Aksel Sandemose and Canada: A Scandinavian Writer's Perception of the Canadian Prairies in the 1920s

Norma Hall is a historian who specializes in colonial era settlements in
Newfoundland and Manitoba.

Christopher S. Hale deftly presents perception as key to appreciating
Danish/Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose. Those unfamiliar with his work
will find Hale an unobtrusive yet invaluable guide to Sandemose,
Scandinavian-Canadian studies, and immigration literature. Those already
familiar will find a well-organized collection that demonstrates
Canada’s role in Sandemose’s life and thought.

Hale has translated and edited, for English-language readers, 23
articles as well as five fictional stories related to Canada. The pieces
are introduced by a survey of Danish immigration and a biographical
essay that includes a description of Sandemose’s approximately
five-and-one-half month, financially stressed, 1927 tour of Danish
settlements in Canada. Each piece is accompanied by endnotes that
identify alternate Danish and Norwegian versions, refer to additional
texts, and offer critical insight into how Sandemose combined the actual
and the imagined in his writing. Photographic plates further illustrate
the point. Did, for example, Sandemose secure a bison skull souvenir or
a cattle ranch relic for display and inspiration?

Fanciful or not, Sandemose excelled at evoking prairie life. As a
distinctly Scandinavian outsider, he evaluated Canadian seasonality,
discomfiting distances, and ethos of work. He was wary of North American
ideas and values and, occasionally, perplexed. His encounter with the
locomotive Countess of Dufferin, bedecked with geraniums in a park, is a
notable instance. Sande-mose exhibits an intriguing blend of ambivalence
to, and obsession with, socio-cultural constraint: the degree to which
community and culture define individuals as winners or losers—of the
past and present, at home and abroad.

The book is a timely contribution to scholarly works that focus on the
tensions between personal and collective identity. Sandemose wrote of,
and lived with, the 20th-century struggle to balance nation, place, and
self-esteem. His experience is well worth considering.