From Lee Siegel’s “Pure Evil”, on “Jo Nesbø and the rise of Scandinavian crime fiction”, in the latest (May 12th) New Yorker:
about a hundred Scandinavian crime writers have been translated into English, including Anne Holt, who is a former minister of justice in Norway. The crime tale has become to Scandinavia what the sonnet was to Elizabethan England: its trademark literary form.
It’s entertaining to consider what might count as the trademark literary form in other places, at other times, and in other sociocultural contexts.
(Note: the New Yorker piece is behind a paywall; the beginning is available here.)
