Aksel Sandemose: "A Fugitive Crosses his Track"
-the book about the Law of Jante
I read this book first time when I was 17 years old, and I remember I experienced it as a collection of
reflections from a man i beleived to be a wise guy. When I read it the second time 55 years later I could not
find much more than a grumbling old man complaining about having got a bad start in life.
Subsequently I thought I might as well drop including it in this "canon" but later on concluded that I would include
it anyway. There are two reasons for this:
Primarily I think it deserves a place in the canon because it is the book where Sandemose launches the Law of Jante,
which is the main reason for his fame. The Law of Jante is a collection of the rules set up by the people in his
home town to keep themselves down. Later Sandemose realized that these rules also governs nearly all small societies in the world.
This is the Law of Jante:
- You shall not believe that you are something.
- You shall not believe that you are as much as we are.
- You shall not believe that you are smarter than we are.
- You shall not believe that you are better than we are.
- You shall not believe that you know more than we do.
- You shall not believe that you are more than we are.
- You shall not believe that you can be useful to anything.
- You shall not laugh at us.
- You shall not believe that anybody cares about you.
- You shall not believe that you can teach us anything.
In addition to these rules, Sandemose describes what he calls the Punishment Law of Jante, which in all its shortness sounds:
Perhaps you believe that I do not know something about you ?
But the second reason is at least as important as important as the first one. That is the very last entry in the book,
and also the one that suggests that Sandemose was not just the grumbling complaining old man that one else easily can
take him for. I have often thought of these words since I read them at the age of 17:
In the inner part of Newfoundland there is a mountain. It is called the Halfway Mountain. It rises rather steep from a relatively
flat forest area, and therefore might look higher than it is. On a hunting trip I once came all the way around the mountain, and I noticed
how a mountain like that looks different even if you just has moved a short distance beyond it. You can get thousand different descriptions of
Halfway Mountain, and every one of them are true. I feel a very strong urge to tell you this, and may be these are the most important words
in this book, that the mountain is huge and has many sides, but the man who lay chained to the ground saw Halfway Mountain only from
the place he lay.
Aksel Sandemose was born as Axel Nielsen in Nykøbing
on Mors in Denmark in 1899. His mother was norwegian, and in 1921 he changed his name to Aksel Sandemose after her family background. His first books
he wrote in danish, but in 1930 he moved to Norway and started writing in norwegian. "A Fugitive Crosses his Track" was published in 1933.
He was nominated to the Nobel Prize towards the end of the nineteenfifties, but never rewarded. He died in Copenhagen in 1965.
|
