YEAR IN REVIEW 1997: LITERATURE: GERMANIC

GERMANIC: Danish. Among Danish publications of international interest in 1996 were Karen Blixen's letters, Karen Blixen i Danmark: Breve 1931-62, which provided insight into the difficulties the writer (who published under the name Isak Dinesen) had in accommodating herself to Denmark after returning from Africa. Hans Edvard Nrregrd-Nielsen wrote an outstanding biography in his three-volume study of the great painter Christen Kbke. Among the nation's thriller writers, not the least was Leif Davidsen. His Den serbiske dansker, about a mission to execute a fatwa in Denmark on a visiting author who was welcomed by PEN but cold-shouldered by politicians, had clear overtones of the Salman Rushdie affair. Peter Heg moved into a fantasy world with Kvinden og aben, about an ape, loose in London, learning to speak and having an affair. There was fantasy, too, in the shape of a maritime ghost, in Hanne Marie Svendsen's Rejsen med Emma, about a woman writer who sailed to the Pacific to put her life in order. Dorrit Willumsen, internationally known for her novel Marie, again turned to the 19th century with Bang, a novel about the author Herman Bang, while, in Tavshed i oktober, Jens Christian Grndahl portrayed a man of 44 looking back on his life to discover why his wife had left him after 18 years of marriage. In Det skabtes vaklen: Arabesker, Sren Ulrik Thomsen again showed himself to be a philosophical poet continuing a well-established Danish tradition, rooted in the intellectual stylists of the 18th and 19th centuries. In Tabernakel, Niels Frank produced a series of philosophical and well-wrought poems in a rather more subdued style than his earlier collections. The young poet Naja Marie Aidt produced another volume of poems, Huset overfor, and the productive veteran Klaus Rifbjerg added to his work with Leksikon. Per Hjholt completed his Praksis series, which was sometimes prose, sometimes poetry, with Anekdoter, a sequence of eight varied and sophisticated prose pieces. Henrik Nordbrandt was awarded the Danish booksellers' distinguished Golden Laurels, the first poet in 20 years to win the prize. The Critics' Prize also went to a poet, this time to Per Hjholt. (W. GLYN JONES) GERMANIC: Netherlandic. In Kijken is bekeken worden, the leading Dutch poet Gerrit Komrij made a significant comment on modern literature in general and Dutch publications of 1996 in particular when he wondered aloud why modern literature had never enjoyed the success of modern art. Komrij indirectly answered his own question by pointing out that although lines and colours could have a meaning of their own, words, if too disconnected, did not communicate. Readers liked to read stories. A bridge between the abstract school of the 1950s and the reemergence--be it in different form--of the traditional narrative was the highly productive author A.F.Th. van der Heijden. His unfinished supernovel, De tandeloze tijd, begun when he was just 16, comprised more than 3,000 pages in four volumes. The series would probably never be finished, for van der Heijden, like his older fellow writer Gerard Reve, with his Het boek van violet en dood, was trying to write "the complete book." Reve's strongly narrative and autobiographical novel also did not turn out to be the book "that made all other books, except the Bible and the telephone directory, redundant," in spite of the author's undertaking begun three decades earlier. The autobiographical element, manifestly present in most contemporary Dutch novels, took an extreme form in some works. Prominent among them was Harry Mulisch's Bij gelegenheid, a collection of thought-provoking essays. F.B. Hotz, who made his debut in 1976, claimed in De vertegenwoordigers that the ability to tell a fascinating story does not alone make a great writer. The story also has to be told with precision and in a personal style. The books of seasoned authors Ward Ruyslinck, in Het geboortehuis, Jef Geeraerts, in Goud, and J.J. Voskuil, in Het bureau, as well as the younger writers Koos van Zomeren, in Meisje in het veen, and the Moroccan-born Hafid Bouazza, in De voeten van Abdullah, all proved to meet these conditions. (MARTINUS A. BAKKER) GERMANIC: Norwegian. The most charming contribution to Norwegian literature in 1996 was Jostein Gaarder's Hallo?--er det noen her?, which presented cosmological issues from a child's perspective with intelligence and humour. Promiscuity blossomed in Ketil Bjrnstad's novel Drift, a portrait of Norway around 1970. The life of the main character in Drift during subsequent years was presented in the sequel, Drmmen om havet. Erotic tensions between two married couples were analyzed against a Spanish backdrop in Knut Faldbakken's Nr jeg ser deg. Sex and drugs emerged in Anders W. Cappelen's novel Meska. In Erobreren, Jan Kjrstad returned to his television personality Jonas Wergeland from the 1993 novel Forfreren, providing a heady mixture of sex and social satire. Peter Serck's short stories in Ansiktene spoke eloquently of the irredeemable loneliness of the soul, not the least during sexual encounters. Finn Carling presented a synthesis of the world's many trouble spots in En annen vei, in which a doctor taken hostage reflects on the mad world surrounding him. Sissel Lange-Nielsen's semidocumentary historical novel Den norske lve brought to life the hardships and instabilities inflicted on the united kingdom of Denmark-Norway by the Napoleonic Wars during the years leading up to 1814. Bergljot Hobk Haff's elegantly written novel Skammen was a family saga rooted in 20th-century Norway. Stylish playfulness characterized Ernst Orvil's collected short stories, Samlede noveller. The collected poems of Inger Hagerup, Gunvor Hofmo, and Sigmund Mjelve were published in 1996. Rolf Jacobsen's verse was analyzed by Erling Aadland in Poetisk tenkning i Rolf Jacobsens lyrikk. Torill Steinfeld's Den unge Camilla Collett offered a rich portrait of the 19th-century feminist. Irene Engelstad, Liv Kltzow, and Gunnar Staalesen provided a portrait of another feminist in Amalie Skrams verden. ystein Rottem published his three-volume Etterkrigslitteraturen. Knut Hamsuns brev 1908-1914, edited and annotated by Harald S. Nss, was notable for 130 passionate letters to Hamsun's second wife, Marie. Rottem's Hamsuns liv i bilder was a survey of Hamsun's life in words and pictures. (TORBJRN STVERUD) GERMANIC: Swedish. The year 1996 saw a number of new works by established Swedish authors. Kerstin Ekman's Gr mig levande igen chronicled life in present-day Sweden and the collapse of established values in conjunction with the impact of the war in former Yugoslavia. Sara Lidman's novel Lifsens rot continued the narrative of her pentalogy (1977-85) with the introduction of a female character who sealed the fate of a rural community. Birgitta Trotzig's prose poems in Sammanhang emphasized similar values within the framework of an investigation of language and being. Gran Tunstrm's Skimmer was a novel about desire, hatred, and love in which the relationship between a father, a son, and a mother assumed mythical resonances. Important books of poetry included Tomas Transtrmer's Sorgegondolen, in which the metaphoric use of details helped counteract a sense of isolation, and Gran Sonnevi's Mozarts tredje hjrna, which explored the role of change as a basis of awareness. The poems in Lars Gustafsson's Variationer ver ett tema av Silfverstolpe drew on music to investigate the concept of time, while Gunnar D. Hansson's AB Neanderthal was a metapoetical work that explored artistic intuition. Jesper Svenbro's poems in Vid budet att Santo Bambino di Aracoeli slutligen stulits av maffian combined Swedish and classical landscapes to paint fragile idylls, while those in Lukas Moodysson's Souvenir conveyed a fragmented world. Ulf Eriksson's Paradis was a collection of short stories in which the elliptical style offered scant shelter against ennui and loneliness. While the short stories in Inger Frimansson's Dr inne vilar gat focused on relationships, those in Maria Larsson's Mimers brunn ventured into the world of science fiction. Identity was a central theme in both Bodil Malmsten's novel Nsta som rr mig and Steve Sem-Sandberg's Theres, while Elsie Johansson's Glasfglarna revolved around a working-class childhood and ke Smedberg's Strlande stjrna investigated the generation gap. Carina Burman's novel Den tionde snggudinnan and Jacques Werup's Den ofullbordade himlen both explored the situation of women in the early decades of the 20th century, and Mrta Tikkanen's Personliga angelgenheter combined tales of loneliness and desire. (EDITORS) ITALIAN If literature reflects the society and culture in which it is produced, the least one could say was that Italians were deeply dissatisfied with themselves in 1996. Following the ever-increasing and much-lamented popularity of violent themes in motion pictures and on television, the wave of new pulp-fiction writers indulged in the not entirely parodic representation of mindless home-spun violence. The few novels that seriously addressed contemporary topics were critical of Italian society and pessimistic about its future. The main culprit was seen to be the national obsession with money. Nowhere was this theme more evident than in Ferdinando Camon's short novel La terra e di tutti, in which the northeastern part of Italy was depicted as being poisoned by its wealth. Camon's characters, like the Lombard ones of Aldo Busi's Suicidi dovuti, were a frightening mixture of ignorance and power, their only saving feature being the likelihood, suggested between the lines, that their excesses might be a biological compensation for the extremes of deprivation suffered by their ancestors. Roberto Pazzi's intense psychological novel Incerti di viaggio did not offer much comfort either; his cultured middle-aged, middle-class childless couple, traveling by night train from Naples to the north, experienced their enforced proximity as a prison from which neither could escape. Most novels, however, were set either in the past or far away from Italy or both. In Le stagioni di Giacomo, the writer Mario Rigoni Stern evoked the life of his native Alpine community between the two world wars, while in Esilio Enzo Bettiza, inspired by the tragic wars unfolding in his native Dalmatia, told the saga of his family through the past two centuries and of his own exile from his homeland since 1945. The best-seller of the year was the short and captivating, though rather insubstantial, Seta by the young writer Alessandro Baricco. It was the somewhat Calvinian story of a 19th-century Frenchman who, year after year, traveled to Japan and back, ostensibly to acquire precious silkworms but actually in search of an indefinite and ever-elusive object of desire. Equally exotic with its exquisite Asia Minor settings, though more ambitious in conception and richer in style, was Giocando a dama con la luna by Giuliana Morandini, in which the myth of classical Greece, as lived by the 19th-century German archaeologist Karl Humann, was shown to harbour the sickness that took over and ultimately destroyed Germany. The Nazi occupation of Austria provided a dark background to Paolo Maurensig's second novel, Canone inverso, the story of a bewitched and bewitching violin and of the double personality of its bizarre Hungarian player. The notion that goodness is not normal was central to Anna Maria Ortese's Alonso e i visionari, the strange story of a little puma that, taken to Italy from Arizona, causes passions and hatred to burn intensely and dark fantasies to conquer reality. Readers could hardly find respite from the general gloom. Even a senseless sequence of events stunningly narrated in Fontano da casa by Franco Ferrucci coalesced into a destiny only because of an individual act of violence that returned an Italian emigrant who thought he had found happiness in 1920s America to the anonymity of Genoa. The violent intolerance of Turinese bourgeois in the 1920s was the setting of Il bacio della Medusa, Melania Mazzucco's impressive first novel about the passionate love that drew together two women of disparate social backgrounds. Stefano Benni's satirical Elianto provided a measure of comic relief, even if at the expense of a country transparently named Tristalia. One of the most compelling books of the year was Fausta Garavini's Diletta Costanza, a lucid, intelligent, and compassionate half-fictional and half-historical reconstruction of the life and times of the remarkable Costanza Monti, daughter of Vincenzo Monti, a major Italian poet in the Napoleonic era. A telling sign of the times was the appearance of the periodical Il semplice, a "prose almanac" edited by a group of young writers around Gianni Celati and Ermanno Cavazzoni. It was devoted to the publication of ordinary or artfully "underwritten" narratives, an attempt to denounce the meretricious use of literature. A major event in poetry was the centenary of the birth of the Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale, who died in 1981. His Diario postumo: 66 poesie e altre, a collection of new or little known poems, appeared during the year. Montale's acknowledged successor, Andrea Zanzotto, published Meteo, 20 compositions focusing on an "ecosystem" ambiguously poised between life and death but ultimately threatened more than ever before by contamination and violence. Gesualdo Bufalino (see OBITUARIES), the Sicilian novelist and author of many works much acclaimed by critics and the public alike, died in 1996, as did Amelia Rosselli, a distinguished voice among contemporary Italian poets. (LINO PERTILE) JAPANESE The Japanese economy had remained at a low ebb for several years, and the economic syndrome seemed to be infectious in 1996 even in the literary domain. Some of the country's important literary magazines disappeared, and the jury for the Jun'ichiro Tanizaki Award announced that there would be no winner. One of the remarkable best-sellers of the year was the memoir Ototo ("My Brother") by Shintaro Ishihara, who had made his brilliant literary debut when he was in his early 20s and had later become a conservative politician. Ishihara's memoir was a spontaneous and readable account of his brother Yujiro, who had died of cancer several years earlier. There was, however, an irony in its commercial success, with the dead Yujiro turning out to be more appealing than the author. It might seem that the literary vitality of contemporary Japan was being maintained mainly by female authors. One of the most impressive short works of 1996 was Otto no shimatsu ("How to Manage My Husband") by Sumie Tanaka, the octogenarian novelist who was the winner of the Women Writers' Prize of the year. The work was an outspoken autobiography, but it was very readable and humorous. The author's husband happened to be a well-known dramatist, but he had a limited income. Tanaka, therefore, had worked hard as a screenwriter for movies and the radio while caring for both her son and her daughter, who suffered from serious diseases. A devout Catholic, she remained an active and lively person, and her outspokenness was effective, even infectious. The work was a tour de force. Another strong contender for the Women Writers' Prize was Yoko Tawada, who published Gottoharuto tetsudo ("St. Godhard Railway and Other Stories"). The stories were impressive, with evocative prose and fantastic settings suggestive of Kafka. Tawada lived in Germany and published her stories in both Japanese and German, unusual for a Japanese author. There were two remarkable novels by male authors in 1996. Otohiko Kaga's Ento ("Burnt Metropolis") was a voluminous chronicle of wartime Tokyo, and Tsujii Takashi's Owarinaki shukusai ("Endless Fiesta") was a nostalgic evocation of the complicated emotional and sexual relations of a prewar group of pioneering Japanese feminists. The Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize in Poetry for 1996 was awarded to Masao Tsuji for Haikai Tsuji shu ("Poems of Haikai Tsuji"), a collection that was colloquial and humorous, a happy fusion of traditional haiku and modernism. Saiichi Maruya's Hihyoshu ("Collection of Critical Essays") in six volumes was both stimulating and readable. Inuhiko Yomota's Kishu to tensei--Nakagami Kenji ("Kenji Nakagami--Noble Descent and Metamorphosis") was an ambitious reassessment of the late novelist, comparing Nakagami with Yukio Mishima in a historical and Pan-Asiatic perspective. Shun Akiyama's Nobunaga, a lively reinterpretation of the eccentric samurai hero of the 16th century, was rich in fresh critical insight. (SHOICHI SAEKI) JEWISH The main issue of Hebrew fiction since its revival in the 19th century, that of identity, was reflected in 1996 in novels dealing with the early days of Tel Aviv. They included Nathan Shaham's Lev Tel Aviv ("The Heart of Tel Aviv") and the new edition of Dan Tsalka's Filip Arbes. The same topic was explored on the one hand in a novel that went back to the Holocaust--Ori Dromer's O'ri ("My Skin")--and on the other in novels that examined Israelis in the United States, including Dorit Abush's Ha-Yored ("The Deserter") and Sam Bacharach's Shnei darkonim ("Two Passports"). The veteran writer Yehudit Hendel published the collection of stories Arukhat boker tmima ("An Innocent Breakfast"), and Gabriel Moked collected a number of his existential tales. Yossel Birstein penned the disappointing novel Al tikra li Iyov ("Don't Call Me Job"), and Aharon Megged examined again the inequities of the literary world in his novel Avel ("Iniquity"). The most interesting novel published by the younger generation in 1996 was Lea Aini's Mishehi tzrikha liheyot kan ("Someone Must Be Here"). First novels included Marit Benisrael's Asur lashevet al tzamot ("Let Down Your Braids") and Uzi Gdor's Biktzei ha-mahane ("At the Settlement's Edge"). First collections of short stories were represented by Shoham Smith's postmodernist-oriented Libi omer li ki zikhroni boged bi ("Things That My Heart Fails to Tell") and Yaron Avitov's Adon slihot ("Master of Forgiveness"). The main event in poetry in 1996 was the publication of Nathan Zach's Mikhevan she`ani baSviva ("Because I'm Around"). Other significant books included Ory Bernstein's Zman shel aherim ("Temps des autres"), Avner Treinin's Ma`alot Ahaz ("The Dial of Ahaz"), and Roni Somek's Gan eden le-orez ("Rice Paradise"). Important critical studies included Avner Holtzman's work on the formative years of M.J. Berdyczewski and Shmuel Werses's book on Yiddish-Hebrew writers and the transformations of their works from one language to the other. The Palestinian writer Emile Habibi (see OBITUARIES) and the poet David Avidan died in 1996. (AVRAHAM BALABAN)