A Quote by Per Petterson
If you're a Norwegian writer, you are not visible in the world. The door of the English language is very hard to open for a Norwegian writer.
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You can write a radical Norwegian or a conservative Norwegian. And when I changed to a conservative Norwegian, I gained this distance or objectivity in the language. The gap released something in me, and in the writing, which made it possible for the protagonist to think thoughts I had never myself thought.
I dream in Norwegian, I count in Norwegian so that basically makes me Norwegian now, I suppose.
I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian.
I do consider myself a Norwegian writer, or a Scandinavian writer, as my family tree reaches into both Denmark and Sweden. I don't think about it, of course, when I am writing.
And then, with a European director and Norwegian actors speaking in Norwegian, it was going to be very interesting. So, whatever initial trepidation or fear I may have had was alleviated by those factors. I just said, "This is something to get on board with."
I'm 100% Norwegian. Three generations removed and all continuous inbreeding of Norwegian of Minnesota and Iowa, so I traveled to Norway before.
I really hated being the Norwegian girl in every single conversation in Australia, so I tried to make my Norwegian-ness invisible, speaking like whoever was around me.
I was listening to a lot of Norwegian black metal and death metal. There's a great history to Norwegian black metal. That music is very dark and violent, but it's also beautiful.
Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.
In Sweden I am considered the Finnish-Norwegian, in Norway Finnish-Swedish, and in Finland Swedish-Norwegian. I've never really belonged anywhere.
It is also a fact that people who are isolated and alienated in their neighborhoods as a result of the large number of neighbors who do not speak Norwegian, who do not follow the Norwegian customs, norms and way of life, could have psychosomatic disorders that can lead to both sickness leave and need for medical help.
Well, the biggest Norwegian newspaper regarded this as an arrest, since they hadn't told us that they were coming and they brought me in. So the biggest Norwegian newspaper looked upon that as an arrest.
Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English.
Oh, I love labels, as long as they are numerous. I'm an American writer. I'm a Nigerian writer. I'm a Nigerian American writer. I'm an African writer. I'm a Yoruba writer. I'm an African American writer. I'm a writer who's been strongly influenced by European precedents. I'm a writer who feels very close to literary practice in India - which I go to quite often - and to writers over there.
Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.
Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning
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