sort of Wilt Chamberlain meets OJ Simpson. Oh my god. That's also a good subtitle for the episode. Only probably more interesting than either of those guys. On the sex part, and I don't mean to get us off track, Tom, but
00:31:21
Speaker
Yeah, there are descriptions about incredible sex and he's kind of has this spiritual like seeing the light thing that happens when he's having sex, but his whole life, his whole mind is very sexualized. We start out talking about the breasts.
00:31:41
Speaker
And then he's obsessed with the sweaters and the documentary that he does about the ice skater, you know, it's all about like, oh, she like innovated this ice skating outfit that now everyone wears with the with the, you know, the very short skirt and the tight tops. So, yeah, he is he is kind of obsessed, I guess, with sex.
00:32:08
Speaker
I think that also plays into some of the elements that make it feel not as realistic. Not that he had as much sex as he's had, but that there is this mythic quality to his interactions, who each person is in his life, which colors the telling. I mean, each time it kind of takes
00:32:34
Speaker
this woman appeared at the right moment for him to have this first experience that then leads to this next one. And there's a description at one point that actually asking the question like, why do all these women fall for Jonas? And it's because of the pressure that's building up inside of him. And like, I mean, there's this
00:32:55
Speaker
great. He's doing this series called, you know, thinking big about these heroic figures. But the description of his journey is almost a hero's journey. Like it is
00:33:08
Speaker
putting him into a similar rarefied air. In some ways, reinforced by the fact that he becomes this massive celebrity and his downfall is a stain, is an unasked question about the Norwegian people. How could they possibly have fallen for this person sort of thing? I mean, there's a lot of critique of celebrity culture, but also,
00:33:35
Speaker
I don't know anywhere near enough about Norway, Norwegian politics, Norwegian society say it, but it feels like this novel is really asking some hard questions about how the Norwegians function or how Norwegian society views itself and views its artists as well.
00:33:49
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with that. And I think there's something about those experiences too that does tie into the conquering notion and the notion of gaining things and not necessarily owning them, but owning that experience and having that be something that you
00:34:05
Speaker
take in whereas the seducer is a little bit more like he's more he's treated much less like like sinister with like a much um there's no like real dark edge he's just like a really decent guy who happens to like be very you know engaging and has all these experiences whereas this starts to like point towards that darkness and i remember
00:34:27
Speaker
And you'll have to correct me or cut this if I'm completely wrong, but like when that there is a scene in which they're playing hockey I believe and has a moment where he's like and that's when the first moment was that he thought he could kill or that there could be like a physical harm that he was capable of. I remember reading whatever section that is and whatever specificity there was as part of like a
00:34:51
Speaker
holiday reading series at the university because I was like, well, reminds me of like my times when I think of like Christmas and the holidays, I remember going to like my grandparents' house in Wisconsin and getting into large fights with my cousins in the snow and being pissed off. And so this sort of reminded me of that. But I do know that this I remember this book having more of the darkness, possible darkness than the other one did. The seducer was like much more innocent than in terms of like his character.
00:35:21
Speaker
There's this wonderful scene and I don't know, maybe it's 80 pages into the book. What we said that the chapters are short and they just kind of plop you into like these different moments.
00:35:35
Speaker
in the protagonist's life, but he's an Istanbul with his wife. He's totally taken aback by her because he's basically getting mugged, robbed.
00:35:52
Speaker
in an area around the souk. And a guy comes up and is like, give me all your money. And he's just passively complying. The wife comes up and basically just very nonchalantly kicks the shit out of the guy that's robbing him. And he's like, where's this coming from? I don't even know this woman at all. And from that moment, he feels like,
00:36:21
Speaker
She took some of the magic out of Istanbul for him because he thinks that Istanbul was where he was conceived. And he thinks of himself as this kind of duality East and West and some kind of romantic kind of notion. And he realizes that he doesn't know her. She's a lot more smart and savvy than he is, probably could beat the shit out of him. And he says at the very end of that chapter,
00:36:51
Speaker
I think I could kill her, which is really interesting. If you leave me, I'll kill you, he thought. Yes. And this is coming after I mean, right after she does this. I mean, it sounds like I know some sort of judo toss where she like grabs the guy's hand with the knife and flips him through the hair and air and disarms him at the same time. And then
00:37:14
Speaker
is kind of like, well, I mean, you gave him, Jonas is like, he took my money. And she's like, okay, whatever. It wasn't much like and just like, she just disarmed this man with a knife, like, like it was nothing and is totally cool as a cucumber and couldn't care less. And then it goes into this long description of all the all the rumors he'd heard about her over the years of that she'd, she'd written a novel, which she had some people had read a manuscript, but then she then burned it and put it into the Ganges that she studied the martial arts in the Far East. And also,
00:37:44
Speaker
love it when it's written as the martial arts. The quality there is so great. And had she really danced with a famous rock star on the stage during a concert and on and on and you just
00:37:57
Speaker
You get at so much of, and it's such a great early scene to point out, Laurie, you get at so much of the insecurity that this novel is really trying to establish is a key component of Jonas, that he is desperate to be different and desperate to be one of the special ones. And throughout his life,
00:38:20
Speaker
his various efforts are towards that end. And then he hits upon something in creating this TV series, which sounds interesting, but also sounds at times like so incredibly overdone. Like every episode is a impressionistic work that gets at the core of who this person was, which after he is found, and this is not
00:38:45
Speaker
giving anything away. He is found guilty of murdering his wife. The press rips him apart for his treatment of these people. Some critics say that he actually murdered these heroes by creating the episodes the way he did, which is, again, going back to that notion of conquering. I mean, he ripped apart and ripped away, perhaps, some of the mystery or some of the heroic quality to these figures.
00:39:16
Speaker
It's one of the elements of that too that's like interesting and makes it curious as to like the public's reaction within the context of the novels is that are these really about those heroes or are they about him making the movies about the heroes? Like is he
Balancing Biography and Artistic Creation
00:39:32
Speaker
as the artist far more important than the people that he is treating?
00:39:36
Speaker
And that I think is also wrestled with in the notion of the books as a whole in that complicated, strange structure that I was describing is like, he's taking, Sharstad's taking this imagined life of this character and then making his art, 1500 pages of art around this character.
00:39:55
Speaker
and making it all based on him. So there's that kind of transference of like, when you take something from your life, a real person and make it into your own art and your own thing, are you glorifying yourself or are you actually doing a biography of this person? Because the first two books are really like biographies that are being written about Nionis and like that is a complicated sort of feature that is also treated a lot by, in Jacob's room, by Virginia Woolf deals a lot with like the idea of biography and the biographer
00:40:25
Speaker
I just think that that's quite interesting. There is, and just to make a sort of segue joke, the one big review that we got for these books was when the New York Times covered The Discoverer as like the third volume and summing it all up. And the review is insanely negative and begins with like kind of the most offensive beginning that you could possibly have, where it starts out saying like,
00:40:51
Speaker
I'll just paraphrase, but it's basically like, you know, when you're asked to review a book, it's one thing when you're asked to review like a trilogy and I had to read 1500 pages of this crap to like, write this one book review. And I was like, it's like a really aggressive. Here, I have it. I actually have it open if it'll wrote it. Yeah, I am not. I am not surprised that you have it near at hand to quote from verbatim and call out.
00:41:16
Speaker
Go for it. Let's go. Here's a verbatim. It's by Tom Schoen. I don't know who that is. Reviewing books doesn't often feel like real work, not the kind of work that makes you break a sweat or join a union. So when an editor from the New York Times calls you up and asks if you want to review a new novel from Norway, and the novel turns out to be not only over 400 pages long and largely set in a fjord, but also part three of a trilogy,
00:41:38
Speaker
Parts 1 and 2 of which ran to over 1,000 pages with multiple narrators in a nonlinear time scheme. Yes! Then you jump at the chance to take your place as a worker among workers. And then goes Allen with say, lots of decadent shit. There's something really screwed up about that notion of work that's running through there, but okay. It's like, it's very weird.
00:42:01
Speaker
But if we can just get back a second, yeah, Boo on that guy, he doesn't know what he's talking about. And I don't think he read these works in a very fair light. He sounds just resentful that he got this assignment, that he picked this straw.
00:42:19
Speaker
The notion of the conqueror and the idea that the documentaries are more about Jonas as the documentarian than they are about the subjects that the documentaries are allegedly focused on.
00:42:36
Speaker
This is something that Jonas like glams on to very early, it seems, in his career or in life, maybe just generally, that he comes across this idea that to be a conqueror, you don't have to actively do something. You don't have to achieve a big thing. All you have to do is have people's attention.
00:43:04
Speaker
So as long as people are paying attention to you and they're paying more attention to you than they're paying to anyone else, then you are a conqueror. You have conquered. He's kind of a very wily and cunningly smart dude.
00:43:23
Speaker
Right, and he also hits upon this idea as well, and it takes a good chunk of his life to shift into TV production and TV presenting because he spends a lot of time studying architecture.
00:43:39
Speaker
There's a scene early, actually just before the Istanbul scene that we already described, where he sees his parents watching the TV and the way that they're just staring at the screen and taking it in. He goes on to say, it seems likely, and this is just a theory, and this happens, this is me breaking in, this happens a lot in this telling where there's this
00:44:03
Speaker
inflection of opinion of what's taking place here. So we're going to relay the facts and we're going to give you some insight into his private life and his thoughts. But we're really just guessing here because we can possibly know that.
00:44:15
Speaker
It seems likely, and this is just a theory, that this was the evening on which Jonas Verglen formed his overriding perception of Norway, of Norway as a nation of spectators. And so in order to conquer, all you have to do is conquer their screens. And if you conquer their screens, you've conquered them, which is, I don't know, more than moderately prescient of our contemporary society. Who does that remind us of? A little bit. Yep. Jonas Verglen as the Kardashians.
00:44:46
Speaker
I mean, well, the tying it back into your OJ example. Yeah, I mean, OJ gave us the Kardashians in some respects. I mean, yeah, directly.
00:44:58
Speaker
I wanted to ask if I may, or either of you guys, this double narration that's going on. The professor is struggling. He doesn't really know where to start. He's acquired all of these notes like Tom
00:45:16
Speaker
explained and he's got writer's block and he's just kind of without a path. And then he gets a visit by a guy in a black cloak who kind of sits him down and says, I'm going to tell you some stuff about Jonas Professor and I'm going to kind of tell you
00:45:41
Speaker
the way that you need to narrate this and you can't record me, but you better write damn fast because I'm just going to start telling you this story.
00:45:54
Speaker
And I thought it was very effective, the way that that happens. And it sounds on maybe for listeners that it would get kind of weird and murky or confusing. But I don't know. I thought that it worked. You guys want to comment on that at all? I mean, I think it's remarkably clear. Like, I mean, for as much as this is a winding narrative with all sorts of like,
00:46:24
Speaker
cutting back on itself and yeah, the interjections of these
00:46:31
Speaker
this composite writer, right? Because the point of not being allowed to record the stranger, the visitor, is for the professor to blend his information and his writing with the stories he's being told, which again goes into this idea of spectating of the sagas of that sort of mythic quality. But even with all of that, it's so, I mean, I think it's just a function of like being like,
00:47:00
Speaker
Sharr said, being a really good writer. It's very clean. It has fun. It plays quite a bit with structure and narrative. But it never loses the reader. It keeps you trucking along. It keeps you moving. And you pretty much always know where you are or what this is a callback to from earlier in the novel. It isn't playing games like that, I don't think.
00:47:29
Speaker
There's also something to that idea, again, of this person is providing a narrative or a stories, and then the professor is recontextualizing that into the book. So that conversion process that Jonas does with the people that he's covering in his series and converting that into his impressionistic, almost too elaborately artistic sort of programming. This is another example of that sort of interaction between
00:47:59
Speaker
life and the construction, the craft of retelling something. Also, I think I have all these tabs and I'm just quite sure I can't find this one quickly. But there's a
00:48:14
Speaker
There's a line in the latter third of the novel saying that if you tell the story of someone's life, it's very easy to make all the details, make the person's life incredibly banal. That just by the retelling, you're going to leave out so much of the flavor and the interesting parts and the things that make a person a person.
00:48:37
Speaker
And this is clearly like an effort to prevent that, to actually give some of, I mean, so I'm happy with my very succinct synopsis of this, but a little bit of something I left out is that the visitor is there in an effort to quote unquote, save a life. They're there to not exonerate Vergeland, but
00:48:59
Speaker
to really tell this story for a particular reason. And there are all sorts of almost demonic, like the Greek version of Damon in terms of how the visitor comes across. I think that's mostly resolved by the end. They're grounded by the end. You don't know
00:49:16
Speaker
really who they are, but they are a person. They're not
Mythic and Realistic Elements in Narrative
00:49:19
Speaker
just the devil reappearing because they constantly want to sit next to the fire and complain about how cold it is and all sorts of comments that are really, and they're there because they lost a bet. It's such clever, clever language.
00:49:38
Speaker
I don't know, there's so much of the sagas, the Viking past suggestion of the heroic age, the heroic nature of what Vergeland's project is, that that injection of a Christian morality is
00:49:56
Speaker
is kind of interesting, is kind of fun to bring even more of some of the pressures within Norwegian society maybe to bear. I think I'm gonna keep saying things like that in these podcasts to see it at some point someone like really like smacks back at us for like making far too many assumptions about like Spanish society, Norwegian society, what have you.
00:50:20
Speaker
That might be my game I get to play in the podcast moving forward. We'll see. I'll let you take the hits for that, Tom. That's why I'm here for Lori. I'll stand right in front and take this. I mean, when you mentioned the spectator thing, this is a country that the most popular TV show that had ever been aired in Norway up until, I don't know when, but some years ago, this is still the case, was just logs burning.
00:50:49
Speaker
And there was a very famous, and they would watch it, like they just watch it. There's a very famous TV show and book that was just how to chop wood. And it was literally like how to chop wood. There is something to that spectator notion within the books that you're referring to that seems to still be a part of Norwegian culture.
00:51:09
Speaker
Which I don't know if it's a stereotype but it is reflected there. I mean even the connoisseur that my struggle is like basically a spectator situation you're just watching someone's intricacies of their life down to like how they wash a dish, like there's something about it that is built in there and I don't know if it's like
00:51:25
Speaker
from the nature of the environment, the fact that there is a lot of like small hounds on the fjords, you know, not a lot going on. There's like a big bustling metropolis in Oslo, but even like Lillehammer and some of the other places are relatively like rural and small. And there's a lot of interiority within the books that, and within the art that I've seen that sort of fits that. Like another example is Dog Sallstead.
00:51:52
Speaker
A lot of his books are like a guy in a room telling this sort of stories or like recounting like what life was like in that way. But it does, I don't wanna like up your stereotyping game, but there is something to that with like the way that Norwegian culture is seems to be a lot of like sitting back and watching something that may seem almost banal, but like is to them like gratifying just to be able to observe and to witness it.
00:52:19
Speaker
Thank God we don't have to worry about, at least I think not, The Conqueror being auto-fiction, which, you know, I think we're all kind of sick of that whole discussion. I kind of feel like the Kenosguard, my struggle really kind of started everyone being a little bit obsessed about, you know, auto-fiction and everyone's already tired of it.
00:52:44
Speaker
This might be a good way for you to repackage and repush the books, Chad. The idea that this is the anti-autofiction, but on top of it that it's, I mean, it's almost predicted the TikTok age. You mentioned like log burning and chopping wood. Some of those popular videos on social media in general are people just chopping tree trunks in half or
00:53:07
Speaker
the session with ASMR and watching and this is what I mean this is my thing watching people make hard candy and just the sound of like the chopping of the candy at the end after they've spent all this time you know molding it I don't know it's it's fun when a book
00:53:24
Speaker
comes out and is hitting on something within its society, but something that is almost even more obvious and prevalent in the moment that you're reading it than at the moment when it was published. I think that's really rather neat.
00:53:41
Speaker
It would be really fun to relaunch the books as like a trilogy all in paperback. The seducer was still, the rights are still tied up. Last time I checked in on this, that was a few years ago though. And Peter Mayer maybe had just passed away at that point in time. So like Overlook has obviously undergone different changes since that moment, but there were, it wasn't possible.
00:54:03
Speaker
it would have been possible to do two of the three again in paperback, but that just doesn't seem to make any sense, especially with books of the size. Like you really need to have something that needs to be something like that, that pitch, but like something that then pushes. So it's not just like these exist and nobody notices, but like these exist and there's like a momentum to read the three of them and not just like two and three. I think you should publish all three in one volume.
00:54:31
Speaker
Do you know how hard that is? Yeah, I've heard I've heard someone that I know maybe called Chad Post that has talked about how very difficult it is to publish a gigantic book in one volume.
Publishing Challenges of Large Books
00:54:47
Speaker
There's like there's like one printer in America that can do a book of the size of that that size would be and it's
00:54:57
Speaker
a very expensive proposition. Like to do it as one, I mean you could get whirly into the weeds, but to do a book that is like 14, 1500 pages or more is basically like you're looking at a printing bill of about $35,000.
00:55:13
Speaker
Compared to? Compared to like $6,000. Wow, wow. For like a normal sized book. But even those, I mean, those, those were relatively expensive. But I want to say like back in the day, and this has changed because the paper prices have changed too, which is made doing books of this sort, like almost prohibitive.
00:55:32
Speaker
um the cost that used to be for for that for those particular books if i remember right we're they were probably like three dollars per unit and now that would be closer to seven seven and a half which one so like the the the length of things and the pressures the financial pressures that go along with that are really
00:55:53
Speaker
It's very tight right now because of the printing log jam that happened a couple years ago, the paper prices increasing so greatly, and the premium on getting things done in a relatively quick fashion. It's crazy. And when you scratch the surface of it, you start to see that the prices in the past four years have doubled. It's just wild. It's just wild.
00:56:14
Speaker
Well, I don't want to make it impossible because you already have to obtain the rights to the first volume. But yes, publish them in a three-volume series. That would be wonderful, too. There is a place that will give you boxes relatively cheaply that you can put together yourself and package the books in, which would be very cool, too, to sell some prepackaged with a box that has some connective cover issues with it. It would be great. I think it would be wonderful. I mean, I'd love to do it.
00:56:44
Speaker
That model, I think, was used with Proust, the Moncrief translation. They did kind of three volumes that have like two or three of the books in each volume in the box. The silver. Yes, the silver, exactly.
00:57:01
Speaker
Yeah, and those are also like oversized too. They're like a particularly oversized. I think they're even more than nine by six. I think they're slightly larger than that. They're very unique. Yeah, I like that set too. The other is Anniversities by Uwe Jansen that New York Review Books did, where they're in that box that you couldn't buy the volumes individually.
00:57:20
Speaker
For like the first two year or two that that was available you had to buy the box set because that's another problem when doing things and that are person trilogies or series in multi volumes is that one of themselves better than the other two but you can't really like
00:57:35
Speaker
you can't have, especially if it's a box that you can't have different numbers of print runs. But yeah, it's all part of the calculus on what works. Basically, you know, Norwegians have a lot of cash. They all have their oil money sort of background for the country.
00:57:53
Speaker
you know, great health care. They're all the money is, it's, it's so expensive to visit Norway. If you're coming from America, they could just, you know, throw a little, throw a little, throw a little cash over this way and we can make that happen instantly. That wouldn't be so hard. So all your Norwegian listeners just, you know, tap in, donate, openletter.org. I think we have, I think we have about 12,000 Norwegian listeners, Tom, something like that. Roughly last time I looked,
00:58:19
Speaker
I don't know if we've been pronouncing the names wrong the entire time. Maybe we've lost all of them and maybe the shit talking I've been doing has lost, you know, a half dozen. So, you know, half dozen thousand. So we'll see. I think we've gained some by mispronouncing things so horribly because they're just all sitting back and laughing, laughing, laughing, saying, listen to these dumbos. Like they have no idea how to pronounce our names.
00:58:44
Speaker
They have their earbuds in and they comment to their partner who's busy watching the logs burn on the TV. Wait till you hear this. On the logs, I'd like to say that if you enjoy and consider around for hours watching someone split logs, I think you've probably never split logs yourself. It is horribly difficult and exhausting work.
00:59:09
Speaker
I actually, in the situation that we're in now, in the house where I am recording this from, there is a fireplace and we do chop logs and I am jacked for this. I am so excited. This is like a dream come true. I'm going to chop so well. Give me like a month and I'm going to be the best woodchopper there is, Norway. Have you started chopping yet?
00:59:33
Speaker
I haven't had to. There's still so much. There's no need yet. Okay. Come back in three weeks and tell me how much you're loving it. Okay, I will. I'm serious. This is a lifelong dream. It's really hard work. I did not see a log chopping competition breaking on this podcast today.
00:59:55
Speaker
There are like the neighbor has one of the like acts that's like he kept saying hydraulic acts, I believe that he's like, oh, you can just do it in a second. He's like, but you're just talking to my tech. It's like, hi. He's like, well, your grandfather just did it on his own. Like one one log every day did it right here and chopped it until he passed away. And I was like, oh, your grandfather could do it like the same hard. Like I've got this. I've been talking. There's.
01:00:22
Speaker
The radical misunderstandings of the hardness of previous generations is pretty rife at the moment. Tom, what else do we need to say about this beautiful open letter book before we close out? One thing I wanted to quickly just bring up was that we had a very clear manifestation of the Kennedy-Mansfield complex.
Legacy and Notoriety in 'The Conqueror'
01:00:48
Speaker
We love this complex. It's our favorite complex.
01:00:51
Speaker
This is from Javier Marais' Your Face Tomorrow, and it's the idea of how you leave this world, overriding everything else about what you've accomplished, which can cut in two directions. It can be a way for someone to be remembered. It's also an existential dread and fear for those who have
01:01:10
Speaker
accomplish things that how they how they go out ends up completely obscuring everything else they did. And multiple times in this novel, Vergeland is desperately afraid to
01:01:26
Speaker
never be remembered, or if he is remembered, what is he remembered for, which in some ways seems to, it's suggested, drive some of his actions towards the end. So I am just pleased as punch that that showed up here that our various readings are all slowly intersecting over time. But
01:01:47
Speaker
I think maybe one of the last things we should do, maybe the last thing that we do today is something we haven't done in a bit, because we haven't spent so much time at the end of last season on Maria's, is associations. Other books that we think, not necessarily that are like this one, but are good ones to jump to next.
01:02:07
Speaker
you know, off ramps from this one or, you know, roads that make sense, things that just sort of resonate. I mean, we use the word resonate a lot. Other books that resonate quite a bit with with this one. I'm going to ask Chad to go first. Well, I think so. So you're talking you mentioned the sagas a couple of times. Nial saga is my one of my favorite books of all time, which I read really for the first time just this year. I want to help lead a
01:02:38
Speaker
trip of University of Rochester alums through Iceland and read a bunch of the sagas for that. And I think like in relation to this, it's pretty interesting because there is that element of conquering. There is like an element of like, from the Icelandic point of view of telling the story of what is the biography of our nation.
01:02:56
Speaker
Um, and in a way those characters that are in these sagas, um, are, are, they're still present within Icelandic culture. Things are named after them. They're there. This is like a telling that to them is like, uh, you know, true on a very basic level, but Njal saga in particular, Agil saga is another one. That's great. But, um, Njal saga in particular is incredibly funny, which you wouldn't necessarily expect.
01:03:20
Speaker
but the tone of it is very basic, very simplistic in a lot of ways, and very funny. Like, it's weird. Like, there's points where, like, one character, I mean, there's a woman in there who's basically, like, murders her husband because he doesn't screw her well enough. There's, like, there's, like, just... And she's, like, the... She's my favorite. I love her. I would... My undying affection to this woman, who also, like, destroys the lives of every man that she touches. But they're, like, really interesting, well-rounded characters within something that's, like, you know,
01:03:49
Speaker
ancient in very many ways, like hundreds of years old and shouldn't be so modern sounding based on what you'd think. But they're really, really fun. They sort of tie into this in a weird way and sort of give a groundwork for the sort of narrative storytelling that's present within a lot of Scandinavian and Norwegian and Nordic writing that is semi-plot driven, but with these cool characters and with like an interesting sort of half ironic, half like
01:04:18
Speaker
adulation sort of sense of things. I love it. Like I didn't it was not something I was like, Oh, I'm gonna have to read this. Like if anyone asked me a question, I'll be able to like, you know, at least give them a partial answer. And by the end, I was like, all of our lectures are about the sagas. I'm not talking to you about anything else. We're just going to talk about all of this because I can't stop reading them. And I love it. That's my recommendation. That was enthusiastic. That was fervent. That's for sure. Lori, anything? Oh, man.
01:04:49
Speaker
I've been thinking just really fast since you asked this question and I'm all over the place. Okay. One part of me is like, well, this is kind of like a picaresque tale, right? Like how did this guy evolve in his life and how did he get to become this dude? So one part of me is thinking like,
01:05:11
Speaker
Dickens, like David Copperfield. But I'm not sure that's feeling very right to me. Another part of me is thinking Somerset Maugham of human bondage. But of course, Jonas isn't quite as pathetic as the protagonist in that book. And he doesn't get pushed around by the woman, I think, quite as much. And this is going to just seem like I'm
01:05:40
Speaker
kissing up, but I'm also thinking here of another open letter title and it's Tirza by Aaron Ginsberg. And I think it's the kind of not very apparent in some respects violence
01:05:57
Speaker
that a character could be capable of. Chad's nodding at that maybe because he published Cheerza and it is an awesome book, which we should talk about someday, Tom, out of the backlist. But I don't know. Do you think that's a fair comp?
01:06:13
Speaker
that's really interesting because yeah it is it does have thematic elements that are linked there and there is like a trickiness to the structure even though it is straightforward like straightforward storytelling in a lot of ways it is propulsive it is well rounded his i don't know if you've read his new book but goodman might not be as necessarily as conqueror inflected but it's also absolutely wonderful um although you will never look at carrots the same way again
01:06:41
Speaker
Oh, wow. That's almost like reason to read it. I have a copy of it. Thank you, Chad Post, for the arc. I need to get to that one. That book literally, Greenberg is such a good writer, and we are doing more of his books. But Goodman in particular, when I was proofing it, Kaya had edited it and was like, oh, I can't stop reading this. You'd be up to like two or three in the morning working on it.
01:07:08
Speaker
And then I started reading it to proof and I was like, I don't want it. I don't want to stop. Like this is one of the few times I'm not like this is a chore to like be like focusing on every word. Is it spelled right? Is this the same as it was before? Is t-shirt hyphenated and all that kind of crap. I instead, I was just like, this is so good. I need to know what's going to happen next. I need to keep going. I don't know where this book is going to lead. I don't know where where it's going to end up. And it's incredibly satisfying.
01:07:34
Speaker
Okay, Tom, so you teed this up. So you've got to have a whopper in mind. I mean, I don't is the problem. And you're just buying time. I really have. That's why you think I asked Chad to go first. Like I had absolutely no intention of kicking this off. So
Resonating Works with 'The Conqueror'
01:07:52
Speaker
now I feel like maybe I'll edit the podcast such that I do go first and you're great picks overwhelm mine. I think
01:08:01
Speaker
Interestingly, I think two French writers kind of jumped to mind a little bit for very different reasons. Lauren Benet, there's just a sense of humor in his books that's a little bit more pronounced than maybe in The Conqueror.
01:08:17
Speaker
I don't know, it just sort of jibes, right? There's something, there's a lot in the seventh function of the language that is just so enjoyable and so quirky and so true to how people interact and behave and view each other that really feels
01:08:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's not as much of maybe the pathos of the Conqueror, but there's definitely something kind of humming along together there. And then the other one is a lot of Jean Echenez's work.
01:08:49
Speaker
He is not especially funny. I mean, he is funny, but he's funny in a very like French way, I would say, which is, man, I'm just coming for everyone today. But there's a way in which he constructs his characters and the types of characters that he's interested in creating that really reminds me of
01:09:09
Speaker
the various characters that populate this novel, from the quirkiness to the hidden motivations to how much they change over time to the surprisingness of how people choose to act and behave that I really think makes a lot of sense there too.
01:09:28
Speaker
There are multiple modes of Eshinose too, like the early books like Cherokee and Double Jeopardy and I'm Gone to a lesser extent, but those ones that are very quasi-mystery books, those do have a good sense of humor to them. Even Chopin's Move, which he did at Dalke, has
01:09:47
Speaker
all this I mean it's all based around like flies that can like uh spy on you like there's a like a weird sense of humor to it but then tying into conquer too there's the the trilogy like the one about the runner um and we are not when we ravel and then um there's a third
01:10:03
Speaker
character but there's like the trilogy that are like biographical books that he wrote but they are like strange biographies because they don't focus on the right the right kind of pieces that you would expect in a biography which then relates to we're talking about with Jonas Wergland's like that that idea of like what are you creating and what are you what what life are you telling and how are you telling that life and those three books like all of the S&S books are so short they're so wonderful because they're just like quick they're quick reads but like
01:10:31
Speaker
like dense an idea, but not hard to they're not time consuming. They're not hard to read. They're very like, enjoyable, like one day sort of deals. I can't think what the last one was. It's called special special envoy special something. No, it is special envoy. That book is the darkest ending I've ever read.
01:10:51
Speaker
Um, and then, and also like in, in the mode of sort of having a bit of a mystery quality to it, but also some weird, weirdly funny thing is going on. Big blondes is one I've always gotten a kick out of. Yep. I forgot about that one. There's all those, that university of Nebraska era is, is particularly good. They did a lot of interesting books right there for like a 10, 15 year period. And then.
01:11:15
Speaker
they got a new director who didn't care and all that sort of ceased. Such as university is not to take a shot at stereotyping something else that one can take fun of. I think this episode, this episode be the one that is just called the one where they all come for us or something like that. But I think that's a really great place to leave off. Chad, thank you so much for joining us. This was so much fun and a lot of really great
01:11:42
Speaker
I don't know, like in the weeds stuff about publishing and publishing works in translation in the US. And that's, I don't know, I've always found that interesting. So I think that's a really cool thing to bring into it. So thank you for that.
01:11:56
Speaker
No problem. It was really fun to talk to both of you. I love this and I love the podcast. So everyone keep listening and subscribe. Tell your friends. And let's have everyone get on the Open Letter website. Look at the fantastic catalog of books. This is a publisher that if you've not read anything published by Open Letter, just remedy that right away. And if you need some
01:12:22
Speaker
some suggestions. I'm sure Tom and I can load you up. We've mentioned several titles here today, so have fun with it. Absolutely. Well, until next time, talk to you then, Lori. Okay. See you later.