"On Learning Norwegian"

As usual on my recent travels through the Dayton airport, I visited the excellent small bookstore in the terminal, and this time I came away with three books. I got through one (An Uncomplicated Life: A Father's Memoir of His Exceptional Daughter, by Paul Daugherty) and left it with an enthusiastic recommendation to my friend in Aalborg. I still had five that I had acquired in Dayton and Denmark--and we are talking physical books here--so you would think that I wouldn't need to buy another on the trip back from Orlando to Dayton. However, I walked into the Hudson book shop in Orlando and fell over a new release called Freeman's Arrival. It is a collection of short stories by various authors, described on the cover as "The Best New Writing on Arrival." I was captivated by the idea of having a whole book about arrivals in the departure lounge of an airport, and when I saw that one of the pieces was "On Learning Norwegian," by Lydia Davis, my will power disintegrated.

I did not know Lydia Davis before I picked up this book, but remembering my own long (and continuing) efforts to learn Danish, I thought I could understand why "On Learning Norwegian" might represent an arrival of sorts. Davis learning Norwegian was not like me learning Danish, however. Her story recounts her own experience in reading a 426-page (plus appendix) "novel" by Dag Solstad that "gives detailed accounts of the births, marriages, deaths, and property transactions of Solstad's ancestors in Telemark from 1691 to 1896." She read this book without previously knowing a word of Norwegian, and she didn't use a dictionary.

By the time she finished the book, she knew some Norwegian, and she understood the narrative. The story that fascinates me lies in her reflections of how she successfully (and sometimes unsuccessfully) puzzled out meaning from letters on a page.

It took her over a year to read the book. It took me less than two hours to read the 56-page story. I finished the last paragraph about a minute before we touched down and arrived at the Dayton airport.