(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[the nation] The smelter at Odda is cold now. In the village you discuss whether what was once the world's largest carbide melting furnace should be on UNESCO's list of world cultural heritage. Raufoss, on the other hand, has created a high-tech business cluster with annual sales of NOK 4,5 billion.
On the Ekofisk field is a concrete colossus – an engineering feat from the Norwegian oil adventure's childhood, left in the sea, taken over by the seals – while a new phase in the same adventure has made Hammerfest almost unrecognizable. Now Finnmark, «perhaps the last bastion for the old Post-War Norway», is also about to change dramatically
Counter-terrorism's interpretation of modernity
Marit Eikemo and Nils Rune Langeland in their essay collection try to understand this new Norway. They both write in the field of tension between what was and what is to come.
In Stamsund in Lofoten, the old fishmeal factory is closed, while "the art and culture are about to take over the entire definition power in the fishing village". The drama is no longer a wooden city, but understands itself as a city of light, with the light bulb manufacturer Osram in a central role. The examples are taken in equal measure from the two books.
Admittedly, there are differences between them. While Eikemo in Samtidsruinar is looking for places and buildings that have played their part and might get a new one, Langelands Norway is a collection of texts that were first printed in the newspaper Dag og Tid, originally presented as an article series. While Langeland seeks to chart the position of the popular nationalist today, and turns into a spokeswoman for the social sciences in Oslo and cultural radical 68s with popular contempt and elitist naivism, Eikemo is less polemical and more personal.
Read on Grorudbanen, between Stovner and Tøyen, the similarities are still clear. In the light of the Ammerud blocs, it is as if Langeland and Eikemo represent two wings in the same movement, which have now reappeared on the other side of the Labor Party state, with ambitions to interpret post-industrial Norway from the perspective of countercultures. It is Western Norway that writes – in one book the Western Norway man, with a clear undercurrent of masculinity, in the other Western Norway woman, with a more feminine look.
On Grorudbanen
You can read Eikemo on the way from Tøyen to Stovner, if you read a little fast. As you walk on the subway, it strikes one that Eikemo's awareness of the clichés of Odda literature is plausible. Gradually, one sees how she makes such different phenomena as the reorganization of the defense, the history of psychiatry and the ban on slot machines the subject of intense reflection, related to memories and meetings. Before you arrive, however, you have also read about Stovnersenteret.
"This is not my hood," writes Eikemo. She has been there before, after an athletics voice in her childhood, and was even in love with a boy from "Stoffner, as the district was called the worst". But she still does not recognize herself.
It is the accident, when the roof collapsed in Centra mat in the autumn of 1997, she is based on. It affected everyone who lived in the valley, but it was also striking how the building rose again, and was actually expanded considerably. Eikemo feels uncomfortable with this. She is of course right that the Steen and Strøm-owned shopping center is a commercial place, and that this was one of the reasons for the rapid normalization.
That the place is also more than money, for the boy she was in love with, for those who play basketball in Stovnerhallen nearby, for the girls who have a job next to the school, for the families with children who do the Saturday shopping there, she can not quite live. into.
She finally wonders if something big and beautiful can "happen here too". Of course it can.
Oslo inner east
Langeland can be read on the way back, if you turn similarly fast and have a stomach for more. First and foremost, it is the position of the folk spirit in "international Norway" that Langeland writes about. He draws lines from the 1800th century to the 21st century, from Protestantism to the oil-financed experience economy, and formulates sharp, provocative contemporary diagnoses. Several of them are apt, as at Dyreparken in Kristiansand where Julius appears as the monkey god of the new Norway. "In this diverse fantasy landscape of animals and children, we can experience the germ of a new civilization up close," writes Langeland. "Nature, culture, market and childhood merge into a right-wing, paradisiacal union."
Then you arrive in the inner east of Oslo. In the book: «The sun and the thirty degrees of heat push people down into the streets. There is something burning African in the air, "it says. Langeland visits the Mosque in Urtegata. It's labyrinthine. The author feels like Josef K. in Kafka's novel. On the way away, he meets a group of men in Tøyengata, and Langeland feels that he has to cross to the opposite sidewalk. At Oslo Plaza comes the reaction. "Black birds plunge inwards and downwards towards the glass tower," he writes. "Is it cool," I wonder. It is reminiscent of 11.9. in miniature. » Suddenly the big man has become a little scared.
The fate of the nation
Both Contemporary Ruins and Norway contemplate the post-war nation's position. It is a loss experience that is processed, but not without ambivalence for Eikemo's part. Luster in the Sognefjord, where Bosnian refugees were accommodated in the 90s, is, for example, effectively contrasted with Norwegian advertising aimed at tourists.
Langeland is clearer in the goal. For him, the "weathering of the Norwegian nation" is a capital project. In western Oslo, there is a dream of "cracking the Western countercultures". "It is vital for Oslo to secure the intellectual and cultural supremacy," he writes. "Then the financial will follow."
This is when one becomes aware of the role that globalization plays, even in reflections on the need for a post-industrial national identity. For Eikemo, the Japanese star architect Toyo Ito's cocoon-like and failed building at Torrevieja in Spain becomes a double-sided symbol of the Norwegian solar refugees' isolationism and her own identity needs. For Langeland, "Nordvegen", the tourist trail along the coast, where a Swiss bathes naked in the whirlpool on board the Hurtigruten ship MS Trollfjord, will be the source of an alternative national mythology.
The post-industrial Norwegianness is not entirely free of irony, in other words.
