jueves, 10 de marzo de 2022

Soviet Jewish short-story writer and playwright. Isaac Babel was born in Odessa and brought up in the Russified middle-class family of a dealer in agricultural machinery. Odessa was then a thriving center of modern Jewish culture where writers such as Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik lectured and published. In 1916, Babel met Mendele Moykher-Sforim, the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature. Babel’s love of Yiddish is reflected in the subtext of his Russian prose, as well as in his adaptation of one of the popular folktales about Hershele Ostropolyer, “Shabos-Nakhamu” (1918). It was for love of Yiddish, not just want of money, that Babel wrote the screenplays of Sholem Aleichem’s Menakhem Mendl stories, Evreiskoe schast’e (Jewish Luck; 1925), and a novel, Bluzhdaiushchie zvezdy (Wandering Stars; 1926), and edited two volumes of stories by Sholem Aleichem in Shimon Hecht’s Russian translation (1926). The Zionist and Hebrew influences of his childhood had to be concealed after the Bolshevik Revolution, but the response of the post-Kishinev generation to pogroms and to the decay of shtetl life are evident in Babel’s first published story, “Staryi Shloime” (Old Shloime; 1913), which describes an old man’s suicide after his sons abandon Judaism under socioeconomic pressure.

In 1911 Babel enrolled at a business school in Kiev, which was evacuated to Saratov at the outbreak of World War I. In 1915, he drafted a semiautobiographical story, “Detstvo. U babushki” (Childhood: At Grandmother’s). The contradictions and paradoxes of Russians and Jews living together fascinated Babel all his life. He explored this theme even before the revolution, in an undated manuscript about a Jew, Yankel, who helps rescue a priest’s son from imprisonment, and in the story “El’ia Isaakovich i Margarita Prokofevna” (Ilia Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofevna; 1916), about a Russian prostitute in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) who helps a Jew from Odessa to evade tsarist antisemitic residence restrictions.

Continuing his studies at the liberal Psycho-Neurological Institute in Petrograd, Babel contributed to the local press in 1916–1917. In 1918, his pieces in Maksim Gorky’s pro-Menshevik newspaper Novaia zhizn’ (New Life) described the horrors of life in the revolutionary capital. In 1920, Babel joined Semen Mikhailovich Budenny’s legendary First Horse Army as a correspondent and turned his impressions of the brief Soviet–Polish war into a cycle of stories, published originally to great acclaim and controversy in periodicals in 1923–1925, then in book form as Konarmiia (Red Cavalry; 1926). Juxtaposing lyrical modernism and shocking brutality, Babel’s loosely constructed vignettes offer an estranged view of war and revolution as seen by a Jewish intellectual, Liutov, who cannot reconcile his severed roots in Judaism with the price he must pay to be accepted by the Cossacks.

By 1924 Babel had arrived in Moscow, but the recognition of his talent and his involvement in the literary world did not bring him personal or artistic satisfaction. Creative freedom was under attack and conditions in Moscow were becoming unbearable. His mother and sister moved to Belgium, and his wife, Evgeniia Borisovna Gronfein, emigrated to Paris, burdening Babel with financial worries about supporting all three at a time when foreign currency was hard to get and he was short of money because he would not compromise his fastidious and drawn-out process of composing short stories of just four or five pages. A son, Mikhail, was born in 1926 from a relationship with a Russian actress, Tamara Kashirna. In an apparent attempt to patch up his marriage in 1928, Babel lived for a time in Paris; his daughter Nathalie was born there the following year, after Babel had returned to Russia. He was allowed to travel abroad only two other times, in 1932–1933 and, briefly, in 1935. In 1932 he met a Russian engineer, Antonina Pirozhkova, by whom he had a daughter, Lidiia, and with whom he lived from 1934.

In Babel’s Odessa stories (written between 1921 and 1937), the character of the gangster Benia Krik represents lost Jewish empowerment as well as the joie de vivre of Odessa Jews. A film, Benia Krik (1927), relates the fate under Soviet rule of the band of gangsters Krik controlled. Later tales, including “Froim Grach” (written in the late 1920s), “Konets bogadel’ni” (End of the Almshouse; 1932), and “Karl-Yankel” (1931) similarly tell of a vibrant Jewish community that was brought to an end in the name of a socialist future.

In 1924 Babel began to compose a series of stories, Istoriia moei golubiatni (Story of My Dovecote), about his Jewish childhood in Odessa and his work with the Cheka in 1918. These stories depict a child’s vivid impressions of pogroms and antisemitism, while the pull of nature and budding sexuality lure the boy in the tales from his Jewish home to the unfamiliar and hostile Russian world. The title story brilliantly describes the incomprehensible violence of a pogrom.

By the end of the 1920s Babel sought a sparser prose style. An experiment with a longer form, the incomplete novella Evreika (The Jewess; 1927), tells of a Jewish Red Army officer who transplants his family, the Ehrlichs, to Moscow. In 1930 Babel was horrified by Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture, which resulted in deportations, requisitions, starvation, and the destruction of peasant traditions. Babel’s observations provided rich material for a book of connected stories, titled Velikaia Krinitsa after a thinly disguised village in the Kiev district. The two extant chapters, “Kolyvushka” and “Gapa Guzhva,” named for colorful local characters, are eloquent examples of Babel’s new restrained voice that spoke of horror in a village where no dog dared to bark.

Babel’s first stage play, Zakat (Sunset), based on the Odessa stories, had a short and not particularly successful run in 1928, while his second play, Mariia, the first in a trilogy, was banned at the rehearsal stage in 1935. It became increasingly difficult for him to publish his writing, and his works were heavily censored. At the Soviet Writers Congress in 1934, Babel declared himself to be a “master of silence.” He was arrested on 15 May 1939, forced to confess to being a spy and a counterrevolutionary, and executed on 27 January 1940.

Suggested Reading

Isaak Babel, Red Cavalry and Other Stories, ed. Efraim Sicher, trans. David McDuff (London, 2005); Isaak Babel, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, ed. Nathalie Babel, trans. Peter Constantine (New York, 2002); Harold Bloom, ed., Isaac Babel (New York, 1987); Efraim Sicher, Style and Structure in the Prose of Isaak Babel (Columbus, Ohio, 1986); Efraim Sicher, “The Jewishness of Babel,” in Jews in Russian Literature after the October Revolution: Writers and Artists between Hope and Apostasy, pp. 71–111 (Cambridge and New York, 1995).

JEWS IN EASTERN EUROPE

Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel, Isaac also spelled Isaak, original name in full Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel, (born June 30 [July 12, New Style], 1894, Odessa, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died January 27, 1940, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.), Russian short-story writer known for his cycles of stories: Konarmiya (1926, rev. ed. 1931, enlarged 1933; Red Cavalry), set in the Russo-Polish War (1919–20); Odesskiye rasskazy (1931; Tales of Odessa), set in the Jewish underworld of Odessa; and Istoriya moey golubyatni (1926; “Story of My Dovecote”), named after the opening story of autobiographical fiction about a middle-class Jewish boy growing up in Nikolayev and Odessa under the old regime. Babel’s innovative prose is distinguished by aphoristic precision, combined with the metaphoric extravagance of Modernist poetry. It had a considerable impact on the genres of short story and autobiographical fiction both in Russia and abroad, especially in the United States. Translated into many languages, his works have for decades exemplified both the achievement of Russia’s literature of the revolutionary Soviet period and the dilemmas faced by a modern intellectual, a Russian, a European, and a Jew, caught in the swell of a violent social upheaval.

Odessa, where Babel was born to a struggling middle-class Jewish family, was a chief inspiration, even though his early childhood passed in the nearby city of Nikolayev (1894–1905). Babel was the third of five children (two died in infancy, and one, Hanna Ghitel, died at age seven, when Babel was four; his only surviving sister, Maria, was born in 1897). In Nikolayev, Babel’s father came to enjoy business success, and in 1904 Babel began his formal education at Nikolayev’s Count Witte Commercial Academy. In December 1905 Babel moved to Odessa and transferred to the Nicholas I Commercial Academy, from which he graduated in 1911. The rest of the family moved back to Odessa in 1906 and eventually settled in the city centre, in well-to-do Richelieu Street (Rishelievskaya). Known for their secularism and cultural vibrancy, the Jews of this most cosmopolitan city in the Pale of Settlement made up a third of the population and were well represented among the poor, the middle class, and the very rich. Although Babel’s parents were observant Jews (albeit not strictly) and subject to the anti-Jewish restrictions of the old regime, their values were largely shaped by the opportunities offered by Russia’s modernization. The family language was Russian (Babel was taught to read Russian by his mother), with enough Yiddish for Babel to be comfortable translating a favorite author, Sholem Aleichem, in his later years. Babel’s father, a moderately successful businessman, did his best to give his two children a full-fledged modern Russian education, replete with foreign languages and, typical for Odessa, classical music (Babel studied violin with the famous Pyotr Stolyarsky). A rabbi’s son, the elder Babel also took care to have his children instructed in Judaism and Hebrew. Babel’s knowledge of the Talmud and the Jewish religious tradition was sufficient to allow him in 1920 to discuss the finer points of traditional Judaism with Hasidic scholars in Galicia. His upbringing, however, was largely secular and rooted in the Russian Enlightenment culture of the country’s educated society. His first attempts at prose fiction (none has survived) were in French, a circumstance he attributed to his charismatic teacher, a French expatriate and member of Odessa’s substantial French community.

In the fall of 1911, Babel went on to study economics and business at the Kiev Institute of Finance and Business Studies, receiving the degree of Kandidat of economic sciences in 1916. While finishing his studies in Kiev, he enrolled in the faculty of law at the liberal Psycho-Neurological Institute in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and, once there, proceeded to launch his career as a reporter and short-story writer. Although his first known story, “Old Shloyme,” appeared in a small Kiev weekly called Ogni (“Lights”) in 1913, Babel never mentioned it and preferred to place his literary debut at the end of 1916 when he met Maxim Gorky, who welcomed him into literary authorship by publishing a selection of Babel’s stories in the November 1916 issue of his journal Letopis (“Chronicle”), alongside his own autobiography. This was a major coup for a fledgling author and assured his wider recognition. Babel’s friendship with Gorky, the most famous Russian writer at the time, continued, along with Gorky’s patronage, until the esteemed author’s death in 1936.

Consonant with Babel’s background and milieu, his early stories explored the gritty middle-class world of a modern Russian city whose inhabitants often operated at, or over, the margins of propriety and law—such as a small-time Jewish merchant moving in with a prostitute to avoid deportation (“Elya Isaakovich and Margarita Prokofyevna”), a desperate gymnasium girl seduced by a boarder and trying to induce an abortion (“Mama, Rimma, and Alla”), or a young writer watching through a peephole the goings-on in a house of ill repute (“Through a Peephole”). In the manner of Gorky’s fiction and, even more so, Guy de Maupassant, Babel took a keen interest in Russian Jews as urbanites living by their wits, small-time operators, bohemians, and members of the “world’s oldest profession,” whose business he ironically juxtaposed with that of a modern litterateur (“My First Fee”). Unlike his predecessors, such as Aleichem or Anton Chekhov, he tended to see in his Jewish subjects not so much the victims of rapid change but resourceful characters making use of capitalism and urbanization for their own purposes. That sanguine outlook found expression in his youthful but important manifesto, “My Notes: Odessa,” a paean to his native city, in which he saw a model for Russia’s own modernization in matters of economics, culture, and, especially, belles lettres. In conclusion, he predicted the imminent arrival—from Odessa—of a new “literary Messiah,” a “Russian Maupassant,” who would deliver classical Russian literature from its moody northern cast and replace it with the cosmopolitan zest of the empire’s sun-drenched multiethnic southwest. Babel’s subsequent career may be seen as an attempt to fulfill this prophecy.

Little is known about Babel’s whereabouts in the summer and fall of 1917. Babel claimed that he spent those months volunteering at the Romanian front (not far from his native Odessa). He may have later journeyed back to Petrograd, as recounted in his story “Doroga” (“The Road”). We know that he resurfaced in Petrograd in March 1918, when he joined the staff of Gorky’s anti-Bolshevik newspaper Novaya Zhizn (“New Life”), to which he contributed a series of sketches about everyday life in the revolutionary city. At the same time, by his own account in his 1924 autobiography, he moonlighted as a translator for the Petrograd Cheka (secret police, forerunner of the KGB). After Novaya Zhizn was shut down by the authorities in July 1918, Babel continued to publish and do occasional work for the new Soviet Commissariat of Enlightenment. He was also drafted into service with a food procurement detachment traveling to the German colonies of the Saratov region to exchange manufactured good for victuals sorely needed in the depleted city. In the spring and summer of 1919, he was back in Odessa, where in August he married Yevgeniya Gronfayn (1897–1957), daughter of his father’s business associate, who was an artist and an old friend from his student days in Kiev. After Odessa was retaken by the Reds in early 1920, Babel worked as an editor for the Odessa Gubernia State Publisher.

In the spring of 1920, under a Russian-sounding pen name, Kiril Lyutov, Babel joined Semyon Budenny’s First Cavalry Army as a reporter for YugROSTA (the southern branch of the Russian Telegraph Agency) and was soon thereafter assigned to the 6th Division of the army for the duration of the Russo-Polish War. While there he also performed staff duties at the division headquarters, contributed to the army broadsheet Red Cavalryman, and on occasion accompanied his detachment into action. Much of the fighting done by Budenny’s Cavalry Army took place in the ethnically diverse borderlands between eastern Poland and western Ukraine, a region long settled by traditional, largely Hasidic, Jewish communities. Babel had displayed a special interest in Hasidic folklore (e.g., in his story “Shabos Nakhamu,” 1918, from his projected “Hershele” cycle) and was eager to explore the life of these insular communities, little touched by modernization. Decimated in the crossfire of World War I, they were now victimized by the warring armies in the Russo-Polish conflict. Babel’s experience during this campaign, recorded in his 1920 Diary, formed the basis for the stories of Red Cavalry (1926). Some of them, including the opening “Crossing the Zbruch,” are set amid devastated Jewish life, and, while they do not dominate the book as a whole, they provide a counterpoint to the key motif of violence that runs throughout the entire narrative. Babel’s direct exposure to violence, marked by the visceral brutality of a low-tech war, the intensity of the battlefield comradeship, and bonding with people far outside his ken, transformed him as a writer. An author who had eschewed violence before, he now placed it at the centre of his fiction. The first stories of the Red Cavalry cycle began to appear in Odessa’s press as early as 1923.

Babel began to work on this war material in 1921–23, proceeding on parallel tracks: one was devoted to chronicling the Russo-Polish War and the other to his Tales of Odessa cycle, a set of Rabelaisian stories about the colourful Jewish gangster Benya Krik—a mock Jewish messiah—and a subtle allegory of Babel’s own incipient career as a Russian Jewish writer irreverantly “muscling in” on the domain of Russian literature (“How It Was Done in Odessa”). The first story of the cycle, “The King,” appeared in the Odessa paper Moryak (“Mariner”) on June 23, 1921. The Tales of Odessa are narrated by a bookish young man “with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart,” an ironic alter ego of the author. This narrator is fascinated by the brash energy and unabashed sexuality of Benya Krik, a cosmopolitan Jew who resorts to violence for the sake of redistributing wealth, who can take life in the course of justice, and who can also “spend the night with a Russian woman and a Russian woman would be satisfied.” In these stories, Babel found his unique narrative persona and voice. Pitched to a different key, they inform Red Cavalry and indeed his oeuvre in its entirety, including “Story of My Dovecote” and other works. Thus, if the Tales of Odessa represents a “mock epic,” then Red Cavalry is its true epic counterpart. Variations on Babel’s narrative persona and its distinct voice can sometimes be recognized in the works of the post-World War II American writers exploring Jewish American life, such as Philip Roth and Grace Paley.

The short stories and vignettes of Red Cavalry form a unit, similar to a novel, thanks to the character of the narrator Kiril Lyutov. Ostensibly autobiographical, Lyutov evolves as a character in a novel between the opening story of Red Cavalry, “Crossing the Zbruch,” and its closure, “Rebbe’s Son.” He shares many qualities with the chronicler of the Tales of Odessa, just as the Odessa gangsters may be easily transposed onto Budenny’s horsemen of Red Cavalry. Babel used his narrator as a device to probe the uneasy confluence of bookish intellectuals, a violent socialist revolution, redemptive nationalism (the resurgence of Poland), and the messianic beliefs of the region’s Hasidic Jews. While sympathetic to the cause of world revolution, Red Cavalry’s Lyutov finds it hard to reconcile its lofty ends with the immense brutality of its means: Budenny’s motley Cossack army possesses as much instinct for raw social justice as for marauding, pogroms, and rape. This paradox remains unresolved, except ironically on the aesthetic plane, as Lyutov professes his admiration for the will, directness, and vitality of the Cossacks—these cousins to Nietzsche’s blonde Bestie, who are doing the bidding of the Bolshevik regime, even as they oppress and victimize other sufferers. The same contradictions rend to pieces the visions that possess the minds of other players in the unfolding drama of war. In this way, albeit only implicitly, the setting of Babel’s Red Cavalry becomes a latter-day Jerusalem—a focal point of clashing chiliastic and apocalyptic collective dreams. Babel mentions this “Jerusalem motif” explicitly in his war diary, in the July 24 entry, which was made on the eve of Tisha be-Av, when Jews commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temple and recite the Lamentations of Jeremiah. “Everything is the same,” Babel concluded in his description of his surroundings, “as in the days of the destruction of the Temple.” This motif is never spelled out in Red Cavalry, but it is threaded through its whole structure, complete with the figure of Ilya (Elijah)—a defeated precursor manqué—whose last breath animates Babel’s alter ego Lyutov in the concluding story, “Rebbe’s Son.” Thus Babel, as the author of Red Cavalry, made good on his promise of becoming a literary redeemer.

For many leftist intellectuals in Russia and in the West, Red Cavalry embodied the moral ambiguity of the Revolution: its abhorrent brutality on the one hand and, on the other, the irresistible desire to see ideas of truth and justice unleash and animate the people, becoming a force akin to life itself. Babel’s writings enjoyed an enthusiastic critical response in Soviet Russia, even though he himself was classified as a “fellow traveler,” an author who tagged along with the Bolsheviks but only so far. Controversies and condemnation, notably Budenny’s attacks on him in 1924 and 1928, were countered by authoritative figures, Gorky among them, and, while they stung Babel to the quick, they also served to burnish his fame.

In 1925 Babel began publishing a series of semi-autobiographical stories in which his familiar narrator was implicitly summoned to “recall” his early years. Presented as part of a book about his boyhood and dedicated to Gorky, the seminal “Story of My Dovecote” and “First Love” (1925) suggest that Babel conceived of his oeuvre as a set of consecutive autobiographical cycles, not unlike Gorky’s autobiographical trilogy, and he continued to add to it, as he did to his two other major cycles, throughout the 1930s. In those childhood stories, Babel successfully established a new genre of a quasi-autobiographical novella about a middle-class Jewish boy who is tested in and shaped by a complex of opposing cultural forces: opportunities opening up for Jews in the modernizing Gentile world and its anti-Jewish prejudice; the parental pressure to succeed and its opposite, the recoil against secularization and assimilation; and, finally, the confusion of sexual codes articulating the clash between the more traditional Jewish family and the modern cosmopolitan world outside.

The Bolsheviks’ sharp turn toward socialist construction and conformity beginning in 1929 threatened to marginalize Babel. A total mobilization was declared, and Soviet writers all had to pull their weight in the national effort to build socialism in one country on the basis of collectivized agriculture and rapid industrialization. Of the several stories he wrote about the collectivization of agriculture (1929–30), two have survived, and only one was published in his lifetime (“Gapa Guzhva,” 1931). Raw and violent, powerful in the manner of Red Cavalry, they stood out from contemporary Soviet prose and did not bode well for Babel’s future in the emerging Stalinist canon (after reading “Gapa Guzhva,” Stalin referred to Babel as “slippery” and questioned his loyalty to the Soviet cause). His only published “industrialization” story, the resonant miniature novella “Petrol,” appeared in 1934. From the early 1930s on, Babel’s published literary output diminished noticeably: a few short stories and one play.

Like some of the other writers of his generation, Babel began writing for the screen in the 1920s, using this opportunity as both a secondary creative outlet and a major source of livelihood to supplement his meagre literary income. A friend and frequent collaborator of Sergey Eisenstein, Babel enjoyed the reputation of a brilliant screenwriter, an innovative master of silent-film inter-titles and, later, film dialogue. He also encountered adversities in dealing with the Soviet film establishment. Babel and Eisenstein planned to work together on a film version of the Tales of Odessa, but the collaboration was derailed by scandals at the Moscow Film Studios, and Babel, always short of money, was forced to sell his script to the Ukrainian Film Studios. The resulting film, Benya Krik (1927), was, in Babel’s opinion, a failure. It was also banned soon after its release, for one year. Babel’s 1936–37 collaboration with Eisenstein on the film Bezhin Meadow (about a young communist boy, Pavlik Morozov, murdered by his retrograde peasant father) was officially vilified for its “formalism,” an aesthetic deemed too complex for the mass Soviet viewer. The film was banned in postproduction and its stock recycled. Yet many of the films of the late 1920s and ’30s were based on Babel’s scripts, most notably Lyotchiki (1935), also known as Men with Wings; he was also the author of the dialogue for the blockbuster comedy Tsirk (1936), also called The Circus. Preferring to associate his name with his belles lettres only (he used pen names in his early journalism), Babel insisted on not having his name listed in film credits, and we are made aware of his roles only thanks to the memoirs of the filmmakers and Babel’s own private correspondence. Babel may have been the author of the script for the screen version (1938–40) of Maxim Gorky’s trilogy, directed by Mark Donskoy, and he was deeply involved in the film’s production. However, his arrest in 1939 meant that his name, regardless of his wishes or role, would no appear in the film's credits.

From his youth Babel benefited from the rich theatre life of Odessa. He loved theatre and enjoyed writing for the stage. In his lifetime, his sole successful attempt on the theatre stage was his play Zakat (1927; Sunset). Featuring the jolly gangster Benya Krik from Tales of Odessa, the play ends with a grim vision of Odessa’s carnivalesque underworld transforming itself into a routinized capitalist enterprise, replete with bookkeeping and other bourgeois proprieties. The play may have resonated with the Russian Revolution’s turn toward routinizaton and the disenchantment felt by those who missed its creative frisson. A similar sentiment informs a contemporary popular novel, Envy (1927), by Babel’s friend and fellow Odessan Yury Olesha, as well as the late plays by another friend, Vladimir Mayakovsky. Although the 1928 Moscow production of the play received mixed reviews, its 1927–28 run on the provincial stage—in Kiev, Minsk (in Yiddish), and Odessa, where it played simultaneously in two theatres, in Russian and Ukrainian—was an unqualified success. His second play, Mariya (1935), was published and even rehearsed in Moscow and Leningrad. Dark and brooding, with many autobiographical resonances, the play examines the vicissitudes of an upper-class intelligentsia family, the Mukovnins, as they try to adjust to the harsh realities of the revolutionary Petrograd. The action revolves around the family’s hope for the return of Mariya Mukovnin, the clan’s favourite, who, like Babel in his day, joined Budenny’s Cavalry Army at the Polish Front. Mariya never returns and, in a brilliant anticipation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1948), never appears on stage. Full of ambiguities and considered ideologically suspect, Mariya never reached the production stage in Babel’s lifetime. It has since enjoyed successful productions in London, in western and eastern Europe, and, since perestroika, in Russia

A prominent member of the Soviet cultural elite and an international celebrity, Babel lived abroad for prolonged periods of time in 1927–28 and 1932–33 and for two months in 1935, when, along with Boris Pasternak, he traveled to Paris to speak at the International Congress for the Defense of Culture (after André Malraux and André Gide threatened to scuttle the event if Babel and Pasternak were not allowed to travel there). Babel’s mother and sister had emigrated to Belgium early in 1925, followed shortly thereafter by Babel’s wife, who settled in Paris and bore their daughter, Natalie, there in 1929. Abroad Babel maintained a wide circle of friends and acquaintances among the émigrés as well as Soviet expatriates, most notably Ilya Ehrenburg. He even planned a cycle of stories about Paris. Two were published in his lifetime: “Rue Dante” and “The Trial.” He was on friendly terms with Malraux, a famous author and leader of the French antifascist left, who took a keen interest in the Soviet Union in the heady days of the popular front. Babel hosted Malraux in Moscow during the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, a defining moment for Soviet culture in the 1930s as well as for the country’s international standing as a bulwark against Nazism. In his speech at the Congress, Babel referred to himself as a practitioner of “the genre of literary silence” but also as one whose creative “gestation was more akin to that of an elephant than a rabbit.” With daring precision, he identified another cause for his diminished output: his fear of angering the all-powerful authorities with a wrong kind of writing. “The Party and the state have given us everything,” he averred with concealed irony, “taking away but one right—the right to write badly.” This ironic indictment of Soviet censorship may have been too clever to be clearly heard. Ultimately, Babel’s promise to bring forth a work about “socialist construction” that would be comparable to Red Cavalry and his failure to live up to this promise was interpreted as a refusal to celebrate Soviet achievement under Stalin.

The Great Terror swept away many of Babel’s friends in the military, security, the party, and the cultural elite, finally reaching Babel himself on May 15, 1939. By then Babel had started another family in Russia, with Antonina Pirozhkova (1909–2010), a civil engineer, who gave birth to Babel’s second daughter, Lydia, in 1937. A friend, mentor, and former lover of Evgeniia Yezhov, the wife of Stalin’s butcher Nikolay Yezhov, Babel may have enjoyed some immunity at the height of the Great Terror. But with the fall of Yezhov in 1938, the suicide of his wife, and Yezhov’s arrest in 1939, this fortuitous connection became a liability. Babel still enjoyed some immunity as an antifascist celebrity spokesman for the U.S.S.R. in France. But Stalin’s turn toward an alliance with Nazi Germany in the spring 1939 made Babel’s popularity in France irrelevant. He was arrested in his country house in the writers’ village, Peredelkino, where he was then preparing for publication a collection of stories, some of them apparently new. He was accused of espionage for Austria (he once shared a house with an Austrian engineer) and France (for his meetings with Malraux) as well as a terrorist conspiracy (his association with Yezhov’s wife) and various anti-Soviet activities. After several days of nonstop interrogation and torture, Babel signed a “confession.” He later renounced it twice but to no avail. He was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death on January 26, 1940. He was executed at 1:30 AM the following day. In 1954 Babel was among the first victims of the Stalinist terror to be cleared of all charges, but his entire personal archive—all of his unpublished works, drafts, notebooks, and other papers—which had been confiscated during his arrest, disappeared without a trace.

Babel’s literary rehabilitation began in 1957, when a collection of his stories and plays, with a foreword by Ehrenburg, appeared in the Soviet Union. Two years earlier a notable American edition, with an introduction by Lionel Trilling, had become the foundation of the Babel revival in the United States. In 2010 Babel became the first Russian writer of the 20th century to be published in W.W. Norton’s Critical Editions series, which is the most authoritative edition to date of Babel’s short stories in English translation. The most authoritative annotated edition of Babel’s stories in Russian, Rasskazy, edited by Elena Pogorelskaya, was published in St. Petersburg in 2014.

BRITANNICA

Isaac Babel
by David Levine

Isaac Babel: “They Wouldn’t Let Me Finish”

November 12, 2014 Bentley Clifford Utgaard

Isaac Babel is a bit of a conundrum. It’s not an easy task to trace his scattered trajectory from Jewish youth navigating the quotas in the Russian education system, cutting his literary teeth at the feet of his beloved mentor Maxim Gorky in Petrograd (present-day St. Petersburg), rising to renown as a champion of Soviet literature, and being imprisoned for allegedly spying for France and Austria. No stranger to prejudice, Babel wrote with revolution and religious persecution at his backdoor. His own time on the warfront further ignited his incendiary prose and became the basis for his most celebrated story cycle, Red Cavalry. Babel’s loosely autobiographical style coupled with his modernist sensibility lent his writing a personal yet subliminal quality. His stories sometimes read like morality tales, sometimes like diaries, sometimes like journalistic dispatches. One thing they all have in common is his staggering ability to convey with succinct confidence the far and ridiculous reaches of human suffering.

Babel was born in 1894 to a family on the ascent to the middle class in the southern city of Odessa (in present-day Ukraine). A port city on the Black Sea, Odessa —“Paris of Russia” — was known for its diverse population. Soon after his birth, Babel’s family moved to Nikolayev, about 100 miles northeast of Odessa for his father’s work, and the family lived there until in 1905, when they moved back to Odessa. This same year, Czar Nicolas II established his constitutional monarchy via his “October Manifesto” – a list of provisions ostensibly giving the Russian people more civil liberties. The manifesto was a grudging response to the Russian Revolution of 1905 in which various factions made their voices heard regarding unjust governmental policies including limited land rights for peasants, poor treatment of minorities, and unfair labor practices. Its issuance sparked a turn of events that led to violent pogroms in the region. Russian backlash against Jewish inhabitants grew exponentially after months of mutual agitation and distrust. Jews and Russians alike celebrated and fought. Witnesses reported widespread murder and other heinous acts against Jewish men, women, and children. Over 400 were killed in the Odessa pogrom alone (Weinberg, 248).

Though Babel’s family was spared the 1905 pogroms’ atrocities, he writes of a young boy who is affected by a pogrom in The Story of My Dovecote, published in 1925. Dovecote was written in the years just after the Red Cavalry cycle – the cycle that brought him notoriety across the country. Today, Dovecote is generally referred to as a standalone story as opposed to part of a larger cycle, though his daughter Nathalie Babel, who has steadily worked to compile publish her father’s work over the years, explains that with this story her father had “…broadened his range of subject matter, dealing more directly than before with autobiographical material and writing in longer form. He intended to collect the stories he wrote based on his childhood in a single volume….” (The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, pg 599-600). In Dovecote, the 9-year old protagonist learns that he has earned, after a rigorous examination, one of two Jewish spots at a prestigious school. Babel himself was only allowed into a school open to sons of Jewish merchants. (“No Time to Finish”, page 520). The boy’s parents react:

When my father saw me, he abandoned the muzhik and drank in my story without a moment’s doubt. He shouted to his sales clerk to close the store, and rushed over to Sobornaya Street to buy me a cap with the school emblem on it. My poor mother barely managed to wrest me away from my delirious father. She stood there, pale, trying to foresee my fate. She kept caressing me and then pushing me away in disgust. She said that a list of all the children admitted into the lycée was always published in the newspapers, and that God would punish us and that people would laugh at us, if we bought a school uniform ahead of time. My mother was pale, she was trying to foresee my fate in my eyes, and she looked at me with bitter pity, as if I were a little cripple, for she was the only one who fully realized how luckless our family was. (Complete Works, 603).

Later in the story, after the protagonist begins school, he realizes in all the excitement he has forgotten to buy doves for their newly refurbished dovecote as his father had promised he could if he got into the lycée: “I had gotten everything ready for them…On Sunday, October 22, I set off to the wild game market but I ran into unexpected obstacles on the way.” The obstacle, of course, being the unrest created by the October Manifesto. He finally sneaks away to the market, buys two doves, but while he is there someone from his neighborhood informs the bird catcher that “Grandpa Babel” (the boy’s grandfather) had been “served…a helping of death.” The boy begins to make his way home, stopping to ask the legless cigarette seller Makarenko about how to find someone he knows, when Makarenko notices the bag under his shirt. He takes a dove out of the bag, and slaps it against the boy’s face, killing it. Babel writes:

I lay on the ground, the innards of the crushed bird trickling down the side of my face. They trickled, winding and dribbling, down my cheek, blinding me. The dove’s tender entrails slithered over my forehead, and I closed my uncaked eye so that I would not see the world unravel before me. The world was small and ugly. A pebble lay in front of my eyes, a pebble dented like the face of an old woman with a large jaw. A piece of string lay near it and a clump of feathers, still breathing. My world was small and ugly. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see it, and pressed myself against the earth that lay soothing and mute beneath me. This tamped earth did not resemble anything in our lives. (ibid, 609)

These passages are great examples of Babel’s straightforward yet dreamlike and visceral prose. His use of repetition is prevalent and unsettling—a sort ofstream of consciousness used to great effect to get readers’ minds in the correct perspective. Many of his stories are only a few pages long, but dense with imagery and message.

In 1916, after Babel finished his schooling, he went to Petrograd to find work. He shopped stories around to no avail until he met Maxim Gorky. Gorky was a dissident writer and socialist, a founder of “Socialist Realism.” To say Gorky was Babel’s mentor is an understatement – Babel credited him for much of his development and success as a writer. Gorky wasn’t especially impressed with Babel’s nascent efforts, but he detected in Babel a voice that could speak clearly through the noise of revolution and war. Gorky instructed him in the hardships of the writer’s vocation, telling him that “the writer’s path…is strewn with nails…you will have to walk on them barefoot, a good deal of blood will flow, and each year it will flow more freely. If you’re weak – they’ll buy and sell you, harass you to death, lull you to sleep, and you’ll fade away while pretending to be a tree in bloom.” (Ehre, pg 21) Two of Babel’s earliest stories appeared in Gorky’s Letopis (“The Chronicle”), and Babel went on to write many dispatches for Gorky’s later publication New Life.

1917 was a year of massive upheaval, echoing sentiments from the 1905 Revolution twelve years prior. The February Revolution, in which Czar Nicholas’ military mutinied to join anti-establishment factions, forced the czar’s abdication and the end of the Russian empire. The subsequent provisional government was overthrown during the Lenin/Trotsky-led October “Bolshevik” Revolution by Soviet workers insistent on a socialist state. Thus began the Russian Civil War that would last until the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922.

In the intervening years, according to Russian scholar Milton Ehre, Babel signed up to fight on the Rumanian front (until he contracted malaria), pushed paper for the Checka (Russia’s first secret police agency), went on a grain requisition expedition in the Volga, and worked a bureaucratic position with the People’s Commissariat of Education. In 1919 he served with the Northern Army against General Yudenich’s White Army, and in 1920 was assigned asa war correspondent with General Budyonny’s First Cavalry under an assumed Russian name, Kiril Vasilievich Lyutov, to hide his Jewish heritage. Budyonny’s outfit was charged with reclaiming land that the Polish had overtaken in the Ukraine and neighboring regions, as well as bringing Communism to the Poles. (Ehre pg 19-20)

Babel’s style of storytelling and reportage reveals his interest in new literary forms. The twenties saw the rise of notable American authors such as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, and in Europe T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka, to name a few of many. With increasing access to and receptivity of Western influences, Russian poets and novelists had more freedom to experiment with form as well as previously untouched subjects, such as prostitution, a common theme in Babel’s work. A break from the realism tradition in Russian literature paved the way for more innovative, poetic prose. James Falen states:

Russian realism had had a place in its aesthetic for truth and goodness, but it had sadly neglected – or so the modernists held – the claims of beauty. A new wave of aestheticism encouraged Russian writers to turn to the West…and make their own contributions to symbolism and other movements…The Russian modernist sought to bring literature closer in form to painting and music. (pg 40)

From 1921-25, Babel produced his most potent and celebrated works: The Odessa Tales and Red Cavalry, in fact they were written practically simultaneously. Falen writes:

…(T)he two sets of stories share certain themes and attitudes and have as a common setting a background of passion and chaos. Though the Odessa stories possess a surface of broad comic intent, they like those of Red Cavalry, have conflict and violence at the heart of their world. While Red Cavalry portrays soldiers engaged in actual combat, in legally sanctioned ward, the Odessa characters are criminals, men at war with the society and their fate. The life of the Jewish underworld depicted in The Odessa Tales shows traditional moral and cultural values as fully under assault, and in much the same way, as they are in Red Cavalry. Furthermore, in both cycles the moral questioning of violence is linked to certain common attitudes toward Jewish identity. (ibid, pg 59)

The Odessa Tales are comprised of eight stories each less than 10 pages long. Set in 1905, they follow Jewish gangster Benya Krik’s ascent to infamy in his Odessa neighborhood. The first story, “The King,” recounts how Benya handles the new police chief’s threat of a raid on Benya’s sister’s wedding day feast. She is a 40 year-old goiter sufferer marrying a young mute who had been “bought” by Benya. A young man comes to tell Benya of the threat:

The chief called the whole station together and gave them a speech: “We must finish off Benya Krik,” he said, “because when you have His Majesty the Czar, you can’t have a King too. Today, when Krik gives away his sister in marriage, and they will all be there, is when we raid!” (Complete Works, pg 134)

It is revealed that Benya already knows of the raid and Babel goes on to describe how Benya became the son-in-law of a man he robbed, named Eichbaum. While Benya and his henchmen were killing Eichbaum’s cows as leverage to extort money from him, he saw and fell in love with Eichbaum’s daughter, Zilya. A few days later, dressed in an orange suit and diamond bracelet, Benya gave back Eichbaum’s money in exchange for Zilya’s hand in marriage and promised that he would be his business partner and proclaimed, “I will kill all the dairymen except you. No thief shall walk the street you live in…your son-in-law will be the King, not some snotface! The King, Eichbaum!.” (ibid, pg 136)

This darkly humorous description is followed by an equally colorful description of the wedding feast and associated antics, yet there is a sense of garish overindulgence with sinister undertones. The same young man as before returns to tell Benya that the police station is on fire. Without giving away the ending entirely, Benya goes to appraise the fire then returns to the wedding feast to find his sister “with both hands…edging her timid husband to the door of their nuptial chamber, looking at him lustfully like a cat which, holding a mouse in its jaws, gently probes it with its teeth.” (ibid, page 136)

“The Father” – the fifth story in the cycle – is a story about Froim Grach and his daughter Basya who has come to live with him after 20 years of living with her mother’s mother (Basya’s mother had died in childbirth). Basya is eager to find a husband. Babel presents us with a description of the gangsters heading to a brothel after the work day is over:

They rode in lacquered carriages and were dressed up in colorful jackets, like hummingbirds. They were goggle-eyed, one leg resting on the running board, their steel hands holding bouquets of flowers wrapped in cigarette paper. The lacquered cab moved at a walking pace, and in each carriage sat one man with a bouquet; the drivers, sticking out on their high seats, were covered in bows like best men at weddings. Old Jewish women in bonnets lazily watched the flow of this everyday procession – they were indifferent to everything, these old Jewish women, it was only the sons of shopkeepers and dockworkers who envied the kings of the Moldavanka. (ibid, page 162)

Babel’s illustrative prose conveys the allure of the life of the gangsters to the young men of the town. These are the shopkeepers’ sons role models – the slick, the fashionable, the deliberate. However, one of the shopkeepers’ sons, Solomonchik Kaplun, catches Basya’s attention because he was “among those who tried to turn their eyes away from the splendor of other men’s success.” (ibid, page 162) She sets her mind on him and begins sewing her trousseau, all the while lamenting that she is not a suitable match since she is Grach’s daughter. She’s right – the Kaplun family rejects her as she is not from a family of grocers like them. Grach then goes on a mission to find a way to marry off Basya, and ends up in negotiations with Benya Krik. Benya makes Grach wait hours while he spends time with a prostitute. In his desperation, Grach knocks on the door and makes Benya come out. Benya, casual as a breeze, agrees to marry Basya, winning her dowry and forcing the Kapluns to pay him for his trouble as a result of their arrogance. This psychological warfare is an interesting counterpoint to the physical violence he instigated in the first story, though just as effective and lucrative for Krik.

The Red Cavalry cycle is less, perhaps, fanciful or ornamental than The Odessa Tales, and the characters operate in a larger theater of war as opposed to gangland circles, though much of the action in Red Cavalry is intimately set in war-torn villages. Babel casts a more damning than amused eye in his treatment the human toll taken on both sides. The protagonist for many of the stories, the journalist Lyutov (the same name and occupation Babel had as part of Budyonny’s regiment in real life), navigates his station in a kind of pitying fog, seemingly an outsider among the Cossacks, but we, the readers, aren’t at first entirely sure if that is because he is, as Babel was, a Jew trying to hide his heritage. There is a sense of uneasy detachment towards the villagers, a devastating presentation of the sad reality of life in a war zone. Repetition of imagery and certain phrases and sentiments surrealize Lyutov’s existence among his “comrades” and the villagers – his so-called “enemies” his regiment frequently has to rely on for food and shelter. The first story, “Crossing the Rivers Zbrucz” opens with Lyutov’s regiment traveling to their next encampment amidst this rollercoaster of discordant imagery:

Fields of purple poppies are blossoming around us, a noon breeze is frolicking in the yellowing rye…Silent Volhynia is turning away, Volhynia is heading into the pearly white fog of the birch groves, creeping through the flowery hillocks, and with weakened arms entangling itself in the underbrush of hope. The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, gentle light glimmers in the ravines of the clouds, the banners of the sunsets are fluttering above our heads. The stench of yesterday’s blood and slaughtered horses drips into the evening chill. (ibid, pg 203)

Upon their arrival in Novograd, Lyutov is assigned quarters in a ransacked dwelling inhabited by a pregnant woman and two “red-haired Jews”. Disgusted by their living conditions, he tells the woman to clean up the house. They make a place for Lyutov to sleep next to another Jew on the floor. He falls into a fitful sleep and dreams of his division commander shooting bullets through the brigade commander’s eyes. The pregnant woman awakens him, saying, “Pan (Polish for “Sir” or “Mr.”), you are shouting in your sleep, and tossing and turning. I’ll put your bed in another corner, because you are kicking my papa.” She proceeds to lift the blanket to reveal her massacred father. She explains how he was killed by Polish forces and continues forcefully, “I want you to tell me where one could find another father like my father in all the world!” This is how the story ends, with an unanswerable exclamation of a question, apropos to the inexplicability of war.

Babel became a master of skaz, a narrative written in “language marked not as the author’s own – especially in the language of a more popular and oral register than that of the author” (Vinokur, page 679). Babel grew up learning Yiddish, Hebrew and French, and even wrote some stories in French, so his ear for language was most likely quite keen. Crucial to skaz is careful observation of spoken language and transcribing it meaningfully to preserve its freer qualities. Gregory Freidin’s chapter on Isaac Babel in European Writers: The Twentieth Century, explains Babel as “a writer who was able to justify they revolution morally and aesthetically, who made this justification the matter of self-sacrifice. Babel was likewise credited with the invention of the new linguistic culture.” (pg 21) Though there are many instances of skaz narrative in Red Cavalry, the story “Zamosc” provides a particularly insightful glimpse into the attitudes of the peasants caught in the war zone. As before, dream-filled sleep comes to Lyutov, a dream of a woman offering breast milk to him, which at first he believes is an act of attempted nourishment, but then the woman puts coins over his eyes as though he is dead. Lyutov wakes to find that he his horse, whose reins were tied to Lyutov’s foot while he was napping, has dragged close to the line of action. A peasant is lying next to him with a rifle. Rockets are exploding over the Polish camp. The peasant, naturally unaware of Lyutov’s heritage, says:

“It’s all the fault of those Yids,” he said. “That’s how we see it, and that’s how the Poles see it. After the war there’ll be hardly any of them left. How many Yids you reckon there’s in the world?”
“Around ten million,” I answered, and began to bridle my horse.
“There’ll be two hundred thousand of them left!” the muzhik yelled, grabbing me by the arm, afraid that I was about to leave.

The dream of refused salvation while being brought to war unaware, then stranger’s words damning Lyutov’s own heritage is pretty rough stuff. Babel’s head-on treatment of Lyutov’s cultural complexity and the nature of war itself in the space of a few pages is succinct yet brimming with beauty of imagery. Not a word is wasted and his meaning is clear yet still somehow full of mystery and symbolism. About Lyutov’s dream, Vinokur writes,

Curiosity is a one-way street which one loses one’s innocence by bearing witness. Beauty and lyricism cannot extract Lyutov from the reality he has chosen to witness out of eager curiosity; they can only pluck his strings. Skaz draws on the power of song, which can often involve a suspension of judgment, almost a seduction…But Babel’s craftsmanlike rigor invests this otherwise physiological, participatory aestheticism with critique and hidden meaning. Where beauty and lyricism take one’s breath away, Babel’s labor of whittling and polishing a story through dozens of drafts brings your breath back. (Vinokur, page 691)

There is much more to Babel’s life and works than what has been covered here. His others works include articles, early stories, reports from Petersburg, Georgia and France, and screenplays. Nathalie Babel published his letters and diaries in a volume titled Isaac Babel: The Lonely Years 1925-1939, which have been helpful in sorting out to what extent his stories are autobiographical. After Stalin came to power in1924, Babel’s works failed to meet Party guidelines, he was charged with “silence” and his production waned. Babel’s wife emigrated to Paris, where she gave birth to Nathalie in 1929. His mother and sister also emigrated – to Brussels – but Babel “clung to Moscow, hotly wed to his truest bride, the Russian tongue” as Cynthia Ozick puts it in her introduction to the Complete Works.

Babel commented on his imposed “silence” dictated by Stalin at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow in 1934, calling himself “a great master of the genre (of literary silence).” (Complete Works, pg 1055). He was also denied traveling privileges, with the exception of one trip to Paris in 1935 arranged by writer André Malraux to attend the Communist-sponsored International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture and Peace. On this trip he was able to see his wife and daughter Nathalie for what would be the last time. As Stalin systematically tries and executes military and political leaders one after another, Babel continues to quietly publish a few stories and scripts here and there, but does not go unnoticed. On May 15, 1939, Babel is arrested and charged with anti-Soviet activities including spying for France and Austria, and is tortured into making a false confession against himself and a few fellow writers. The transcripts reveal his last words in the proceedings: “I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others…I am asking for only one thing-let me finish my work.”

Babel was executed the next day, on January 27, 1940. Rumors of his release from prison were in circulation as late as 1948. He is exonerated in 1954, the government acknowledging that he had not committed any crimes. KGB archives obtained in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union reveal Babel’s death was by firing squad after which his body was deposited in a communal grave. (Complete Works, 28) His untimely death may seem to have been in vain, but his work lives on, taking away and giving back our breath one glorious story at a time. Babel has had the last word.

Bibliography

Books

Babel, Isaac E., Carol J. Avins (ed.) and H.T. Willets (trans.), 1920 Diary. Yale University Press, 1995
Babel, Isaac E., Nathalie Babel (ed.) and Peter Constantine (trans.), The Complete Works of Isaac Babel. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.
Babel, Issac E., Nathalie Babel (ed.) and Andrew MacAndrew and Max Hayward (trans.), Isaac Babel: The Lonely Years 1925-1939. New York: Farrar, Straus & Company, 1964.
Babel, Isaac E. and Nathalie Babel (ed.), You Must Know Everything: Stories 1915-1937. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
Ehre, Milton, Isaac Babel, Boston: Twayne, 1986.
Falen, James E., Isaac Babel, Russian Master of the Short Story. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974

Articles/Chapters

Babel, Nathalie. “’No Time to Finish’: Notes on Isaac Babel.” The Kenyon Review 26:3 (Summer 1964): 514-532, accessed August 27, 2014. http://jstor.org/stable/4334467
Bernstein, Richard. “Isaac Babel May Yet Have the Last Word.” New York Times 11 July 2001: E1. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Accessed 22 July 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/11/books/critic-s-notebook-isaac-babel-may-yet-have-the-last-word.html
Bojanowska, Edyta M. “E Pluribus Unum: Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry As a Story Cycle” The Russian Review 59 (July 2000): 371-89, accessed August 27, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2679461
Freidin, Gregory, “Isaac Babel (1894-1940),” in European Writers: The Twentieth Century, ed. George Stade (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2009), 11:1885-1914
Muldoon, Amy. “Classics of Marxism: Leon Trotsky.” Review of History of the Russian Revolution, by Leon Trotsky. International Socialist Review, Issue #60, July 2008. Accessed August 27, 2014. http://isreview.org/issue/60/history-russian-revolution
Vinokur, Val. “Morality and Orality in Isaac Babel’s “Red Cavalry.” The Massachusetts Review 45:4 (Winter 2004/2005): 674-695, accessed August 27, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25090939
Weinberg, Robert. “The Pogrom of 1905 in Odessa: A Case Study” in Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds. (Cambridge,1992): 248-89

viernes, 14 de enero de 2022

Jo Nesbø

JO NESBØ

(1960)

BIOGRAPHY

Jo Nesbo is one of the world’s bestselling crime writers, with The Leopard, Phantom, Police, The Son and The Thirst, all topping the Sunday Times bestseller charts. He's an international number one bestseller and his books are published in 50 languages, selling over 50 million copies around the world.

Before becoming a crime writer, Nesbo played football for Norway’s premier league team Molde, but his dream of playing professionally for Spurs was dashed when he tore ligaments in his knee at the age of eighteen. After three years military service he attended business school and formed the band Di derre ('Them There'). They topped the charts in Norway, but Nesbo continued working as a financial analyst, crunching numbers during the day and gigging at night. When commissioned by a publisher to write a memoir about life on the road with his band, he instead came up with the plot for his first Harry Hole crime novel, The Bat.

JO NESBØ

Jo Nesbø

Norwegian writer and musician

by Kathleen Kuiper

Jo Nesbø, (born March 29, 1960, Oslo, Norway), Norwegian writer and musician, best known internationally for a series of crime novels featuring hard-boiled detective Harry Hole (pronounced Hoo-la in Norwegian).

Nesbø grew up in Molde, western Norway. While in school, he also played guitar and sang in a pop-rock band. He graduated from the Norwegian School of Economics (Norges Handelshøyskole) in Bergen with a degree in economics. After graduating, he took a job as a stockbroker while maintaining a vision of himself as a singer-songwriter. In 1992 he helped start a band named Di Derre, which recorded several albums. Working at a stressful day job and performing with his increasingly popular band at night eventually took its toll on Nesbø. When someone made a casual suggestion that he write a book about traveling with the band, he took it as a challenge, asked for six months off, went to Australia, and returned with what would become his first Harry Hole novel.

That book, titled Flaggermusmannen (1997; “Bat Man”; Eng. trans. The Bat), follows Hole, a recovering alcoholic, to Australia for a murder investigation. Nesbø’s second Hole novel, Kakerlakkene (1998; “Cockroaches”; The Cockroaches), takes the detective through the seamy underworld of Bangkok. Rødstrupe (2000; “Robin”; The Redbreast) details the role of fascism in Norway. In Sorgenfri (2002; “Sorrow-Free”; Nemesis) Hole investigates a bank robbery and is implicated in the death of a former girlfriend. A serial killer is at work in Marekors (2003; “Pentagram”; The Devil’s Star), this time in Oslo. Hole tracks a contract killer in Frelseren (2005; “Saviour”; The Redeemer) and another serial killer in Snømannen (2007; The Snowman). Panserhjerte (2009; “Armoured Heart”; The Leopard) has Hole tracked down in Hong Kong and persuaded to reengage in police work. Gjenferd (2011; “Ghost”; Phantom) treats the drug scene in Oslo and examines Hole’s experience of fatherhood, and Politi (2013; Police) continues the story begun in Phantom. In Tørst (2017; The Thirst) Hole hunts for a killer who finds his victims on Tinder, a dating app. The 12th Hole book, Kniv (Knife), was published in 2019.

Nesbø’s Hole series proved to be extremely popular and was translated into many languages. Its popularity was in part because of tight plotting and in part because of Nesbø’s method of presenting his main character. Throughout the series, Hole battles his demons, sometimes successfully but more often not. Each successive volume deepens the reader’s experience with Hole and his life on the edge. Furthermore, the later books refer to incidents in the earlier books, another effect that adds dimension to Hole’s deeply flawed but essentially sympathetic personality.

Nesbø’s long essay “Stemmer fra Balkan” (“Figures in the Balkans”) was published in 1999 with another long essay by Espen Søbye, about the authors’ trip to Serbia and Norway’s role in the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999. Nesbø also produced several stand-alone books, including the novella Det hvite hotellet (2007; “The White Hotel”) and the novels Hodejegerne (2009; Headhunters; film 2011), Sønnen (2014; The Son), and Kongeriket (2020; The Kingdom). Blod på snø (2015; Blood on Snow) and Mere blod (2015; Midnight Sun) are linked crime thrillers set in 1970s Norway. Macbeth (2018), a retelling of Shakespeare’s classic play, was written for the Hogarth Shakespeare series. In addition, Nesbø published a book of short stories, Karusellmusikk (2001; “Carousel Music”), and a number of children’s books, including a series of books featuring Doktor Proktor and his Fart Powder.

BRITTANICA

Jo Nesbø

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A LITTLE ABOUT BOOKS AND EVEN LESS ABOUT HARRY

I COME FROM A FAMILY OF READERS AND STORYTELLERS. My mother was a librarian and my father used to sit in the living room reading every afternoon. And he told stories. Long stories we had heard before, but in such a way that we wanted to hear them again. When I was seven I psulled Lord of the Flies off the bookshelf and asked my father to read it to me. Not so much because I had good taste, but because on the cover there was a picture of a pig’s bloodstained head impaled on a pole. My father read it and I thought I could have made the story more exciting myself. I had already begun to impress friends my age, and some older children, with my gruesome ghost stories.

But my greatest passion was soccer. I made my first appearance for Molde, a Premier League team in Norway, at the age of seventeen and I was sure I would go on to play professionally in England for the Tottenham Hotspurs. So I started skipping school and I think that, if you asked the teachers at my high school, my very existence came to be shrouded in mystery. My grades tanked, but so what? I was going to be a pro athlete…

Then I blew out the cruciate ligaments in my knees. Probably no loss for Tottenham, but my world came crashing down. School was over and when I got my grades I realized they just weren’t good enough to do the things I had wanted to do. A number of career paths were no longer open to me. So I took a deep breath and signed up to do military service in the far north of Norway. For the three years I was there, I shut myself in every night and every weekend and bulldozed my way through the high school syllabus. And read quite a bit of Hamsun and Hemingway, too. Until then I had always trusted my talent and taken it for granted, and followed the path of least resistance, but now I discovered a new side of myself: self-discipline. When I finally held my high school diploma in my hands that spring, with top-notch grades, I experienced a deep, heartfelt satisfaction I had never felt before, and perhaps not since either. Now I could get into pretty much any school or any program I wanted. The problem was that I didn’t know what I wanted to study. So I enrolled at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration in Bergen, a school with a long, illustrious tradition and a prestigious name. I figured it had to be good.

One day in the cafeteria this guy came up to me and said someone told him I played guitar. That wasn’t exactly true: I knew three chords. But I didn’t contradict him since he was trying to get a band together. And so I became the guitarist for De Tusen Hjem which played the kind of industrial noise rock you get when you’re really bad at playing, have plenty of electricity, big amps and practice in a basement. We sounded so awful our vocalists quit one after another. Eventually somebody pushed me up to the microphone. And since I thought the lyrics for the cover songs we were playing stank and that we might as well be playing actual melodies instead of just angry strings of chords, I started writing songs. De Tusen Hjem never achieved world domination, but we did release a single, which was played frequently on local radio, at least once on national radio, and sold 25 copies.

When I finished university, I had an economics degree and the glimmering of a notion that I might like to write pop songs. I moved to Oslo and started working in finance, got bored and wrote songs. One night a young jazz bass player I knew listened to some of my songs. The next day we started a band, Di Derre. A year later we were touring. Two years later we had a recording contract. Our second album became the best selling album in Norway in years. Our concerts sold out in hours. And suddenly we were pop stars.

However, I had seen what happened to other musicians who turned their hobby into a job, and I knew it would demand too many compromises as far as my music, and my life, were concerned. So I hung onto my day job as a stockbroker while we continued playing gigs. I also studied to become a financial analyst. When I got headhunted by DnB Markets, the largest brokerage firm in Norway, to build up their options division, I had to commit to two years with them. In other words, I had more than enough to do. I performed at night and worked during the day. After one year I was so burned out that I hated everything and everyone I worked with, including myself. I told my band and my boss that I needed six months off. Then I hopped on a plane to Australia, to get as far away from Norway as I could. But I took my laptop with me.

The reason I brought my laptop was that a woman from a publishing company had proposed I write a book describing life on the road with the band. That engendered a whole new way of thinking and I realized I was ready to take the leap and write a novel. It was just a question of getting started. But it had to be a story about what Aksel Sandemose claimed were the only two things worth writing about: murder and love.

It takes about thirty hours to fly from Oslo to Sydney. And in those thirty hours I came up with the plot for a story I started writing as soon as I got to the hotel. It was the middle of the night, I had jetlag and I wrote about a guy named Harry who landed at the same Sydney airport, was staying in the same hotel and had jetlag…

When I returned from Australia I had almost finished the book. As soon as I set my suitcase down in my living room, I picked up writing again. I just wrote and wrote and was irritated by disturbances like hunger and the need for sleep. These were the best weeks of my life.

I sent the manuscript to a publisher, but under a pseudonym to make sure they wouldn’t be tempted to publish a crap book by a pop-star-turned-writer. The manuscript was delivered and my leave of absence was over. My first morning back at work I switched on my computer and realized I had almost everything: an apartment, no debt, an overpaid job and a great band. The only thing I didn’t have was time. My father had died two years before: the very same year he had retired and was going to start writing the book he had been planning about his experiences during the Second World War. But his time ran out. And I wasn’t going to let the same thing happen to me. So, before my computer screen was up and running, I was standing in my boss’s office explaining that I didn’t have time to work for him any more.

I spent the next three weeks wondering what to do. Until one morning I received a phone call asking if I were Kim Erik Lokker. And then the brief message that my manuscript was going to be published.

At the publishing house they asked me why I had used a pseudonym and I explained that my
name was already well known in Norway. But when I told them my name they didn’t seem to recognize it. So I cleared my throat and explained that I was the vocalist for a well-known band. Still no response. I said the name of the band. Two of them nodded and one started humming a song. By another band.

The Bat was published in the fall of 1997 under my own name, and with a mix of elation and terror I waited for the reviews to deal with that pop music guy who dared to write crime fiction! But the reviews were on topic, serious and focused on the book, not on me as a person. And, best of all, they were positive.

I went to Bangkok in the winter of 1998 with the synopsis of what would become The Cockroaches. When I got there I realized things weren’t going to work out: I was planning to stay for two months and I was already feeling claustrophobic. And yet, two weeks later I was in love with the city. I didn’t notice the noise, liked sweating, and felt that air should have a smell, a taste and a color. And once again I was following in Harry’s footsteps—or he in mine—through Chinatown, on boats on the Chao Phraya River and in go-go bars in Patpong.

I discovered that I had learned a lot from the first book. I was better at the craft of writing and had picked up a few pointers on composition. At the same time, I was under more pressure now because I knew that writing was what I wanted to do, and after The Cockroaches there was no guarantee I would get another book published. From my time in the music industry I knew that the public’s memory was short, and that if The Cockroaches flopped I would be back to square one.

When I returned from Bangkok my publisher called and told me that The Bat had been awarded the 1997 Riverton Prize for Best Norwegian Crime Novel. I was pleased, of course, but also a little skeptical. It had been too easy! So I counted up the Norwegian crime novels that had been published that year, subtracted the authors who had already received the prize since I had heard people usually only won once, disregarded the books the reviewers hadn’t liked, and realized that I must have won the prize through a process of elimination.

A month later I found out that The Bat had also been awarded the 1997 Glass Key for Best Nordic Crime Novel. Then I figured maybe I shouldn’t think about these things so much and just enjoy the moment. I was unlikely to experience anything like this again.

When I saw the headline in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, I knew enjoying the moment had been the right thing to do. I was witnessing my first devastating review. So when I learned that The Cockroaches had been accepted as the main book in the National Book Club’s New Books section—the golden ticket into a commercial and literary elite in Norway—I knew that it was actually thanks to its predecessor, The Bat.

So I sat down and started writing The Redbreast. It was the story my father had wanted to tell, about Norwegians on both sides of Nazism during the Second World War. About the mythical self-image of the Norwegian people and a nation actively resisting Hitler. About why people make the choices they do and the victor’s privilege of writing history.
If writing the first two books was like playing a solo on an acoustic guitar, this was like directing an orchestra. When it was finished I knew that if the critics slaughtered the book or if it failed commercially, I would have to give up writing and find something new. Because The Redbreast was simply the best I had to offer.

When the book came out, it was more with a sense of relief than pleasure that I gradually realized I had done quite well. The publishers were enthusiastic, the reviewers were enthusiastic and the public was enthusiastic. The book won the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize in 2000 for best novel of the year.

In Nemesis, which came out in 2002, I set the plot almost entirely to Oslo, more precisely on the very street where I lived. As a private citizen, Harry gets drawn into the story via a former girlfriend from many years ago, who is found dead. And the tension between Harry and his adversary, his colleague Tom Waaler, continues. In terms of content, Nemesis is an obvious follow-up to The Redbreast and—the way I see it—has more in common with the first two Harry Hole books in terms of its structure and narrative. The book was well received and was awarded the William Nygaard Prize.

The Devil’s Star picks up where Nemesis left off, set in Oslo during a July heat wave, and once again with Tom Waaler as a central character. But he remains a riddle. The overarching Waaler storyline—a person who in many respects is very similar to Harry and reflects his psyche and moral dilemmas—runs through The Redbreast, Nemesis and The Devil’s Star, and so it would be natural to view them as an Oslo Trilogy. The Devil’s Star came out in fall 2004, became my greatest commercial success thus far, and paved the way for my books to be published abroad. Until that point I had been translated into six languages and was known as “an exciting, exotic Scandinavian crime writer.” But in spite of all that, I sold relatively few books outside Norway.

I finished The Redeemer in the summer of 2005, after having spent more than two years writing it. The inspiration for the plot came partly from the Salvation Army, partly from the siege of Vukovar on the border between Croatia and Serbia in 1992, and partly from the seedy side of Oslo around the now closed junkie hangout, Plata. I know a little about the Salvation Army after having worked with them on a charity recording and concert. The background story of the young Croatian hitman comes, at least in part, from a dramatic story a Croatian captain told me when I was writing Stemmer fra Balkan [Balkan Voices, non-fiction] in 1999. And you used to be able to stroll over to a war zone closer to home any night of the week—nighttime Oslo at the Plata—and study it close up. You still can, although Plata itself no longer exists.

I was wildly excited when I finished The Redeemer and was surprised to find more resistance from the publisher than I had encountered with any of my earlier books. I had already cut almost a hundred pages from the novel and I cut even more. The new version felt so pared to the bone that I was afraid I had killed it. At one point I asked my editor what he thought about dropping the book altogether and starting on a new one. Perhaps I had been affected by the fact that we could feel mounting expectations from all sides after the success of The Devil’s Star. In addition, The Redbreast had been voted Norway’s Greatest Crime Novel of All-Time by NRK [Norwegian Public Broadcasting] and the Book Clubs. Suddenly there was a long way to fall.

So it was with a certain dread-tinged excitement that we launched The Redeemer in the fall of 2005. The critics descended on the book, and the first review appeared the day after the book was released. It was a Saturday and my editor called to warn me that the review in Dagsavisen was quite dismissive. And one bad review usually presages more. I had the weekend to steel myself for the rest. On Monday morning I looked myself in the mirror, knowing I was facing five days of interviews and that I would be looking five years older by Friday. However, when the dust settled, the conclusion was clear: the bad review given by Dagsavisen was the only one; the others were, in a word, overwhelming. And the public was not slow to react. The head of my publishing house called to tell me that The Redeemer was the fastest-selling fiction book in the history of the company. Five days had passed and it was already, for lack of a more precise or profound expression, a fantastic success. And I can remember promising myself I would enjoy the moment without feeling guilty or suffering the paranoia I imagine extremely beautiful women must feel: the feeling that people like you for reasons you actually despise. Quite the contrary, I ordered a T-shirt that said BESTSELLER on it. On the other hand I’ve never found the right occasion to wear it. Well, I suppose I can always beat myself up for being too chicken.

I spent 2006 writing a few songs for Di Derre’s Farewell and Best Of album, and then doing the launch and the subsequent farewell tour. The tour was a heartwarming encounter with a large, loyal audience. But I also discovered something else: in the popular consciousness I was no longer a musician who wrote books, but a writer who played in a band. When I started writing the next Harry Hole novel, The Snowman, I noticed that things were starting to happen abroad. My agent started calling more and more often, and more and more contracts were arriving in the mail from countries further and further away from Norway. My Harry Hole novels have been translated into more than forty languages, but I still get a huge kick out of it when a book arrives in the mail and the only word I recognize is my own name on the cover.

The Snowman was released in June 2007. Not only was it unheard of to release a book in the middle of summer—after all, it was generally agreed in the Norwegian publishing world that books with a certain sales potential should be released in the fall—but was it really going to be called The Snowman? Yes, of course.

Again reviews were positive and The Snowman was to become the fastest-selling novel in Norwegian history. And for the first time in many years I took a sort of summer vacation. It didn’t last very long. For many years I had been toying with an idea for a children’s book. It had started with my daughter who, as usual, had asked me to make up a story while we were eating dinner. So I made up Nilly—a tiny, red-headed ten-year-old boy with an Elvis quaff and the banter of a used car salesman; his neighbor and best friend Lisa; two fat, nasty twins with a Hummer-driving father; and a fairly eccentric professor who had accidentally invented the world’s most powerful fart powder.

Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder came out in October 2007, and I was apprehensive about the reviews. After all, this was a book they were allowed to slaughter. My worries proved to be groundless. The book was greeted with unanimous enthusiasm. Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder was nominated for Ark’s Children’s Book Award 2007 and sales took off, probably significantly aided by a popular talk show that interviewed me. They flew in the Methane Man, a tall, thin man dressed in superhero spandex. He used extremely audible farts to blow out candles on a birthday cake and “sing” hymns. A quarter of the entire population of Norway, myself included, laughed until we were screaming.

In November 2007 I published a novella titled The White Hotel. All the revenue from the sales went to Save the Children. And I think I can hear you yawning now as you wait for me to tell you how overwhelmingly positive the reviews were. But it was only reviewed in one place. The reviewer liked the project, but hated my contribution. I read the review twice and I’m sad to say he made some good points.

All the same, 2007 was a fantastic year for me. I was awarded the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize for the second time, this time for The Snowman. Furthermore, the Harry Hole books had started appearing on bestseller lists abroad. So what do you do when everything is going so well? Yes, that’s right, you start writing something completely different, forcing yourself to take risks, and thereby discover a new world. This way the fear of failure will increase the pleasure in any success you might achieve. This time the project was a story about a headhunter at a recruitment firm. He uses the FBI’s nine-step interview model on job candidates and is married to a woman who is much too beautiful and whom he must rely on art theft to finance. One day a Dutch man turns up for a job interview. It turns out he has a missing Rubens masterpiece hanging on the wall at home… The title was Headhunters. It topped the sales charts from the moment it came out in the summer, and again the critics were very kind. Apart from one, from my hometown paper in Molde, who just didn’t like the book. I read the review carefully. And even though Headhunters received The Norwegian Readers’ Prize for 2008, I thought—and still think—that the critic in Molde had good arguments.

I also made a decision that was very important for me. But not until Greedy Jo had had a serious discussion with Decent Jo. The decision was that all the income from Headhunters, domestic and international, would go towards a plan I had been mulling over for a while: basic reading and writing classes for children in the third world. My motivation was principally twofold. I have been privileged enough to be able to travel all over the world, and what this traveling has taught me is that the ability to read is a basic prerequisite for citizens to find their bearings in society so that genuine democracy can exist and so that those same citizens can create a better life for themselves and their families. Besides, I had also realized that I did not have—and would never have—a lifestyle that matched what was gradually becoming a rather large amount of money in my bank account. And there were surely plenty of other very human motives there, too: feelings of guilt that things had gone absurdly well, the need to be liked, to buy myself karma, an indulgence, redemption, etc. But I do not imagine that self-analysis by an overpaid Norwegian writer is very important to an Indian girl who receives ten years of schooling and can return home to her village afterwards, perhaps as a teacher, and be a role model for other girls and mothers.

So we set up a foundation, the Harry Hole Foundation, which would award an annual prize called A Decent Guy or A Decent Lady, and a stipend that the prizewinner, with the help of a committee, would invest in literacy projects. And the following year, in 2009, we did just that. The Decent Guy prize went to a prison chaplain, Odd-Cato Kristiansen, and the stipend went to the Naandi Foundation that helps provide schooling for deprived girls in India.

In 2008 I published my second children’s book, Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder: Bubble in the Bathtub, a flatulent romp through French history, which was short-listed for Ark’s Children’s Book Award, but didn’t win, eliciting the following question from a journalist: “How does it feel to lose for once?” For someone who has definitely not succeeded at everything in life, it feels strange to realize that in some circles I have been branded a kind of golden boy who can do no wrong. But of course there are heavier crosses to bear, and I promise to do everything in my power to make sure that this illusion lasts for as long as possible before the bubble bursts.

That would certainly have happened in 2009 if I had published the Harry Hole novel that I had just finished writing. To put it plainly, it was bad. And I knew it. I had sent the manuscript to my editors after spending two months writing a first draft that in a way was brave and different, but that didn’t work. It felt like applying make-up to a corpse. So when we met in the summer of 2008 and, as usual, my editors made comments that on the surface might have seemed like minor details, this confirmed for me that they had read the novel the same way I had. I told them I was going to drop the publication. There was a long silence and a couple of gaping mouths around the table, and they argued that these things could be fixed. But, deep down, I knew that the problem was the basic foundation, the scenario, the premise of the whole story. It couldn’t be helped that it was almost two years of work. And as I left the meeting, I felt relieved and confident that I had done the right thing.

Then I sat down and wrote The Leopard. It was my longest and most labor-intensive book so far. I did research in the Congo and Hong Kong, studied torture weapons and interviewed avalanche experts, scuba divers and rock climbers. And it was also my most brutal book. I had already started Harry’s physical deconstruction in The Snowman, and this continued in The Leopard. Because Harry is like all of us; we fall apart. The only question is how fast. This book was also well received in Norway, but it might have been the first time I noticed that there was so much interest in the books that the reviews probably wouldn’t have that much impact on the sales. In the end, the book broke the previous sales records in Norway and also sold more than ever in most of the other markets.

I received something in Sweden’s Svenska Dagbladet that I don’t think I ever had before: an unqualified trouncing by a reviewer who felt that the book sensationalized violence. The review seemed so emotionally charged that I could only conclude that The Leopard not only wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but a tea that really stuck in some readers’ craws, a book whose brutality and scenes of violence could truly alienate readers. I received many questions about the use of the torture device Leopold’s Apple in particular. For example, whether it really exists. And another question started coming up: How do you come up with these things? Meaning: What kind of sick, perverted mind could come up with such ideas? I tried to look within myself, to ask if the violence in the book was really appropriately calibrated for the purpose: to say something about the character behind it. Or if I had let myself be lured into sensationalism, effects for the sake of effects and a callous fascination with suffering. There was a time when I flung American Psycho at the wall because it made me physically ill, made me feel polluted just from reading it in all its splendor. Had I now created just such a book, one that had become a sort of guilty pleasure for closet sadists? If there was any comfort, it was that The Leopard was selected as the year’s best crime novel by the Danish Academy of Crime Writers, topped the bestseller lists in Norway, Finland and Denmark, and for the first time Harry Hole made it onto Der Spiegel’s bestseller list in Germany, where it reached as high as No. 3.

At the same time another piece of news came sailing in. I was on my annual writing trip in Asia when I heard that Nemesis had been nominated for the Edgar Award as best novel in the U.S. The award is viewed as a sort of the Oscar for books, also in the sense that pretty much only American books ever win it. I was surprised since I do not personally consider Nemesis to be my best book. I figured it was a sort of compensatory nomination since my standard prize-winning novel, The Redbreast, had flown under the radar when it was released in the U.S. and hadn’t been discovered until a core group of mystery enthusiasts picked it up later and started discussing the book on the Internet. I was quite sure Nemesis wouldn’t beat out the other five highly qualified nominees, but went to New York with my agent Niclas with two shared goals: to finally have the time and energy to get drunk together and to congratulate the winner in a way that sounded genuine. However, my friend Henrik Mestad, who’s been nominated for a number of acting awards, told me that no matter how sure you are that you won’t win before you go, something strange happens in the seconds before the winner is announced: you become COMPLETELY convinced it will be you. I blew that off, of course, and then of course that is just what happened. In the seconds before John Hart’s name was announced as the very deserving winner, I thought, “Who am I going to thank?” And, “What is the quickest route to the stage?” On the other hand, that gave Niclas and I something to laugh about when we started working on the evening’s remaining goal.

In the fall of 2010, Doctor Proctor and the End of the World. Maybe, was released, the third in the series. It was clear that both the series and the author now had an established fan base, because the book went right up to No. 1 on the general Norwegian bestseller list, which is unprecedented for a children’s book. The exhibit at the Natural History Museum in Oslo that accompanied the release was also unusual. “Doctor Proctor’s Sensational Exhibition of Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist” was created by Pjotr Sapegin, Kristine Grüner and their employees at an animation studio, and was based on the animals in the Doctor Proctor books: the Mongolian water vole, flesh-eating flying fish, rhinoceroses with colds, toadstools that eat children and other unsavory creatures. The book won the 2010 Norwegian Critics Prize and before the ceremony I got a message from my daughter to say that I should accept the prize on her behalf, since after all she was the one who had asked me to come up with a story about a crazy professor, a tiny, hilarious boy and a very heroic girl who was a little like her.

The Leopard was released in the U.K. in 2011 and expectations were high, since The Snowman had made it to No. 2 on the paperback list. Both my publisher and my agent were through the roof with joy (let alone myself as the author, although I didn’t have much of a roof where I was at that time) when word came that The Leopard has reached No. 1. When I went on a U.K. tour in March 2011 I realized that something had happened. I had readers! And they were lining up outside the store and around the corner to have their books signed in the same stores where I had sat drumming my fingers a few years earlier.

As I write this, I’m about to tour the U.S. for the launch of The Snowman there. In spite of the Edgar nomination and reviews, the series has not reached a big audience over there, so it’ll hardly be like in the U.K. Or in Poland where I recently accepted a prize and two teenage girls, who had run away from home somewhere further north in Poland, were standing in front of the place where the ceremony was held hoping to meet and maybe get a picture with their hero. Of course, I’m afraid the hero they wanted to see was Harry Hole and that they were a little disappointed that the author was over fifty years old, shorter than 1.94 meters, and didn’t have a scar extending from the corner of his mouth to his ear. But as we took the picture of the three of us together and I heard the younger of the two let out a timid, contented sob, I felt a little like a pop star again. So now it’s about time to head to the U.S. and come back down to earth, ground myself in reality and start from the beginning again. I’m looking forward to it.

Summer 2013. I read through my biography, see what expectations I had before to going to the USA in 2011. They were far exceeded. By its very nature, an author’s biography focuses on the professional aspect of the author’s life, and I realize that the development in this part of my life has actually been rather unexciting until now.

Phantom was published in summer 2011 and history repeated itself in terms of reviews and new sales records. That autumn, I was standing backstage in Toronto, Canada, waiting to go on. I was trying to impress some festival volunteers in the meantime by balancing a broom on my chin, when my phone rang. The news was delivered in high-frequency Swedish: The Snowman had made it onto the New York Times bestseller list! I had to hang up as I was being introduced on stage, so on I went and talked about Harry Hole, Scandinavian crime fiction, and myself. I concentrated on this so much that I forgot about the news. Until the very end of the interview. Then I told the audience that I had just found out that the book I’d been talking about for three quarters of an hour was in the NY Times bestseller list. Perhaps I told them because I was on my own, so far from home and there was no one else to share it with. Or perhaps it was because it would feel strange to keep it secret and not say anything. Or did I crave the applause that I naturally got? Was that why I felt slightly ashamed as soon as I’d said it?

A year later, during the ITV Crime and Thriller Awards in London, I would hear one of the prizewinners use the expression an “embarrassment of riches”. When I asked about it, I was told that it came from Shakespeare. We don’t have an expression like that in Norwegian, possibly because the embarrassment of excess has historically not been a problem in a country where poverty was relatively evenly distributed.

But obviously, nothing is more irritating than a guy who is successful and then apologizes for it. So I’m not going to make big point out of the fact that I was only number nine on the NYT list, which means there were at least eight authors who were selling more books, and that I then slipped off the list again, and that when I was on tour in the USA I was never recognized, not even when I came to the bookshops for my own events, or that it was the same eighteen pensioners as last time who woke up when I came through the door of the same library in San Francisco. Instead, I will tell you that when I was interviewed by King James Ellroy of Los Angeles, he used such long, intricate and for me unknown English words to describe the The Snowman that I – no matter what they meant – felt honored.

In 2012, Doctor Proctor and the Great Gold Robbery was published, a book that I in an unguarded moment had promised a school class I would write. But not only because I didn’t know that children forget promises, I also quite wanted to write the book. The greater part of it was written in February 2012, on planes, in airports and hotel rooms in Australia and New Zealand where I was on tour, and my friend Erik had come with me for the rock climbing. Travelling has somehow become different. Maybe it’s because I’ve passed the fifty mark, but when I left Wanaka, an incredibly beautiful place on New Zealand’s South Island, I realized that I would probably never go back there again. It’s not true that the world is small, but it is true that life is short.

At this point, I had already written the follow-up to Phantom. I originally thought it would be a sequel, a Phantom II, to be published three months after Phantom without any marketing. I had created a cliffhanger in Phantom and then stopped. The idea was to use the extreme possibilities that the series format has to offer: the readers’ expectations of a continuation, that they accept the premise of an impossible cliffhanger, in much the same way as a locked room mystery. But the follow-up grew into its own beast, with its own theme. I realized it was an independent book and decided to postpone publication until summer 2013, so there would be some distance between it and Phantom. The publishers and I gave it the tentative the title Police.

In autumn 2012, I had a new tour in the USA. The plan was to travel from there directly to Thailand, where I would meet my daughter who was coming from Oslo. A few fantastic months. But the trip was now accompanied by a somber background music that could not be turned off. My little brother, Knut, who played with me in Di derre, was seriously ill. For a long time, I had hoped that everything would be okay, but when I was climbing in Greece in September, Knut had phoned to say that the doctors weren’t as optimistic as they had been earlier in the summer.

“They say I won’t be playing in the band next autumn …”

I was standing on my own between a scooter and two goats on a rocky mountainside in the sun in Kalymnos, and I didn’t know what to say, all I could see was the empty space to my left on the stage where he was bloody well supposed to stand, and I heard my brother laugh and say: “Jo, don’t you go falling apart now.”

He wouldn’t let me stay at home in Norway, but he promised he would tell me in good time if things got critical. I hesitated, as I know we have elephant tendencies in our family: we like to sneak off somewhere to die alone.

“I won’t keep you in the dark,” he said. “I want you to be there when it happens.”

So I went.

In Minneapolis, I went to a climbing center and pulled a muscle in my back. I woke up the next day, managed to get myself out of bed, bent-double, and was told that Hurricane Sandy had hit New York, so I had to stay in Minneapolis. And not that there’s anything wrong with Minneapolis, but I just couldn’t think of anything else to do apart from go back to the climbing center. I had to be carried out. Quite literally. My back was agony, and would only get worse over the next two months. For the rest of my time in the USA, I used a house that Salomonsson Agency had rented in Los Angeles as a base. Lived and played Hollywood for a while, together with my agent Niclas, Malin and Petter, pitched film ideas to film producers, studios and each other, and ended up selling The Son, a half-finished book, at an auction that closed deep into the night when Warner Brothers put in the winning bid, while we sat in one of those unreal clubs with a view over that unreal town and clinked our glasses, and I thought that this is just as funny and fantastic as it is in films about the film industry, then ordered another drink to dull the pain in my back.

When Molde Fotballklubb, the football club that we’d grown up with and played for, played a decisive game and won the championship, I talked to Knut while I watched the game on the Internet. He was so happy it made me cry.

Hawaii, Tokyo, Bangkok. I spent Christmas on my own in a room, on painkillers.

Then finally I was at my climbing and writing place in south Thailand, together with my daughter in the same old bungalow. But the melancholy music was still playing in the background.

Niclas and his partner My, a documentary film producer, joined me in Thailand. I wrote, worked out, got my back sorted, climbed, filmed, and then we were told that I Am Victor, a TV series based on a synopsis I’d written for a possible book, had been selected for a pilot by NBC. Sun and music in a minor key.

Indonesia. Borneo. I climbed my first 7c grade route. Music in minor.

South Korea had to be cancelled. Knut had got worse. As I suspected, he was underplaying it, so I had asked Kari Anne, his partner, to tell me the truth. I went home. And was holding his hand when he died a week later.

Police was published in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands in June 2013. It took everything to another level. I don’t think we’ll really understand which level until some time has passed. We hired Rockefeller for the launch party, the biggest club in Oslo, where our band had played so many gigs. Some of my favorite artists played, and for the last song – a Di derre hit – I got up on stage and sang. Looked out at the floor, at the galleries, at the sea of people in front of me. There’s a guitar solo in the middle of the song. I looked to my left. To where he should have been standing.

Police is dedicated to Knut Nesbo. Soccer player. Guitarist. Friend. Brother.

Translated by Tara Chace and Kari Dickson

JO NESBØ

CHARACTER PROFILE

ABOUT HARRY HOLE

Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole novels are complex, ambitious constructions where suspenseful and fast-paced crime plots reflect our globalized modern world. Although Oslo is the background for Nesbo’s stories, the nature of contemporary crime pitches Harry against challenges in such remote corners of the world as Australia and Thailand, which lend the novels a truly international feel. However the key to Jo Nesbo’s international success, at least in part, lies in his highly original, yet utterly believable protagonist, Detective Harry Hole. A cult figure already after the first book, Hole is a genuine anti-hero; an impossible character yet impossible not to like. According to his superiors, Harry is both the most competent detective of the Oslo Police and the worst civil servant. A periodic binge drinker seriously opposed to any type of authority, Hole roams the streets of Oslo like a lone ranger, doling out justice his way. At times suspended and generally considered a nuisance by his employers, Harry is nevertheless in some sense revered by his colleagues, for he is a good cop whose high moral standards and pronounced sense of justice often lead him in the right direction. In his personal life, however, his famous ‘inner compass’ seems to have broken down completely. Harry is tormented by the complicated relationship with Rakel, the single mother whom he fell in love with in The Redbreast and who has since walked into and out of his life at regular intervals due to Harry’s workaholic and alcoholic tendencies. He cannot let go of the woman who has proved to be the love of his life. And the feelings are mutual. Although Rakel has other relationships, she always returns to Harry; the two of them cannot seem to live without each other, nor with each other, though that is perhaps what they both desire. Harry has also developed a close relationship with Rakel’s son Oleg, for whom he has become a tough father figure. Like Harry’s little sister Sis, Oleg brings light to Harry’s existence, and life, at times in the series, really does seems to come together for Inspector Hole. But all too often, Jim Beam barges in and turns everything upside down.

In the eleven stories to date, the reader is taken along on a fantastic journey through the ever-expanding literary universe of this fascinating character. Like all truly important crime writers, Jo Nesbo combines refined, complex plotting, high voltage suspense and brilliant characterization with profound ethical discussions, often using updated biblical narratives to mirror contemporary society. Thus the crime novels of Jo Nesbo become challenging investigations into questions of betrayal, faith and revenge, while providing first-rate entertainment for the crime fiction lover.

Harry Hole’s Curriculum Vitae

Personal Details

Harry Hole is in his late thirties. Born in Oppsal, Oslo, he is unmarried, with one great passion and several smaller ones behind him. No children, but on occasion a kind of father to Oleg, Rakel”s son. Lives in Sofies gate in Bislet, Oslo.

Appearance

Tall, athletic, lean. Blonde hair, machine-cropped. Stands up one centimetre from large, bumpy skull. Skin white, nose large, with a network of thin veins. Pupils are blue with that faded look long-term alcoholics get. Harry”s mouth is his best feature and what women tend to fall for.

Career

Graduated from Police College and Law School, grades marginally above average. Special investigator for Crime Squad in Oslo. One-year course with FBI in Chicago, specialising in serial killers. Short stint with Politiets Overvakningstjeneste – POT/ Norwegian Secret Service – before returning to the Crime Squad.

References

Bjarne Moller, Head of Crime Squad and Harry Hole”s superior officer, describes Harry as the best investigator in the department and the worst public servant. By which he means Harry’s anti-authority, anti-sobriety, anti-rules-of-the-game attitude which makes him a danger to himself and those around him. Does his utmost to protect himself and his department. And Harry. Moller is Harry’s guardian angel, all that stands between him and dismissal.

Stig Aune, psychologist and police advisor. Has treated Harry for alcoholism and become a personal friend. The only one, except for Oystein.

Oystein Eikeland, taxi-driver and Harry’s sole childhood friend from Oppsal. Thinks Harry ought to have a more liberal attitude to amphetamines.

Rakel, the woman he loves. Single mother. She and Harry try to live with and without each other; neither works.

Sis, his younger sister. The person Harry loves most after Rakel. Down’s syndrome. Feels like a big sister.

Jim Beam, contains 4O% alcohol, a loyal friend since Harry’s early twenties.

Interests

Music: likes everything from Sex Pistols to Duke Ellington. From Neil Young to Slipknot.

Film: His all-time favorite is The Conversation by Coppola. One of very few who consider Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers a masterpiece and Mel Gibson’s Braveheart complete rubbish.

Substance abuse: Alcoholism runs in the family. Started drinking heavily in his late teens, has tried most types of drugs. Views all drugs as anesthetics. Dry and sober most of the time, but with a furious and constant urge.

Sports: Cycling and pumping iron occasionally, cause he likes the purifying feeling pain gives him.

Ambitions and future plans

Ambition: To understand what evil is. And what love is.

Future plans: The near future looks dismal. After that it gets darker. And then it all goes to hell…

JO NESBØ