If this disjunction between an apparently settled state and a violently restless literary imagination is a well-established Scandinavian phenomenon, it is most pronounced in Norway, the most benign of the Nordic nations in practice and the most malevolent in prose. It's as if a generation of Norwegian crime writers took the advice of the nation's two giants of literature a little too literally. "Wake the people up and make them think big," said the dramatist Henrik Ibsen, and the Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun declared that writers should describe the "whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow". The result has been as vivid and incongruous as spilt guts on virgin snow.
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