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I was reading a novel, and I couldn’t continue reading it, so instead I turned to the Danish translation of Amartya Sen’s book “Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny”

I am still only half-through with the book, but so far I must say that I really like it. In a non-pretensious language, but with a tendency to repeat his main points over and over in the different chapters, Amartya Sen lays forth an individualistic view of people that really hits home with my own views. To me, it is absolutely horrendous to speak of a “Clash of Civilizations”, a term that Samuel Huntington coined some years ago with his book. As such, Amartya Sens book can be seen as a direct response to Huntington, but it is also much more than that.

There are quite a few questions that arise while reading the book, and one of them was well put forward by Andrew G. Burridge, a reviewer on amazon.co.uk:

What it doesn’t solve, for me, is what we do when people *do* chose a single identity. Or more that, while we accept that people are free to ascribe different important to their complex and contradictory identities - some identities do have a basic ‘core’ that may be positive, or negative. Being a football fan will tend to involve taking an interest in football. In this, how do we criticise those aspects of faith which appear to have a negative impact? A muslim may not declare jihad every time he goes to the post office, but is that because he isn’t being a very good muslim?

To me, religion is like fire: It can be used for good, or for bad, but it is neither good or evil in itself. One of the points of the book by Amartya Sen is that by giving the religious aspect of people’s identity a far bigger importance than it perhaps deserves, we are doing a disservice to the “integration” we wish so well to achieve. Surely, there are Muslims who are very Muslim in their daily life, just like there are Christians who take things much further than church once a week and the prayer before food at the table, but can we assume that a group of people - hundreds of million of people - can be put into neat boxes based on their religion? Also, how do we effectively meet the threat that religious fanaticism does pose to the world?

I will write more about this book once I have finished it. In the meantime, I was happy to find that Dr. Moira Gunn from ITConversations had an interview with Amartya Sen that you can listen to here.

Last week I was notified about the upcoming publication of Løvekvinden, the latest novel by Norwegian author Erik Fosnes Hansen, in Danish translation. I started reading it on Friday, and even though my reading went pretty slow, I finally finished it yesterday.

Overall, I was disappointed in the novel. I liked the language of the writer, and I find the theme of the outsider very interesting, but overall I didn’t feel that the novel achieved much. *SPOILER* At the end of the novel, Eva, the lion-woman with thick fur all over her body, is chased down by a bunch of people, and they have a scissor, and they cut her hair off all over her body, hurting her in the process. The very end of the book describes how she stumbles home, upset, and closes the door behind her - firmly.

I would have been interested to see how she moves on from there. How she moves on from being hurt so much that she broke down in tears. That she howled. That she cried out, at least for herself. The end of the book gives the hint that yes, she will now isolate herself even more, if not totally, from the world. How would that work? They didnt have the amount of paparazzi and coloured magazines as one does today, but still, her existence would continue to attract interest from within Norway and elsewhere.

The book was published in Norway late last year — as you may know, the high season of books being published is in the autumn (this probably has a lot to do with the christmas sales) — and it received mixed, yet positive reviews. I don’t know anything about its sales in Norway, nor do I know if it will sell well here in Denmark. The publisher, Gyldendal, is Denmark’s largest, and I am sure that the publication will receive some media attention - in fact Berlingske Tidende has aldready printed a pre-launch interview with the author, taking place at the legendary Theatercafèen in Oslo.

This is the first novel by Erik Fosnes Hansen that I have read, and after I finished Løvekvinden yesterday I decided that I want to give him two more chances by reading first Psalm at Journey’s End, and then Tales of Protection. I now have both, in Danish translation, and will begin on them tonight.

Tomorrow night I will attend the author event I wrote about earlier, and it will be interesting to hear what the author has to say about his latest book. I don’t know what else to say about it, what I thought about it. I liked the themes, and I liked part of the portrayal of Eva, but I disliked how the novel went the last 90 pages or so - - I became rather bored, to be honest. The description of her innocent flirtings with a classmate that turned into so much more, her trip to Copenhagen to be the central piece of interest at a scientific/medical conference, her “fall from grace” as she slept with a musical teacher as a revenge on another girl, and the final disgrace, having her fur mangled by the unsharpened scissor - it bored me. Provincial Norway bores me. Movies like Jerusalem bored me endlessly when I saw it - admittedly years ago.

I have begun writing a journal over my reading, and you can see it here. I will fill the page with keywords about each book from now on.

On Thursday, I will attend an event organized by Gyldendal, the biggest publisher in Denmark who also publishes the translated works of Norwegian author Erik Fosnes Hansen. The last days I have been reading Løvekvinden, which was published in Norway last year and will be published now on Friday, May 25th, here in Denmark.

I don’t know whether there will be any chance to ask questions to the author, and if so, what I would like to ask. I still have not finished the book - I started on it on friday - but it reminds me of books like the classic Frankenstein’s Monster: A story of how a person/being who is prosecuted because of their looks. Frankenstein because of his grotesque features, and Eva, the girl turning woman that this book is about, because of the golden fur that covers all of her body, even her face.

I read a Norwegian review of the book here, and I cannot help but agree with the reviewer. It seems that Erik Fosnes Hansen in this case chooses to dwell on - admittedly - an eternal topic, but does not really bring any current themes into it. Or maybe he does. Maybe this could be the story of how people, arabs for instance, are being branded in the media. This classic image comes to mind, the totally unflattering image of one of the people who is said to be behind the 9/11 atrocities. Maybe I will ask about this at the Gyldendal event, or maybe I will make a link to comments in the book by Karen Lisa Salamon, where she talks about how total control of our bodily hair growth is seen as necessary in order to appear clean, effective, progressive.

At least it will be interesting to see how a book that has undergone some months of criticism and discussion in my homeland Norway will - perhaps - be received differently here in Denmark. And who knows, maybe I will be allowed to take some footage from the event.

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This last weekend I finished Putin’s Russia (da / en) and continued on Pamuk’s The New Life (da / en), but yesterday’s publication of “Selvmål” by Karen Lisa Salamon (da) caught my attention to the degree that I immediately got it and started reading that instead. I guess non-fiction > fiction in my world.

I had read Jørgen I. Jensens “Jeg-automaten” (da) with great interest late last year, and even though I do not agree with all his points, the way he questioned parts of the huge coaching/management/self-coaching trend really struck me. Where Jensen approaches this from a theologian point of view, Salamon seems to have a more humanistic entry-point. I have not reached far into the book yet, but I will find ways to represent my reading of it, and my comments surrounding it, here on dltq.org the coming week.

(Hmm, too bad that GAD Internet doesn’t have any introduction to the book on their site yet. Maybe I will talk with the manager there and volunteer to write some reviews for the site.)