Johan Borgen

[Patrick Murtha]

The Writer's Almanac, Garrison Keillor's daily NPR broadcast and email newsletter, had a nice write-up today on the Norwegian novelist Johan Borgen:

It's the birthday of Norwegian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short-story writer Johan Borgen, (books by this author) born in Christiania (now Oslo) (1902). His mother was a good artist and his father was a lawyer who owned a lot of land, and Johan grew up in affluence—the sort that he came later to satirize in his writing.

After World War I ended, Borgen started law school. But he found it boring and wanted to be a writer. He began writing for various newspapers, including the Dagbladet, which at the time was affiliated with the Liberal Party and is now a daily tabloid. He published his first book, a collection of short stories, at the age of 23 and spent much of the 1930s as a journalist, writing witty and biting satire about corrupt politicians and about various social issues. He also wrote several works of fiction, many of which revolved around the theme of identity, man's exploration of himself. He said:

"Personally I believe that man's fascination for art lies in our unsatisfied desire for identity. I believe that our unarticulated longing for freedom, our painful and impractical and completely unreasonable longing for freedom derives simply from the fact that we are shut up inside that system of apparent necessities which is called our personality, or which we call our personality, because we need to fasten a fine-sounding name to the cage in which we have shut ourselves up. … We live a crippled life, shut up inside the narrow cage of considerations, caught in the net of expectations." (Words Through the Years, 1966)

His novels include Little Lord (1955), Dark Springs (1956), and We Have Him Now (1957), which together comprise a trilogy, as well as Blue Peak (1964), and My Arm, My Intestine (1972).
Borgen won a Nordic Council literary prize for his collection of short stories (in 1967 for Nye Noveller), after which critic Sven Rossel wrote, "Borgen is a master of representing sudden outbreaks of forgotten or suppressed spiritual powers. The primary goal for him is not to tell a story or to reproduce a picture of external reality; rather, his short stories are studies, sudden dives into the dark ravings of the spirit or of a dark past, spotlights on the ironic paradoxes of human existence."

[Patrick Murtha]

There are three novels by Borgen listed in English translations on Bookfinder and Amazon: The Scapegoat; The Red Mist; Lillelord. I will not say there are not more translations without doing additional research, because I have learned over the years that virtually unknown volumes do sometimes materialize. I welcome insights from specialists in Norwegian literature who are on the board.

There is also a book-length study of Borgen in English, by Randi Birn, in the Twayne World Authors Series.

[Eric]

By co?ncidence, I have just requested a copy of "Lillelord" (the English translation has that title; "Little Lord" sounds a bit Fauntleroyish) from the publisher to review here and elsewhere. I wrote in my letter to the publisher (on 28 April 2008) that Borgen seems to have been forgotten outside of Norway. Clearly, this is not so.

I have had a fascination for Borgen's stories for many years, and have a copy of the Twayne volume on him. What I have not done hitherto is read any of his novels. But while waiting for "Lillelord" to turn up, I have started reading his "Jeg" in Norwegian. This second novel is available in English as "The Scapegoat".

As with so many major European authors, Borgen wrote far more novels than appear to have been translated into English. On the Amazon website that Patrick Murtha mentions, I can also only see "Lillelord". "The Scapegoat" and "The Red Mist" (original: "Den r?de t?ken") in English translation. And the English Wiki entry is a little stub. And yet Borgen wrote quite a lot: fifteen novels and nine collections of short-stories. Look at the Norwegian Wikipedia entry for the titles, just to see the sheer number:

http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Borgen

As a guide, to the various genres, roman = novel, k?seri = chatty article, skuespill = play, noveller = short-stories.

The Twayne biographical volume (1974) is good and thorough. Maybe they thought he was going to win the Nobel at the time, hence taking the trouble to write a book about an author, so few of whose works have appeared in English. Borgen won several prizes, but never the Nobel.