A Temporary State of Bergen
Smoke and ash. Storm and fire. Ever since the first economists headed north-east in search of suits and pointless arguments, the city of Bergen has long loomed above us like a pimple on the forehead.
A Temporary State of Bergen, by Christian Christiansen
Alabaster Books, 120 pp, 221kr, October 2018
Smoke and ash. Storm and fire. Ever since the first economists headed north-east in search of suits and pointless arguments, the city of Bergen has long loomed above us like a pimple on the forehead. Some of us can't help but squeeze the pimple: the young, mainly, and the foolish. No good ever comes of it.
In the slim volume A Temporary State of Bergen, Christian Christiansen explores the particular madness of moving to Bergen. "I cannot tell you what drove me to Bergen," he writes, "any more than a rock can tell you what drove it to fall into a screaming ravine. Like the rock, my only consolation is knowing that my fall must eventually end."
In prose as lucid as it is limpid, Christiansen goes deeper and more inward than it is safe for any man to go. His argument (such as it is –– the book is more poetry than disquisition) is that Bergen is not a place so much as a state of mind, or perhaps, mindlessness. Christiansen draws on testimony from a motley array of local Bergensers: nightshift workers at Deli de Luca, a deranged barnehage assistant at the Bergen International School, and two lesbians making out naked outside Theatro in broad daylight, fuelled by a potent mixture of coffee and cocktails (when asked by Christiansen what they were doing, they merely replied "Det er alltid bra med pupper"). Bergen is not so much an extraordinary place as a set of extraordinary people.
Let's agree for a moment that A Temporary State of Bergen is a book that cuts its way straight to the heart of Bergen. What, then, does that heart consist of? What, as the world-renowned airport sign so nearly asks, is Bergen?
Bergen is the sound of rain, sleeting sleetingly on the slashed roofs of Sædalen; Bergen is the stench of fish and rotting whale meat on a quayside in the purple light of dawn; Bergen is the sour taste of smalehove, cold in the aftermath of a spiritually crushing Christmas party, the sheep's teeth glistening like ice on a road so slippery that it's about to cause a fatal motor accident; Bergen feels like dry torsk, so leathery to the touch that it recalls the quotidian experience of fondling a thousand-year old desiccated cadaver; Bergen looks indubitably like Bergen.