Erlend Loe is one of Norway's best known writers, but his popularity has skyrocketed unexpectedly in recent weeks for reasons not strictly literary. The cause is a politician, Pete Buttigieg, the surprise candidate of the US Democratic Party primaries, who prevailed over favorite Bernie Sanders on February 3 in the Iowa caucuses , kick-off of the votes. It was then that Erlend Loe's name spread like never before in the world press, as one of the many details that journalists who follow his campaign included in his information was that the applicant was a polyglot and that he learned to speak Norwegian in a self-taught way to be able to read Erlend Loe's novels in their original language.
As he told himself, Buttigieg was hooked on this author after falling into his hands when he studied at Harvard a couple of decades ago his most popular novel, Naíf. Super, a best seller in Norway, originally published in 1996 and then translated into 19 languages. The candidate liked it so much that he wanted to read more Loe books, but he didn't find any other translated into English, so he decided to learn Norwegian. He could thus enjoy his other great success, Doppler, written in 2004. They are the only two translated at the moment into Spanish, both by Cristina Gómez-Baggethun for Nordic, the first in 2013 and the second just a year ago in collaboration with Øyvind Fossan
Loe, born in 1969 in Trondheim, in central Norway, has a very personal literary style based mostly on humor. “But it's a very special mood. Here [in Norway] it is very popular and we call it Naivism, for its novel Naíf. Super and also because it may seem naive, but it is not at all. It is absurd, ironic, disconcerting, that plays with logic. That is Naivism, ” explains his translator Gomez-Baggethum. The author has defined it this way in several interviews: “It's Norwegian humor. A humor based on taking iron away from things, discreet, darker and more strange than English humor. ”
Naif's arguments . Super and Doppler are a good example. Its protagonists are two men who go into crisis and turn their lives upside down. The first one is a young university student who leaves school and settles in his brother's apartment in Oslo, where he dedicates himself to receiving faxes from a meteorologist friend and making lists: the things that have been and are important in his life, what he likes and dislikes, what he has lived in one day ... The second one is a forties called Doppler who decides to change his life after the death of his father and, after falling off the bicycle, leaves his home in Oslo , his work, his children and his pregnant wife to live a lonely life in the forest on the outskirts of the city. He settles in a tent, kills a moose to eat, but then discovers that he has a baby, which he adopts with which he starts talking about the state of the world he has left behind, consumerism and personal success.
Loe uses these characters that self-rise from society to question what foundations the lives are considered to be normal. “It's very ironic even with the way its protagonists try to escape. For example, Doppler decides to de- civilize living in nature, but he cannot avoid going to the supermarket from time to time to buy milk, ”says Gomez-Baggethun. "Under those arguments that seem light hide a lot of existentialist questions," he adds.
Two fragments
Naive Super
I turned twenty-five years old. Some weeks ago.
My brother and I had gone to eat at our parents' house. A good food. And cake. We were chatting about various things. Suddenly I caught myself reproaching my parents that they had never pressured me to practice sports at the highest level. It had neither feet nor head.
I said a lot of idiocy. That today could have been an elite athlete. That I could have had graphics of my fitness. And money. And have traveled constantly. I came to blame them for not having reached anything and for my life to be as boring and uninteresting as it is.
Then I apologized.
Doppler
I do not exaggerate if I say that my wife is surprised that I have gone to live in the forest. It gives the impression of not understanding much, but I don't reproach him either. The truth is that I am not sure that I understand it myself. We had just buried my father and mother, my sisters and I had arranged all the practical matters when, one day, I went for a bike ride. It was spring and it was a pleasure to ride a bike through the forest after a long winter. Although I ride a bike all year, of course. Round trip to work. I am a cyclist. First of all, I am a cyclist. There are no weather conditions that stop me. During the winter I use tires with spikes. I have a helmet, bicycle gloves, pants and appropriate jackets, cycle computer, headlights and lights. I cover a distance of four thousand kilometers a year on the wheels of my bicycle and I have no qualms when it comes to destroying the windshield wipers of cars that do not know how to behave properly. The hood or side window hit them, I yell at them until they let me down and I don't fall in love when the drivers stop the car and try to catch me. I argue until I get them out of their boxes and I hold on to my rights as a cyclist as if life were in it. I move quickly, much faster than cars. What I enjoy most are the traffic jams in the morning, when I go down Sognsveien Street, for example, I cross Adamstuen and continue along Therese and Pilestredet streets. There are always many cars and often several trams. The tram runs through Therese Street and, as there is almost always traffic in the opposite direction, cars are forced to stop, while I get on the sidewalk for a small jump, elusive with good margin on the right to Tram passengers and, four or five meters beyond, return to the road, with plenty of time before the tram starts again.