Krigsminner i nye norske romaner

Abstract

In this article, I analyze three novelistic projects from the last decade, i.e., Jon Michelet’s six-volume work En sjøens helt (2012-2018), Simon Stranger’s Leksikon om lys og mørke (2018), and Kjartan Fløgstad’s Due og drone (2019). The novels address events during the war but have different agendas in contemporary public debate. Michelet’s errand is to draw attention to the war sailors’ achievements, Stranger’s to remind us of the sufferings of the Jews, as well as to try to understand a Norwegian Nazi, and Fløgstad’s to underpin a thesis about capitalism’s corruptive workings and today’s terrorism’s roots in the past. I show how Michelet uses the suspense genre, and how he writes engaging about his seamen, but recirculates an old-fashioned gender matrix. Stranger involves the reader in the questions he asks and tries to evoke empathy and promote insight but tends to use clichés and a pathologizing discourse to understand the perpetrator. Fløgstad has a deconstructive strategy in his plot development since the novel’s generational pattern, its hero narratives and its subject constitutions are consistently questioned and dissolved. His style is more self-reflective than the other two’s due to a saturating ironic rhetoric and a playful attitude to conventions. Finally, I discuss the noteworthy phenomenon, that they all use sexuality to further their conceptualizations of the past in the present.