Ola Bauer
Encyclopedia
Ola Bauer was a Norwegian
novelist and playwright. He made his literary debut with the novel Graffiti in 1976, under the pseudonym Jo Vendt. Among his best known books are Humlehjertene (1980), Rosapenna (1983), and Metoden (1985). Bauer was awarded Gyldendal's Endowment
in 1982, and the Dobloug Prize
in 1998. He died of cancer in 1999.
, during the German occupation of Norway
. His father was a baker, and an active member of the Norwegian resistance movement
. In 1943, he was arrested, while the rest of the family went undercover in Hadeland
. Bauer's father was eventually deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp
, where he died three months before the end of the war. Bauer's family continuously moved from place to place, and Bauer had a hard time adjusting to the changes, and finding friends. He found himself consistently making friends with children of traitors, those who had supported the Germans during the war. "We were all innocent children, who had to pay for our fathers' choices. We could understand each other", Bauer later said. He used to make up stories about his father's death, a new version for every new place his family moved. He graduated from Oslo Språkskole in 1965, on his second attempt, "with a D in Norwegian, as usual".
Bauer started his literary career translating short stories from Danish
to Norwegian for Allers
. He quickly advanced to becoming sports reporter for Det Nye
, and later a traveling journalist for Vi Menn
. He stayed in Paris
for more than a year in the late 1960s, and later traveled around Africa. From 1972 on he made frequent visits to Belfast
, and made many friends there.
. As an adult, he learned that his father had in fact died of methanol
poisoning, having gotten hold of what he thought was alcohol. In his autobiographical
debut novel, Graffiti (1976), Bauer confronted his mother with the fact that she had kept this secret from him. "I grew up in a lie about a man I have never known", he commented. Because of the novel's contents, one of his relatives insisted that he publish it under a pseudonym, to protect his mother. Despite "having nothing to hide [him]self", he therefore released the novel under the pen name
Jo Vendt. Graffiti was very well received by critics. Roar Petersen of Verdens Gang
noted the poetic quality of many of the passages in the novel. Johan Borgen
described the debut as "measuring 7.3 on the Richter earthquake scale
".
Bauer published the freestanding sequel to Graffiti, Bulk (1978), under his own name. The novel depicts a young man returning to Oslo after spending some time at sea. Alcoholism is a central theme, both the protagonist and his mother are portrayed as heavy drinkers. His next novel, Humlehjertene (1980), depicts the protagonist's stay in Paris
from 1967 to 1969, where he becomes involved in the May 1968 student riots. The novel was heavily based on Bauer's own experiences from Paris during the same period. "I suppose every writer actually writes about themselves", he told Verdens Gang. The Troubles
in Northern Ireland
would become the topic of Rosapenna (1983), named after a street in Belfast
. Bauer felt that the Norwegian press was giving a one-sided picture of The Troubles, something he wanted to correct. To get the necessary distance to the source material, he decided to let the novel take place in 1973. Bauer himself arrived in Belfast in 1972, shortly after the Bloody Sunday
, as a journalist for Vi Menn. He became an eyewitness to the bombing of the Abercorn restaurant in Castle Lane. Bauer could not believe the IRA
was responsible for the bombing, and defended them in Vi Menn. He eventually became closely involved with the IRA. "England is to blame for the conflict in Northern Ireland. The antagonism is based on economic differences ... this is not a religious war", Bauer said in an interview shortly after the release of Rosapenna. Bauer's 1985 novel, Metoden introduced the protagonist Bo Brandt, the son of a wealthy, alcoholized, ship-owner
. The novel serves both as a crime thriller
and a psychological study.
Bauer's last novels would revolve around Tom, who starts out as an ten-year-old in Hestehodetåken (1992), and returns as a teenager in Svartefot (1995), and a twenty-year-old in Magenta (1997). Bauer referred to the books as "a reluctant trilogy." In the fourth novel in the series, Forløperen (1999), Tom returns to Norway after spending forty years traveling abroad. The book was finished while Bauer was terminally ill, and released posthumously.
Aside from his novels, Bauer was also a playwright
. Two of his plays, Vesper (1987) and Brendan (1993), depict the conflict in Northern Ireland.
was published in Bauer's honor. Bauers bok, edited by Lars Saabye Christensen
, contained contributions by among others Christensen, Kjartan Fløgstad
, Espen Haavardsholm
, Per Petterson
, Dag Solstad
, and Tove Nilsen
. He was described by Solstad as extremely well-read, being particularly interested in authors like Louis-Ferdinand Céline
and Jean Genet
. In the anthology, Petterson compared Bauer's protagonists to Holden Caulfield
of The Catcher in the Rye
, a novel important to Bauer.
Bauer was survived by his wife Anne Gun, and his daughter, Anya Bauer Hartmark, born in 1972. Bauer had wanted her to be named "Mulele", after Pierre Mulele
, and Bauer and his friends would refer to her using the nickname Mulle as a tribute to the Congolese revolutionary.
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
novelist and playwright. He made his literary debut with the novel Graffiti in 1976, under the pseudonym Jo Vendt. Among his best known books are Humlehjertene (1980), Rosapenna (1983), and Metoden (1985). Bauer was awarded Gyldendal's Endowment
Gyldendal's Endowment
Gyldendal's Endowment was a literature prize which was awarded in the period 1934–1995 by the Norwegian publisher Gyldendal Norsk Forlag. The prize was awarded to significant authors, regardless of which publisher the author was associated with...
in 1982, and the Dobloug Prize
Dobloug Prize
The Dobloug Prize is a literature prize awarded for Swedish and Norwegian fiction. The prize is named after Norwegian businessman and philanthropist Birger Dobloug pursuant to his bequest. The prize sum is . The Dobloug Prize is awarded annually by the Swedish Academy.-Prize winners:...
in 1998. He died of cancer in 1999.
Early life
Bauer was born 24 July 1943 in Holmenkollåsen, OsloOslo
Oslo is a municipality, as well as the capital and most populous city in Norway. As a municipality , it was established on 1 January 1838. Founded around 1048 by King Harald III of Norway, the city was largely destroyed by fire in 1624. The city was moved under the reign of Denmark–Norway's King...
, during the German occupation of Norway
Occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany
The occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany started with the German invasion of Norway on April 9, 1940, and ended on May 8, 1945, after the capitulation of German forces in Europe. Throughout this period, Norway was continuously occupied by the Wehrmacht...
. His father was a baker, and an active member of the Norwegian resistance movement
Norwegian resistance movement
The Norwegian resistance to the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany began after Operation Weserübung in 1940 and ended in 1945. It took several forms:...
. In 1943, he was arrested, while the rest of the family went undercover in Hadeland
Hadeland
Hadeland is a traditional district in the south-eastern part of Norway. It is located around the southern part of lake Randsfjorden in Oppland county, and consists of the municipalities of Gran, Jevnaker and Lunner. Hadeland occupies the area north of the hills of Nordmarka close to the Norwegian...
. Bauer's father was eventually deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp
Sachsenhausen concentration camp
Sachsenhausen or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used primarily for political prisoners from 1936 to the end of the Third Reich in May, 1945. After World War II, when Oranienburg was in the Soviet Occupation Zone, the structure was used as an NKVD...
, where he died three months before the end of the war. Bauer's family continuously moved from place to place, and Bauer had a hard time adjusting to the changes, and finding friends. He found himself consistently making friends with children of traitors, those who had supported the Germans during the war. "We were all innocent children, who had to pay for our fathers' choices. We could understand each other", Bauer later said. He used to make up stories about his father's death, a new version for every new place his family moved. He graduated from Oslo Språkskole in 1965, on his second attempt, "with a D in Norwegian, as usual".
Bauer started his literary career translating short stories from Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
to Norwegian for Allers
Allers (magazine)
Allers is the name of a Swedish and a Norwegian weekly magazine, both published by Aller Media. They both trace their origins from the Danish weekly Illustreret Familie-Journal, founded in 1877 by Carl Aller....
. He quickly advanced to becoming sports reporter for Det Nye
Det Nye
Det Nye is a Norwegian magazine that comes out every three weeks. The target group is women from 18 to 35 years. It contains feature articles, as well as material on careers, fashion, sex and relationships. Its circulation was 68,765 in 2004. The editor is Elisabet Skårberg. It is owned by Hjemmet...
, and later a traveling journalist for Vi Menn
Vi Menn
Vi Menn, is Scandinavia and Norway's largest weekly lifestyle magazine for men, with a circulation of 96,000 and 593,000 weekly readers , with articles on a wide range of topics, including: adventure, travel, hunting, sports, cars and women. It is owned by the Hjemmet Mortensen AS publishing house...
. He stayed in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
for more than a year in the late 1960s, and later traveled around Africa. From 1972 on he made frequent visits to Belfast
Belfast
Belfast is the capital of and largest city in Northern Ireland. By population, it is the 14th biggest city in the United Kingdom and second biggest on the island of Ireland . It is the seat of the devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly...
, and made many friends there.
Literary career
Bauer had grown up with the notion that his father was a war hero, having died as a prisoner of warPrisoner of war
A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...
. As an adult, he learned that his father had in fact died of methanol
Methanol
Methanol, also known as methyl alcohol, wood alcohol, wood naphtha or wood spirits, is a chemical with the formula CH3OH . It is the simplest alcohol, and is a light, volatile, colorless, flammable liquid with a distinctive odor very similar to, but slightly sweeter than, ethanol...
poisoning, having gotten hold of what he thought was alcohol. In his autobiographical
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
debut novel, Graffiti (1976), Bauer confronted his mother with the fact that she had kept this secret from him. "I grew up in a lie about a man I have never known", he commented. Because of the novel's contents, one of his relatives insisted that he publish it under a pseudonym, to protect his mother. Despite "having nothing to hide [him]self", he therefore released the novel under the pen name
Pen name
A pen name, nom de plume, or literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by an author. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise his or her gender, to distance an author from some or all of his or her works, to protect the author from retribution for his or her...
Jo Vendt. Graffiti was very well received by critics. Roar Petersen of Verdens Gang
Verdens Gang
Verdens Gang , generally known under the abbreviation VG, is a Norwegian tabloid newspaper...
noted the poetic quality of many of the passages in the novel. Johan Borgen
Johan Borgen
Johan Collett Müller Borgen was a Norwegian author, journalist and critic. He was married to Annemarta Borgen. Under the pseudonym of Mumle Gåsegg he wrote shorter articles in the newspaper Dagbladet, particularly during World War II...
described the debut as "measuring 7.3 on the Richter earthquake scale
Richter magnitude scale
The expression Richter magnitude scale refers to a number of ways to assign a single number to quantify the energy contained in an earthquake....
".
Bauer published the freestanding sequel to Graffiti, Bulk (1978), under his own name. The novel depicts a young man returning to Oslo after spending some time at sea. Alcoholism is a central theme, both the protagonist and his mother are portrayed as heavy drinkers. His next novel, Humlehjertene (1980), depicts the protagonist's stay in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
from 1967 to 1969, where he becomes involved in the May 1968 student riots. The novel was heavily based on Bauer's own experiences from Paris during the same period. "I suppose every writer actually writes about themselves", he told Verdens Gang. The Troubles
The Troubles
The Troubles was a period of ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland which spilled over at various times into England, the Republic of Ireland, and mainland Europe. The duration of the Troubles is conventionally dated from the late 1960s and considered by many to have ended with the Belfast...
in Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
would become the topic of Rosapenna (1983), named after a street in Belfast
Belfast
Belfast is the capital of and largest city in Northern Ireland. By population, it is the 14th biggest city in the United Kingdom and second biggest on the island of Ireland . It is the seat of the devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly...
. Bauer felt that the Norwegian press was giving a one-sided picture of The Troubles, something he wanted to correct. To get the necessary distance to the source material, he decided to let the novel take place in 1973. Bauer himself arrived in Belfast in 1972, shortly after the Bloody Sunday
Bloody Sunday (1972)
Bloody Sunday —sometimes called the Bogside Massacre—was an incident on 30 January 1972 in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland, in which twenty-six unarmed civil rights protesters and bystanders were shot by soldiers of the British Army...
, as a journalist for Vi Menn. He became an eyewitness to the bombing of the Abercorn restaurant in Castle Lane. Bauer could not believe the IRA
Provisional Irish Republican Army
The Provisional Irish Republican Army is an Irish republican paramilitary organisation whose aim was to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and bring about a socialist republic within a united Ireland by force of arms and political persuasion...
was responsible for the bombing, and defended them in Vi Menn. He eventually became closely involved with the IRA. "England is to blame for the conflict in Northern Ireland. The antagonism is based on economic differences ... this is not a religious war", Bauer said in an interview shortly after the release of Rosapenna. Bauer's 1985 novel, Metoden introduced the protagonist Bo Brandt, the son of a wealthy, alcoholized, ship-owner
Ship-owner
A shipowner is the owner of a merchant vessel . In the commercial sense of the term, a shipowner is someone who equips and exploits a ship, usually for delivering cargo at a certain freight rate, either as a per freight rate or based on hire...
. The novel serves both as a crime thriller
Crime fiction
Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...
and a psychological study.
Bauer's last novels would revolve around Tom, who starts out as an ten-year-old in Hestehodetåken (1992), and returns as a teenager in Svartefot (1995), and a twenty-year-old in Magenta (1997). Bauer referred to the books as "a reluctant trilogy." In the fourth novel in the series, Forløperen (1999), Tom returns to Norway after spending forty years traveling abroad. The book was finished while Bauer was terminally ill, and released posthumously.
Aside from his novels, Bauer was also a playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
. Two of his plays, Vesper (1987) and Brendan (1993), depict the conflict in Northern Ireland.
Death and legacy
Bauer died 12 June 1999, having battled cancer for one and half year. Bauer was involved in a dramatic television production, Jakttid, but as his condition worsened, he had to prioritize finishing his last novel, Forløperen. It was published 26 August 1999. Three years later, an anthologyAnthology
An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts...
was published in Bauer's honor. Bauers bok, edited by Lars Saabye Christensen
Lars Saabye Christensen
Lars Saabye Christensen, born 21 September 1953 in Oslo, is a Norwegian author.Saabye Christensen was raised in the Skillebekk neighbourhood of Oslo, but lived for many years in Sortland in northern Norway; both places play a major role in his work...
, contained contributions by among others Christensen, Kjartan Fløgstad
Kjartan Fløgstad
Kjartan Fløgstad is a Norwegian author. Fløgstad studied literature and linguistics at the University of Bergen. Subsequently he worked for a period as an industrial worker and as a sailor before he debuted as a poet with his collection of poems titled Valfart in 1968...
, Espen Haavardsholm
Espen Haavardsholm
Espen Haavardsholm is a Norwegian novelist, lyricist, biographer and essayist. He made his literary debut in 1966 with the collection of short stories, Tidevann. He was one of the central writers in the modernist literary magazine Profil. He has written biographies on Martin Linge , Aksel...
, Per Petterson
Per Petterson
Per Petterson is a Norwegian novelist. Petterson's debut was Aske i munnen, sand i skoa , a collection of short stories. He has since published a number of novels to good reviews. To Siberia , a novel set in the Second World War, was published in English in 1998 and nominated for the Nordic...
, Dag Solstad
Dag Solstad
Dag Solstad is a Norwegian novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist whose work has been translated into several languages. He has written nearly 30 books and is the only author to have received the Norwegian Literary Critics’ Award three times...
, and Tove Nilsen
Tove Nilsen
Tove Nilsen is a Norwegian novelist, children's writer and literary critic.She made her literary debut in 1974 with the novel Aldri la dem kle deg forsvarsløst naken. Her adolescence novel from a dormitory town, Skyskraperengler was a bestseller.She was awarded the Riksmål Society Literature...
. He was described by Solstad as extremely well-read, being particularly interested in authors like Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of French writer and physician Louis-Ferdinand Destouches . Céline was chosen after his grandmother's first name. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and...
and Jean Genet
Jean Genet
Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing...
. In the anthology, Petterson compared Bauer's protagonists to Holden Caulfield
Holden Caulfield
Holden Caulfield is the 16-to-17 years old protagonist of author J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. He is universally recognized for his resistance to growing older and desire to protect childhood innocence...
of The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye is a 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger. Originally published for adults, it has since become popular with adolescent readers for its themes of teenage confusion, angst, alienation, language, and rebellion. It has been translated into almost all of the world's major...
, a novel important to Bauer.
Bauer was survived by his wife Anne Gun, and his daughter, Anya Bauer Hartmark, born in 1972. Bauer had wanted her to be named "Mulele", after Pierre Mulele
Pierre Mulele
Pierre Mulele was a Congolese revolutionary who was briefly minister of education in Patrice Lumumba's cabinet. He was member of the Bapende ethnic group...
, and Bauer and his friends would refer to her using the nickname Mulle as a tribute to the Congolese revolutionary.
Novels
- Graffiti (1976)
- Bulk (1978)
- Humlehjertene (1980)
- Rosapenna (1983)
- Metoden (1985)
- Løvetemmersken (1988)
- Hestehodetåken (1992)
- Svartefot (1995)
- Magenta (1997)
- Forløperen (1999)