AshehougAgency

Breakfast with Strangers

In Breakfast with Strangers Karin Sveen reflects on what all the many forms of belonging mean. In a small crowded bookshop in Teheran she shares a meal discussing literature and belonging with Safy, a literature student, and Elyas, who runs the little bookshop. She writes with insight about the madness and 'otherness' of painter Lars Hertervig, and basing her ideas on the writer Frank McCourt she explains how fellowship and community can become an authoritative body of censorship from which it may be necessary to liberate yourself. The book comes into being while she is staying in Berkeley, California for a year, to write. Going to somewhere new gives her a new, different view of home and familiar things in her life so that a kind of dialogue emerges, a hermeneutic movement in which the alien and the familiar cast light on each other. Sveen approaches the topic of belonging in an open, personal way by analysing her own life. Reflection on comparatives between USA and Norway and storytelling combine to make an original and insightful way of tackling a major issue.

Click here for English sample translation.

Praise for Breakfast with Strangers:

“Fabulous observations. Brightly polished wisdom and violet marvelling in fine harmony … an especially fruitful bastard which with effortless melodiousness absorbs a broad societal perspective distributed over themes such as cultural history, sociology and politics, elegantly arranged on a bed of personal, rich, branching out reminiscences… Profoundly sensually and perceptively, Sveen juxtaposes the landscape of childhood with other landscapes she has experienced later in life and her experiences while writing abroad, including a fabulous portrayal of Lars Hertevig’s paintings… Above all here you will find a blessed ability to draw thought-provoking parallels, which creates seductive reverberations… Breakfast with Strangers is one of this year’s most bubbling and insightful reading experiences, and a metre-high feather in the author’s cap… how about half-a-dozen awards for this multi-cultural work of art?”
(Bergens Tidende)

“Within the art of essay writing, Karin Sveen has developed her own form, one she has mastered to perfection. She seems both interested and knowledgeable, and has just as strong a need to tell her story as she does personally to probe her theme…Reading her essays is to take part in a journey round a good many swings and turns before moving on towards new discoveries and realizations… Of the modern essayists, hardly any can write with such insight and an ability to broach central themes as Karin Sveen. And she does it with the same breadth and elegance of language that has made her as one of the country’s most prominent and original novelists. Breakfast with Strangers is a highpoint in her authorship - and a highpoint in this year’s run of new books”
(Hamar Arbeiderblad)

“Karin Sveen now adds her name to a long literary tradition of seeing the opportunities presented by exile, not just the problems … Sveen is sober, observant and admirably ready to encounter what is strange”
(Morgenbladet)

“Intelligent writing about belonging… Karin Sveen is a clever woman. And she has written a clever book, a collection of essays about belonging … full of clear thoughts and fine details which Sveen tells through the stories. Good stories. Intimate and vivid Sveen shows us the many ways of being a stranger geographical, linguistic, cultural, mental and spiritual. But Breakfast with Strangers is also about the opposite. It is about finding a home … She writes gently and well, does not need to shout to be heard, yet there are tension and paradoxes in each chapter. My goodness!”
(Vårt Land)

“Karin Sveen has written a great book about belonging and encountering what is strange… Her essays have an easy-going style. She writes well. Personal experiences and small anecdotes are woven into more philosophical reflections… Nevertheless, these essays embrace a number of interesting and thought-provoking reflections about belonging, and this makes Breakfast with Strangers’ an exciting and rewarding book to read"
(Trønder-Avisa)

“Masterful essays… Karin Sveen’s Breakfast with Strangers turns out to be a meditation on the theme of belonging which pulses with warmth and is almost unstoppably stimulating. One thing is her deeply personal yet razor-sharp objective reflections upon what constitutes a feeling of home and its opposite, a feeling of being strange, another is how astonishingly she screws her texts together, how she lets them appear completely unpredictable, yet leaves behind a definite impression that they could not have been composed in another way. Here we’re talking about an optimalization of form, a happy marriage between restless brain power and the coldly calculated art of engineering”
(Bergens Tidende)

“Once again Karin Sveen manages to shape valuable analyses of personal experiences… Breakfast with Strangers is one of my best reading experiences this year … a far-reaching book … Sveen has written a very inclusive book which invites one to reflect further. We are not lectured, rather we are put on track so that we can ask the same questions about our own existence and our own belonging in the world that Sveen asks herself even when she lets go of what for her seemed predestined”
(Klassekampen)

“Profound thinking and well written. This year Sveen continues to develop the fine essay style and themes we saw in her last book. She probes our ideas about belonging, home, and not least where we come from. She interprets concepts afresh, showing their range of meanings and placing the emphasize we give them in a new light… In this narrow-minded country, Sveen’s latest two collections of essays are among the wisest and most thought-provoking one can read. This is an author who knows a lot about the many aspects to belonging”
(Aftenposten)

“Likeable essays about feeling at home… first and foremost this book’s contribution lies in Sveen’s unsentimental examination of the meaning of community … Neither does the book lack great individual observations as the author encounters everyday America… Sveen is at her best when she’s most at home, although she needs what is strange to be able to glimpse the familiar, and to glimpse what is strange in the seemingly familiar. Her writing is then more precise, experiences rather than claims, and the examination most profoundly resounding… a low-key, modest book which inspires messages of support. And which contains a string of finely tuned wordings… The most impressive thing about Sveen’s project is her ability to see the realities on both sides of the fence, without rejecting, without romanticizing them. It’s most difficult this way”
(Dagbladet)

“Masterful essays … a great deal of Sveen’s mastery (lies) in the way she draws lines between “the big” and the “little” world, between grand, worn-out expressions and a nuanced reality… At their most profound, Sveen’s texts are about being human in what we, due to lacking a more precise phrase, call “ the modern world”… Sveen would have deserved much more of the attention which was given to the Swedish Professor Ronny Ambjornsson … Though it might be to romanticize Sveen’s working class background, it may deserve at least some of the blame for her writing being as rich and unique as it is. Her background as a poetess also obviously plays a role in the poetic style of her essays… She has a unique ability to shift between - and combine - the earthy and the lofty. Her language is so saturated with content that one must read slowly to absorb everything wise Karin Sveen has to share with us”
(Prosa)

First published: 2005, Forlaget Oktober

Karin Sveen: Biography and bibliography