On July 22, 2011, Alf Walgermo was away from his desk, where he works as the arts and culture editor for Vårt Land—a Christian daily headquartered in Oslo, Norway—when a car bomb detonated 100 meters away. The explosion killed 8 people and injured 209. Walgermo returned later to find his office in disarray, shards of glass impaled in books. "It was a surreal scene," he says. "If I had been there, I would have been lucky to escape with scratches."
Many more were not lucky. Two hours after the explosion, Anders Breivik, the lone wolf who planted the bomb, donned a police uniform and opened fire at a nearby youth camp, killing another 69 and injuring 110. The violence shocked the small country most reliably in the spotlight in connection with the Nobel Peace Prize. One study found that 1 in 4 Norwegians knew someone affected by the massacre.
Two years after the attacks—almost to the day—Alf and I sat at a café just inside the main gate to Vigeland Park, Oslo's analogue to Central Park. Cyclists and joggers power through flocks of meandering tourists. Walgermo points out the occasional thirtysomething man in skinny jeans pushing a stroller, a relatively new species of Scandinavian urban male dubbed "latte dads." We sip our own coffees and consume chocolate croissants while talking about the publishing phenomenon that is Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle and the local arts scene.
Along with his work for Vårt Land, Walgermo has served as president of the Norwegian Critics' Association, the country's 350-member strong alliance of art, music, theater, and literary critics. But contra the stereotypes about those who labor at criticism, Alf is no frustrated artist. His own creative output includes several books, not to mention music with his band Minor Yours. He recently wrapped up a stint as a Statens kunstnerstipend fellow that allowed him to take a sabbatical from the newspaper and work on his new novel. During that time he also penned a comedic musical for children about a brother and sister elephant running away from trouble. "I guess it will be almost impossible to translate because all the puns about pachyderms and their noses are in Norwegian," he concedes.
On the day we met in the park, terrorism seemed to be the last thing on anyone's mind. What is increasingly on the country's mind is God, a growing public religious consciousness that predates, but was nonetheless intensified by, Breivik's rampage. "Fifteen years ago no one would deal with religious themes because it was a little bit taboo," Walgermo says. "But now it's a really open environment. Jon Fosse, one of our most famous writers, says that to write is like prayer for him. Even Per Petterson [of Out Stealing Horses fame] is writing more and more about religion. And when the new Norwegian translation of the Bible was published in 2011, it was the talk of the town."
The Norwegian Bible Society (NBS) started revising its previous (1978) edition of the Bible in 1999, but the organization decided that a bolder approach was called for, both because Norwegian is rapidly changing and to take account of the latest biblical scholarship. The NBS employed not only Greek and Hebrew scholars and theologians for the project but also accomplished writers. In 2011, the society released new translations into both Norwegian (bokmål) and New Norwegian (nynorsk), to great fanfare. "It has been remarkable to see nationally famed authors and poets appear in media as Bible translators, strongly recommending the new translation and talking with enthusiasm about their own participation," said NBS general secretary Stein Mydske. The Associated Press reported that the new translated Bible was Norway's bestselling book in 2012.
A popular six-hour play titled Bibelen (Bible), which imagined Jesus committed to a mental hospital and eventually executed via lethal injection instead of dying on a cross, is one of a number of artistic conversations with the new version of the text. And the translation inspired Walgermo's most recent project, Bibeldikt (Bible Poems), a volume he's coedited with Jan Ove Ulstein for which prominent Norwegian poets have written new work in dialogue with Scripture.
"Jan came to me with the idea and I thought it was too exciting to say no," says Alf. "How many times do you see the best writers of a nation writing pieces inspired by the Bible and gathered together in one book?"
While he struggles to picks favorites, Walgermo points to three poems that suggest the variety and depth of the collection: Gro Dahle with a piece on caring for animals—a goose with a broken wing, an abandoned and bitter cat, a sad-eyed dog—that appeals to children and adults alike; Aasne Linnestå's poem about the Syrian conflict combined with reflections on fasting; and Jon Fosse's perspective on the wind that takes us and the light that never dies.
Walgermo speculates that immigration, especially of Muslims, has done a lot to make spiritual life an acceptable topic in broader society. But he notes that the conversational climate has also shifted among Christians. "Active Christians probably make up less than 10 percent of the population and are becoming more and more ecumenical," he says. "Not so many years ago Catholics and evangelicals didn't speak to each other at all. Before it was like: We know what's right and we won't have anything to do with any other church. Now it seems that active Christians in different branches of the faith are finding more reasons and opportunities to collaborate. Of course there are debates and different positions on issues like gay marriage even within Christianity. But it seems like Christian people are finding common cause. Perhaps this is the result of the massacre in 2011. After this horrible attack people came streaming to the church, both active and cultural Christians. Even people from other religions, too. Everyone came together as a people."
Alf was raised in an evangelical family in a small Norwegian town—his mother still works in the office at the church the family attended while he was growing up—and was aware of being part of a suspect minority that was deliberate about its Christian faith. Roughly 85 percent of the Norwegian population identifies as Christian, a legacy of the historic comingling of church and state, but secularism has been the de facto religion in Norway for many decades now. So Walgermo has observed the growing openness to religion with keen personal and professional interest.
"Faith is something natural to me, something I can't escape, despite having tried," he says. "And insofar as my work reflects something of myself, it often involves elements of faith. As a writer, my goal is to write a good book. I don't feel obliged to force faith into my work in some overt way, but I do feel free to involve my faith in my work."
In 2006, Walgermo published Mestermøter (Teacher Meetings), a short story collection that imagines lives for the 100 people the Bible records personally interacting with Jesus during his earthly ministry. Mestermøter was published by a Christian house, and the reception was impressive enough that Norway's largest publisher, Cappelen Damm, agreed to look at his next manuscripts. He got even more positive attention with the children's book Mor og far i himmelen (Mom and Dad in Heaven). The book is a young girl's prayer to God in the wake of the death of both of her parents. Intended to help parents talk to their children about death, its accessible treatment of the problem of evil engaged a wide readership.
Did anyone at Cappelen Damm balk at the overt Christian message in Mom and Dad in Heaven? "Christian content in children's and young adult books from the major publishers is unusual, but I'm told people working in the office were sitting there crying when they read the manuscript. So I would definitely say they're open to it. You just have to write a book that connects with people." The book also connected with Oyvind Torseter, one of Europe's most beloved book illustrators, who agreed to illustrate it after reading the manuscript.
Walgermo's most successful book thus far is a young adult novel called Mitt bankande hjarte (My Beating Heart) about a 14-year-old girl awaiting a heart transplant. "I wanted to avoid the usual clichés about the heart and write about it as a physical organ," he explains. "It's still a love story, though." My Beating Heart won the Bokhandelens barnebokstipend in 2012 and was selected to be one of five titles given to students in the sixth and seventh grades across Norway to encourage reading. It's been translated into seven languages, including French and German but, alas, still not English.
Recently married, Walgermo has spent a lot of time creating work intended for children despite not having any children of his own. I point out his knack for talking to kids about their concerns while thumbing through a copy of the gorgeous Mor og far i himmelen that he's kindly brought to the park for me. Why kids? "Well, children are people," he says with a straight face, before softening into a grin. Touché. "And I've always felt that children need to be taken seriously, both in real life and when it comes to literature. We shouldn't sweep difficult topics under the carpet. You can talk to a 10-year-old about a death in the family, as much as you can talk to a 10-year-old about a loving God."
My Beating Heart has sold well in Europe, and the German edition of Mom and Dad in Heaven has garnered both good reviews and a Catholic literary prize. Bible Poems was just published, in September, and he hopes to finish a new novel before Christmas. Some months after our day at Vigeland, Walgermo wrote with news of his next creative collaboration: "My wife is pregnant!"
Lisa Ann Cockrel is an editor for Brazos Press and Baker Academic and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She recently fell in love with the Hardangerfjord on Norway's western coast.
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