The Norwegian illustrator, graphic designer and writer Kari Stai (47) was awarded the Brage Prize in1912 for children’s literature with her Jakob og Neikob. Tjuven slår tilbake. Her recent book “Passe Happy” (Moderately Happy) seems to have an international appeal. It will be published in Danish next month. Read more about the fascinating story about a moderately happy Norwegian boy.

The book Passe Happy is about Juri who is 12 years old and feels insecure about absolutely everything. By himself he tries to figure out love, football and how far his tongue should go into a kiss before one cannot breathe. Because, Sofi is so nice that Juri loses his breath. Juri, however, does of course not want to die. He just wishes that everything was as before. That Dad did not have to leave. That best friend Evy did not become so weird.

Why does he have so many feelings? Now, the globe is spinning too fast. If only it could stand a little bit more still.

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Good reviews
The book has received good reviews. Klassekampen’s Jonas Bals writes, “Stai writes about feelings I had almost forgotten” and adds, «Kari Stai writes with warmth and humor, in short sentences that make some of the pages reminiscent of a long poem, many of them beautifully illustrated by the author herself. In a surprisingly short time, she manages to establish a credible and real universe».

The book will be published by the Danish publisher Straarup & co. next month, titled «Fint nok» (Nice enough).

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Published in Denmark in February
“Fint nok” is a present and nice story about what it is like to be 12 years old and completely confused about life. The book is written with lots of humor and empathy by Kari Stai and is especially aimed at children from 10-13 years.

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About Kari Stai
Kari Stai comes from Inderøy municipality in Nord-Trøndelag. She has studied at Telemark University College (1996-1999), Oslo School of Drawing and Painting (1993-1996) and Oslo Academy of the Arts (2000-2005) where she majored in visual communication.

Kari has since worked especially with illustration in magazines and books. In 2008, she debuted as an author with the picture book Jakob og Neikob, “a humorous and surrealistic tale about friendship, unfriendliness and foreign countries”. In 2010, came Blodrik and Blodfabrikken. Both books are written in New Norwegian and published by Det Norske Samlaget.

The illustrations are characterized by clear lines, smooth surfaces in a few, coordinated colors, stylized figures, geometric shapes and a graphic expression.

A Moderately Happy Norwegian Boy, compiled by Tor Kjolberg

Siri Hustvedt was 13 when she got the writing bug. Her father, a professor of Norwegian, had taken his wife and four daughters with him to Reykjavík, where he was studying the Icelandic sagas. Hustveit is best known for her book ‘What I Loved (2002) which became an international bestseller. Here, the
Norwegian New York-based author, feminist and philosopher talks about art and gender.

Siri Hustveit was born in Northfield, Minnesota in 1955. She has written 17 books, among them “What I Loved” (2003) and “The Summer Without Men” (2011). “The Blazing World (2014) was longlisted for the Man Booker Award and won the 2015 Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction.

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A woman looking at men
Her essays on art, gender and the mind “A Woman Looking at Men” were published in 2016 and bridge the gap between the disciplines, inviting us to look at the world anew. This is her fourth collection of essays, and the same theme is often repeated in her novels, of which she has written seven and which are read by a large audience all over the world. One of the central themes in the collection of essays is which prejudices affect how we perceive art and the world as such. And especially prejudice and discrimination based on gender.

Mothers, fathers and others
Among her best essays are the ones in which Hustvedt skillfully weaves her personal stories (about her mother, her daughter and her own childhood) with the state of the world, academia and technology. Her collection of essays, “Mothers, Fathers, and Others”, is described as “a 21st-century Virginia Woolf” in the Literary Review (UK). Hustvedt displays her expansive intellect and interdisciplinary knowledge in this collection that moves effortlessly between stories from her own family background to artistic mothers, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Lousie Bourgeois, to the broader meanings of maternal in a culture shaped by misogyny and fantasies of paternal authority. Mothers, Fathers, and Others is a polymath’s journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art.

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An elegy for Louise Bourgeois
One of the female artists Siri Hustveit values the most is Louise Bourgeois. When Hustveit arrived in New York, no one was interested in Bourgeois at all. The men on the board of the Museum of Modern Art only looked at her as a little girl from Paris, who on top of that carried the burden of three children. This despite the fact that she was in her 30s and had already created works that surpassed most of her contemporaries.  She eventually broke through as a 70-year-old. About 80 percent of the artists who have had solo exhibitions in New York in the last ten years are men, Hustveit writes in “A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women”

The essays range from the personal to the critical, and they often encompass the clinical. Hustvedt brings a surprisingly scientific approach to her artistic and literary subjects. In “What Does a Man Want?,” on the origins of misogyny, she argues that a fixation on DNA and the genome (and the stance that life begins at conception) overlooks the essential influence of gestation. “By assigning a godlike role to genes,” she writes, “the ‘right-to-life’ forces have adopted science in their service and effectively denied the reality that a female body is crucial to fetal development.”

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The placenta is the least understood of all human organs
She illustrates the erasure of the female body through the example of the placenta. “How can a human organ go missing in plain sight?” she wonders as hers is whisked away after the birth of her daughter. “The placenta is the least understood of all human organs. It has been called forgotten, ignored, overlooked, mysterious, underappreciated, and even the ‘Rodney Dangerfield of organs.’” Not to mention that birth itself is a “subject missing from the canon of Western art.” Here is Hustvedt’s unique contribution and genius: By bringing a placenta into a fight about misogyny, she fortifies her argument with physical evidence.

“Men and women are connected from the start,” says Siri Hustveit. «We all come out of a woman’s body.»

An early bird
Siri Hustveit is a passionate reader and therein lies the secret of her books – in the act of reading, rethinking and reconnecting. She has spent her life carving out a career as a writer of intellect in a world still dominated by men.

Her days start early, at 5.30am with some meditation; she is at her desk by 7am. “Morning brain is the best brain,” she says cheerfully. “I can feel my sharpness declining after six or seven hours.” Hustvedt spends the afternoons reading, mostly academic papers that form the basis of her many lectures on neurology and psychology. She and her husband Auster have been married for 40 years, and still read aloud to each other. They are great lovers of fairytales, as is their 33-year-old daughter, Sophie, a singer of slinky, soulful pop songs. There are other writer couples, of course, but few that have stayed together so long.

Norwegian New York-Based Author, Feminist and Philosopher About Art and Gender, written by Tor Kjolberg

Feature image (on top): Photo Wikipedia