{"id":277726,"date":"2010-04-08T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-08T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/04\/08\/siamese\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:40:57","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:40:57","slug":"siamese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/04\/08\/siamese\/","title":{"rendered":"Siamese"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since his literary debut at the age of 18, Norwegian author Stig S\u00e6terbakken has made a name for himself by challenging convention. At times, this challenge has manifested as an interrogation of the Norwegian nation’s sense of identity and its relationship to Europe. At others, it has revealed itself more questionably, such as during the 2009 Norwegian Literary Festival on \u201cTruth,\u201d when S\u00e6terbakken, the festival’s artistic director, invited universally reviled Holocaust denier David Irving to be a speaker at the event. (In his New York Times<\/em> review of Siamese<\/em>, author Jim Krusoe suggests that S\u00e6terbakken might have been reasonably motivated in this instance, inviting Irving in order to \u201csee what would happen when an agreed-upon truth was forced to confront a pernicious, stubborn falsity.\u201d)<\/p>\n

More than simply igniting controversy, however, S\u00e6terbakken has established himself as an accomplished poet, essayist, translator, and fiction writer with more than a dozen publications to his credit. His novella Siamese, which was translated into English earlier this year, is the first installment in S\u00e6terbakken’s “S-Trilogy” (so-called because all three titles begin with the letter ‘s’). Sparsely narrated in unadorned, clipped prose, Siamese<\/em> tells the story of Edwin and Erna, an elderly couple whose relationship embodies a sort of degenerating symbiosis, a mutually antagonistic and passively spiteful codependency from which neither can escape. <\/p>\n

Edwin, the former administrator at a retirement home, is now almost completely blind and living in self-imposed isolation in his and Erna\u2019s apartment bathroom. Subsisting almost entirely on gum and flat cola, Edwin has forced his body into the most fetid deterioration, a squalor sustained\u2014and in some respects, supported\u2014by his hapless, nearly deaf wife whom he harangues and berates as a matter of sport. Isolated as he is\u2014dependent on Erna for everything from changing his catheter to spoon-feeding him the occasional meatball\u2014Edwin takes every opportunity to exert the substantial control he has over Erna, and by extension, his waning life. \u201cIt\u2019s my world in here,\u201d he states proudly. <\/p>\n

\n

Here, my word is law. I know this room like the back of my hand. It\u2019s as though I have a map of the room in my mind, and I\u2019m intimately familiar with all its sounds, I hear even the slightest movement\u2026It\u2019s true, nothing that anyone does in here escapes my attention. I need to know their positions and what they\u2019re doing at every moment. And whenever anyone else is here, anyone aside from Sweetie, that is, I immediately have the upper hand, immediately score a decisive victory over nature, over what nature\u2019s taken away from me, now wholly at ease, empowered. It\u2019s me who dominates the situation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Despite all her slavishness, Erna too finds ways of exerting her dominance over Edwin. While her husband opts for more obvious aggression and emotional abuse, Erna\u2019s manipulations and quiet acts of defiance remain almost entirely undetected by her husband. For instance, Edna\u2019s deceit about Edwin\u2019s trusted physician, Dr. Amonsen. Although the doctor has long since moved away, Erna continues to pass along medical advice to Edwin under Amonsen’s authority. \u201cHe\u2019s always seen Dr. Amonsen as his savior. His faithful defender.\u201d she explains. <\/p>\n

\n

. . . I\u2019ve always lied to Edwin when he asked about Amonsen. I didn\u2019t know what else I could do . . . When Edwin asks me to ask Dr. Amonsen about something, I always let a few days go by before I tell him what Amonsen\u2019s reply was. And as long as I say it was Amonsen who told me this or that, Edwin accepts it immediately. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the course of tracing Edwin and Erna\u2019s increasingly confrontational power struggle, Siamese<\/em> explores the truly elemental fears and desires that motivate all of us\u2014the fear of death or inadequacy, the frailty of the body, the need to feel in control, the desire for power. The couple’s relationship is one that also has the potential to be read as a larger, historical allegory. Consider a speech called \u201cMy Heart Belongs to Europe. Therefore It is Broken,\u201d that S\u00e6terbakken gave in 2005, during which he discussed the former Norwegian alliance with Denmark. \u201cOur union with Denmark lasted over 400 hundred years,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Danish rule is often referred to as the \u2018400-year-night,\u2019 an expression taken from Ibsen\u2019s Peer Gynt\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Recent research, however, has cast doubt over our conception of this long lasting oppression that we, obviously being the weaker half of the Siamese twin Denmark-Norway, experienced during the union\u2026[A] considerable part of the culture we think of as being fundamentally Norwegian, as symbols of Norway as a nation, has been given us by foreigners, Danes mainly, the influence from Danish culture, especially through trading, goes much further back in time than those 400 years of Danish reign. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Without delving too far into S\u00e6terbakken’s assertions about Norwegian cultural history, one can still appreciate the symbolism that he seems to allude to here, and apply it to Edwin and Erna’s relationship in Siamese. The metaphor of two mutually dependent and mutually destructive countries can perhaps expand the scope of this hermetic novel and give it more resonance for readers familiar with Scandinavian history. No matter how it is interpreted, however, S\u00e6terbakken’s novel presents a challenging and frequently disturbing portrait of the balance of power and wages of control in any codependent relationship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since his literary debut at the age of 18, Norwegian author Stig S\u00e6terbakken has made a name for himself by challenging convention. At times, this challenge has manifested as an interrogation of the Norwegian nation’s sense of identity and its relationship to Europe. At others, it has revealed itself more questionably, such as during the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[17496,14766,17946,1646,32026,32036],"class_list":["post-277726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-dalkey-archive-press","tag-larissa-kyzer","tag-norwegian-literature","tag-review","tag-stig-saeterbakken","tag-stokes-schwartz"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277726"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":322336,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277726\/revisions\/322336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}