Wednesday, May 21, 2014

A novel from the Faroe Islands - You needn’t be afraid of stomach troubles when you eat this one

When I was planning my way through the literatures of Denmark and Iceland I did not remember the Faroe Islands.  Now I have read a book from the Faroe Islands, the book, even, whatever that means, The Old Man and His Sons (1940) by Heðin Brú, translated from the Faroese by John F. West in 1970.  The author’s name, his penname, since his birth name is boringly Danish, is “pronounced (approximately) as Hay-in Broo,” West tells me (p. 165).

The novel begins with a long chapter describing a whale hunt:

A school of blackfish in Seyrvágs Fjord – two or three hundred small whales, swimming silently round in little groups, and longing to be back in the broad ocean again, for this is not the way they intended to go.  Man has turned them aside from deep-sea voyaging, to pen them into these narrow waters.  (Ch. 1, 7)

I just noticed we begin from the point of view of the whales, poor things.  People from all over the island descend on the village to kill whales.  Two of them are the old man Ketil and his idiot son Kálvur, eager to get their share of whale meat.  Brú’s novel is recognizably set in what we now call the developing world.  Most of the characters spend much of their time worrying about getting enough calories.  They are not starving by any means, not even hungry, but they are on the edge.  The plot of the book is driven by the otherwise sensible Ketil becoming, in a moment of temptation, too greedy for calories.

This first chapter is immensely interesting.  The whale hunt is a collective operation.  People share their boats, equipment, and labor, working as they think useful.  A central authority gathers and distributes the harvested meat, not according to need but to effort and expense, before auctioning off the bulk of it.  Ketil, a man of tradition, is bamboozled by the increasingly monetized economy.  Ah, I make the book sound so dull.  But that is the background, global economic modernism washing up in even this poor, distant place, confusing relations with neighbors and with the sons in the title.

Globalization can be played for comedy.  Ketil wants to give a gift to a Danish doctor who helped out his son.  He brings the doctor a gift: 

Ketil was puzzled at their reaction.  ‘Whatever’s the matter with them?’ he thought to himself.  ‘You needn’t be afraid of it,’ he assured them.  ‘This is a fresh whale kidney I’ve brought you, a really fine, big, fresh kidney.  You needn’t be afraid of stomach troubles when you eat this one – I’ll show you.’…  The doctor’s wife turned a little faint, and sat down on a chair.  (Ch. 1, 23, ellipses mine)

I wonder if the novel is read mostly by readers who have vowed to read a novel from every country in the world.  It’s quite a bit better than that, varied in incident and humorously ironic, but it is also a good choice for a literary world tour.  For me, certainly, I started with knowing nothing, or almost nothing, about how people live or lived on the Faroe Islands, and soon knew how they fished, how they buried their dead, how they thought about all things profound and trivial.  How these particular fictional people thought, at least.

11 comments:

  1. Although I lived in Iceland for over a year, I have never visited the Faroe Islands or Denmark. But I did make it to Scotland from Iceland. Perhaps your excellent view of the novel will point me in the right direction of experiencing the locale vicariously. Whales as POV? I cannot resist that one. As for Iceland, you might be surprised about my favorite Icelandic author's identity. But that's enough for now.

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  2. So, how does it compare to the other whale-hunting novel?

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    1. There are no kidneys in Melville. I declare Bru the winner.

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  3. I have met a Faroe Islander, and I have looked at photographs of the landscape, which is why I had to switch to knowing "almost nothing."

    Now, as for being surprised by your favorite Icelandic author, any of them would surprise me. Except for Snorri Sturluson, I guess.

    I think - I think - that whale POV is only in the lines I quoted. I was surprised to see it as I typed them out.

    Now, as for Moby-Dick, I take that as one of the greatest achievements of fiction. It has no whale kidney dripping in the doctor's parlor, but it does have both clam and cod chowder.

    Brú is not a fifth as ambitious as Melville, although he can be sly in his own way.

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    1. Moby-Dick also has that graduated shot glass thing in the Nantucket bar. I declare Melville the winner.

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  4. Not long ago on The Animal Channel I watched a program on an NGO group, The Sea Sheperds. They were trying to stop the traditional whale hunts.

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  5. Current hinting practice seems almost identical to what is described in the novel, which is startling. The Faroese are much richer now!

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    1. Once the Faroese hunted whales because they needed the food; now they hunt whales the way they always did because they need to show themselves they are Faroese. Perhaps that is an even greater need.

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  6. Roger, good anthropology! That is insightful.

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  7. I read every Faroese book I can find but I haven't come across this one, which is a pity. The local branch library even had Jacobsen's Barbara until they threw it away. Lots of boats in those books. Somebody needs to meet a friend in another village so they jump on a boat, somebody else wants to visit the doctor but they have to wait because there are no boats around, important people arrive by boat from the mainland; and if the author wants to get rid of a character then they put them on the same boat going in the opposite direction. Useful boats.

    There are other indigenous groups who carry on traditional hunts as well; there are laws in northern Australia that allow specific people to kill dugong, as long as they do it with a spear. The Torres Strait Fisheries Act puts dugong hunting in the permitted category along with all other "activities on water, including traditional fishing." The Canadian Inuit receive quota tags for polar bear. So physical activities get regarded like intangible cathedrals.

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  8. If this weren't a library book, Pykk, I would send it to you. The boats are just as you describe them.

    Some Alaskan Eskimo villages have the right to hunt a limited number of bowhead whales.

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