Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven ***

In a college class I attended, Professor Stephen Booth taught us that the task of literary criticism is to explain the ways in which Hamlet is better than a plot summary of Hamlet. I find it difficult to perform this task for The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven because it reads like its own plot summary. The book has all the trappings of an adventure story –– an exotic locale (Svalbard/Spitsbergen in the years from WWI to WWII), colorful characters (Scandinavian miners and trappers), intense incidents (avalanches, bear attacks, wars, murder) –– but dispatches the major events perfunctorily, especially in the first half. The avalanche that disfigures Sven occupies two sentences; the Finnish trapper teaches Sven the skills of his trade whatever they may be; it is eminently unclear how Sven survives alone in the far north. Perhaps the author believes this terseness to be Scandinavian or Hemingway-esque?

I felt the sketchiness most keenly as it applies to Sven's character and his relationship with other characters. We're told, in the early going, that he has a close kinship with his sister Olga, but we don't learn enough about their bond to understand the nature of their falling out or feel the joy of their reconciliation. Sven purports to be something of an intellectual, but we never see him reading. What motivates his years of isolation, since he so clearly values his friends and family?

With one more layer of descriptive detail, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven could be an excellent study of the nature of human experience, the push and pull between depression and joy and between solitude and sociability. In the words of beginning creative writing teachers: More showing and less telling.

The one descriptive detail that stood out:

The first thing I heard was the wind. A very strange sort of wind to someone who has lived the first part of his life among trees and buildings, since up north there are few impermeable surfaces against which the air can whip and abrade itself. The Arctic wind has more of the sound of someone breathing with his throat entirely open.

A vivid and unexpected insight giving a nice sense of the character's experience of place. More of this please!