Scandinavian Noir by Wendy Lesser

Author:Wendy Lesser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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On a quick trip up to Holmenkollen the next day, she confirms with her own eyes the class divisions in Oslo. No one is poor, perhaps, but some people are infinitely richer than others. Up in the area where Harry eventually moved in with Rakel (and where there turn out to be many “dark-timbered” houses—Rakel’s would certainly not have been the only one), the dwellings are enormous, the plots of land are large and well-landscaped, and the views of the Oslo fjord and the sea beyond it are stunning. It takes about half an hour to travel by subway from the middle-class neighborhood at Majorstuen, where the train emerges from underground and graffiti is still visible along the sidings, to the Holmenkollen station, which lies a short walk from the Ski Museum and a massive ski jump that marks the local skyline (both prominently featured in the denouement of The Snowman). As in the city center, there are almost no people on these wealthy, suburban-feeling streets. But cars, most of them recent expensive makes, are much more common here than they are downtown, and they swoop by her as she strolls up and down the curves of Holmenkollveien.

She quickly tires of the place (no wonder Harry chooses to be either indoors or elsewhere) and catches the train back down to Frogner Park—or Vigelandsparken, as the guidebooks call this part of it. There she dubiously eyes the hundreds of naked human sculptures, cast in bronze or occasionally carved in stone, that the artist Gustav Vigeland made to line the grand alleé running up the center of the park. There is something very odd about this country’s attitude toward the human body, she decides. It is at once celebratory and grim. Vigeland’s adult figures are all heavy with muscle, and whether it’s men intertwined with women or adults holding on to children, the stronger figures appear to be overwhelming the weaker ones in a seriously unpleasant way. The most disturbing statue, perhaps, is a bronze in which a dancing naked man appears to be flinging three babies off his shoulders as he kicks a fourth one with his foot. But they are all upsetting to one degree or another. When it comes to local art, she infinitely prefers the two-dimensional work displayed in the National Gallery, where she encounters, among other things, a roomful of marvelous Munch paintings as well as some lovely canvases by an unfamiliar artist named Harriet Backer.

That evening she attends a long-awaited and much-anticipated performance at the new but already architecturally famous Oslo opera house. Designed by the local firm of Snohetta and built on what had previously been warehouse-occupied land down by the water, the 2007 opera house rises from its surroundings like a white sail or a snowy glacier. The distinctive slanted roof, which is open to the public, functions at all hours as a kind of urban park where people can sunbathe or picnic or just take in the view. Made of white

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