On the train heading inland along Norway’s largest lake, Mjøsa, I felt ill at ease with my task. I was on my way to Lillehammer, a small town whose claim to fame is that it hosted the 1994 Winter Olympics, to attend the Norwegian Festival of Literature, which bills itself as “the largest of its kind in the Nordic countries.”
Norway, a country of 5.5 million people, has in the last decade exported more buzzy books than any of its larger neighbors. I was here to report on the great mystery of why that was. Why does Norwegian literature do disproportionately well abroad? Is it just a matter of state funding? Or could it have something to do with Norwegian habits of self-portraiture and the way that books made in Norway tend to correspond to expectations and demands elsewhere? Or might it be that our most exportable heavyweight writers, Nobel laureate Jon Fosse among them, were a generation bred in a now bygone ecosystem of in-house magazines, literary journals and academic hubs? The festival seemed like a good place to try to answer these questions.