I got my Norwegian last name automatically and my parents, to exhibit their pride of heritage, had to give me a Norwegian first name as well. I don't share the pride, just the opposite, never think of myself as Norwegian or even Norwegian American, just American, and have abjured most of the Nordic trimmings: boiled potatoes, lutefisk, loud ugly sweaters, Edvard Grieg, skating, skiing, and those absurd delicate Christmas "cookies" that invariably get crushed in transport from your mom's house. Should've named me "Mike" like most of the people I play golf with.
But now the prideful Norwegians who begat me are gone and I find myself taking some gingerly steps into their, I mean our, cultural past. For example, I'm reading Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth. This is Ole Rolvaag, who went by O.E. Rolvaag, I presume because who would take Ole seriously as a novelist?— even if he was father to Karl, Minnesota's 31st governor. Giants in the Earth is one of the few books I was encouraged to read, because "it tells the story of your great grandparents' generation" homesteading, and I therefore declined. I assumed they encountered difficulties on the prairie that were overcome with the assistance of their Lutheran faith. Not interested.
Boy, was I wrong, in pretty much the way anticipated by John Berryman, whose "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" includes the lines:
Pioneering is not feeling well,
not Indians, beasts.
Not all their riddling can forestall
one leaving. Sam, your uncle has had to
go from us to live with God. 'Then Aunt went too?'
Dear, she does wait still.
Stricken: 'Oh. Then he takes us one by one.'
The introduction to my paperback edition describes how Rolvaag had emigrated from an island off the west coast of Norway, a fishing village within a few kilometers of the Arctic Circle. He traded the empty vista of the cold sea (if it was the time of year when the sun came up) for a similar view across endless and uninhabited prairie. It's not a mystery why the government gave the land away. One thing I hadn't anticipated is an undercurrent of marital discord. The leading characters are husband and wife: the man, Per Hansa, is competent, gung-ho, up to every challenge but only dimly conscious of the desolation felt by his wife, Beret, who, instead of admiring his pioneering skills, feels obliged to suppress countless resentments. She hadn't asked for this life. The passages concerning her despair, brought on by empty prairieland, are through her eyes, not his. To celebrate small victories against manifold hardships, the men of the settlement gather in a barn and get smashed on cheap whiskey. Hadn't anticipated that, either. "The story of your great grandparents," lol.
Speaking of literature in Norwegian, and getting smashed, the last book I read, the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, comes to a climax, so to speak, when the author's father dies of alcoholism. It seems he sold his house and moved in with his mother, the author's grandmother, who on account of dementia was in no shape to turn her son away, had she been so inclined. He then used the proceeds of the real estate sale, which he hadn't bothered to deposit in a bank, to buy liquor. When the supply ran low, he'd retrieve another bill and head for the store, the only times he went out. The author and his brother deduced this after discovering what was left of dad's stash, and putting the money pile together with the condition of the house, which they had fond memories of from visits in their youth. We are talking about serious levels of human degradation: for example, out of either incapacity or indifference, dad had stopped using the toilet, and the house had to be emptied of everything he'd touched, like beds and other furniture, there were piles of soiled clothes and empty liquor containers, spilled liquor and human waste everywhere, odor that made the author choke on entering, and his uncommunicative grandmother, bones showing through threadbare clothes, sitting silent and confused in a chair.
The brothers, who had been living separate lives far apart from each other and their father, set about doing what needs to be done. They clean, and clean and clean, over many days, assisted briefly by an uncle who hauls stuff to a dump. Knausgaard's narration supplies every detail of the work, including tools used, the cleaning products used, his scrubbing techniques, what his brother was working on while he tackled the laundry room, the bath, steps, handrails, etc. It goes on and on and is oddly moving. The idea might be that, unlike in Great Works of Literature, life is made of menial work and trivial pursuits. That's just the way it is. Death means cleaning house, not philosophy—and, in this case, there's a lot of cleaning. There is also a meeting with a funeral director that's notable for the mixture of crisp business and palpably memorized courtesies. It's not a part of Book 1, but I understand that in a subsequent volume of My Struggle, about the author's life as husband and father, he takes up such subjects as the troubles connected with leaving the house in cold weather with young children who cannot zip their coats or buckle their boots or find their mittens.