Berit EllingsenPhoto by Alexander Chesham, 2015Berit Ellingsen was born in South Korea, grew up in Norway and has lived in Portugal, Sweden and the USA. She trained as a biologist and worked as a science reporter. She says of her novel NOT DARK YET that in terms of genre or category ....."it is fiction with a bit of science in it."
''Berit Ellingsen - a surreal, unpredictable work bringing together environmental devastation, a nuanced portrayal of a relationship, and questions of space exploration.''http://zorosko.blogspot.tw/2015/11/berit-ellingsen-surreal-unpredictable.html.
NOTE: Finnish novelist Emmi Itaranta also writes her novel MEMORY OF WATER directly in English and it was later sold to 14 foreign countries for translation.
Not Dark Yet, the debut novel in English from Korean-Norwegian writer Berit Ellingsen, follows Brandon Minamoto, a young man who moves to the mountains from the city and deals with change and catastrophe in both his personal life and the life of our planet. As Brandon deals with the fallout from his affair with a professor and the violent incident that ended their relationship, he trains for an astronaut program and gets involved in his neighbors’ agricultural project. Fascinating, surreal, gorgeously written, and like nothing you’ve ever read before, Not Dark Yet is the book we all need to read right now. It is art about science, climate change, and activism, and it vitally explores how we as people deal with a world that is transforming in terrifying ways. —Isaac Fitzgerald QUOTE UNQUOTE:
'If I hadn’t written in English, I would first and foremost have missed working in a language which has terms and expressions that are more
accurate than my own language, a much wider vocabulary, and which just feels more suited for writing. That’s why I prefer to write fiction in English.''
''English is also such a widespread language, that by writing in English, my stories and books have been read by people who live in
countries and on continents I have never been to, and in cultures I have never experienced in person, and that is just amazing to know. That would probably not have happened if I had only stuck to my first language.''
[The small press Two Dollar Radio puts out great books, so check out this 2015 release by debut novelist Berit Ellingsen (a Korean-Norwegian writer and former bookseller). Not Dark Yet (also the title of a great later-period Bob Dylan song), follows a man as he leaves his boyfriend in the city for life in the mountains. Jeff VanderMeer highly praised Ellingsen’s book.]
AMAZON REVIEW --
By Julianne (Outlandish Lit)on January 28, 2016
Not Dark Yet is a new novella in the ''cli-fi'' (climate fiction) genre. The world's going to shit due to global warming. People are running out of food. The weather's all out of whack. And the main character, Brandon, just needs to get away from it all. So he moves to a remote cabin in the mountains somewhere, leaving his boyfriend behind. This novella jumps around in time a little bit covering a bunch of interesting plot points. An affair with a professor that goes bad, an agricultural project he joins in the mountains, applying to be an astronaut who will live on Mars, some random military stuff, AND MORE.
All of these things are SO interesting and the book had a lot of potential to do all sorts of stuff. Unfortunately, however, Brandon is just not that interesting of a guy. His character is so flat that it's hard to care about any of his (often briefly touched upon) plights. As much as I love concise books, I feel like Ellingsen could've done a lot with more pages. Anyway, I can't mention the other thing I didn't like because it would spoil the whole book. So in short, I really loved most of the stuff that went down in this story, I really super loved what the book was saying (it's so good), but I wasn't blown away with how it was done. If any of this sounds interesting
VALERIE STOREY has
the interview here:
Book Review: ''Not Dark Yet'', by Berit Ellingsen
NOTE: Born in South Korea of a South Korean mother and a Norwegian father, and with Norwegian her first language and English her second language, Ms. Ellingsen writes her novels directly in English.
Berit Ellingsen was born in South Korea, grew up in Norway and has lived in Portugal, Sweden and the USA.
American novelist Jeff Vandermeer blurbed her novel on back cover this way:
"This is the best work yet from a truly unique writer who clearly will be a name to conjure for decades to come.”
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Not Dark Yet by Berit Ellingsen
Two Dollar Radio
ISBN: 978-1937412354
Fiction, 202 pages
Published in 2015
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VALERIE STOREY: I don't review a lot of books, but when I do it's because I really want to--I want to share something important and real that I think other writers and readers will enjoy and benefit from. That's why I'm taking a look today at Not Dark Yet by author Berit Ellingsen, a writer who has enriched my world and inspired me to keep writing, keep striving, keep going, and always take the time to read a good book.
I first heard about Berit via Twitter, the best source I know for discovering books and authors I wouldn't usually have the chance to learn about. Thanks to so many bookstores disappearing from my neighborhood (three more have just gone bankrupt this past month), social media has become my primary source for literary browsing, and when I read a post about Berit and her collection of short stories: Beneath the Liquid Skin, I had to order the book, pronto. Nothing in my extensive reading life had prepared me for the power and originality of those stories, so naturally I couldn't wait to read her novel, Not Dark Yet. I don't think anything else I've read before or after can compare with either of these books.
Berit lives in Norway, and her work reflects a beautiful sense of place, an isolated starkness that is in direct contrast with much of my own experience. Even desert-y Albuquerque doesn't have the sharp, cold lunar feeling I get from her descriptions. Coupled with this strong geographic presence is a staggering sense of precision to every word she writes, an exactness that has me re-reading many of her sentences for the sheer pleasure of it. In many ways I consider her a "writer's writer" and after I finished reading Not Dark Yet I sat down with my journal to examine what it was that made me love this book so much. Here goes:
MORE AT LINK:
http://valeriestorey.blogspot.tw/2016/08/book-review-not-dark-yet-by-berit.html?m=1
VALERIE ADDS: ''So with all that said, I think I have to read the book again. Not Dark Yet is quirky, original, and packed with secrets -- the kind you can't wait to unravel and sit with for a long while after. I found the book extremely compelling and one that has stirred my curiosity and desire to learn more, write more, and even try my hand at some fan-art. Highly recommended for readers who enjoy an authentic book of ideas and a serious voyage of self-discovery. Five stars from me--six if I could!''
Do check out Berit Ellingsen and her books at her webiste here.
http://valeriestorey.blogspot.tw/2016/08/book-review-not-dark-yet-by-berit.html?m=1
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Berit Ellingsen is a Korean-Norwegian writer who writes in English. We asked her how multiculturalism affects her writing.
Berit’s Novel The Empty City
Multiculturalism affects me first and foremost in that I write in a language that is not the first language of the country I live in. It’s the language most people here learn as a second language, yet which we hear every day on tv and other media, and which is taught early in grade school, and in some cases on pre-school level.
In a country with a small population and not much cultural dominance in the past, the population has to learn
the language that is most used for business and communication, which is English, to be able to communicate with the rest of the world.
Since it’s expensive to translate books and documents, and most people understand English well, a lot of academic literature, business reports, and even fiction is usually not translated, but
imported and read in English. Similarly, large amounts of entertainment and media is imported from English-speaking countries.
Maybe as much as a third of the programs on the tv channels in Norway is in English.
''If I hadn’t written in English, I would first and foremost have missed working in a language which has terms and expressions that are more
accurate than my own language, a much wider vocabulary, and which just feels more suited for writing. That’s why I prefer to write fiction in English.''
''English is also such a widespread language, that by writing in English, my stories and books have been read by people who live in
countries and on continents I have never been to, and in cultures I have never experienced in person, and that is just amazing to know. That would probably not have happened if I had only stuck to my first language.''
Moreover, a French writer who also does translations to English, found my novel, The Empty City, online and wanted to translate it to French, a language I don’t know very well and can’t write in. If I hadn’t written in English, my words would not have reached that audience, whose language I don’t speak.
Naturally, there are more people who write in English than in Norwegian, and perhaps it’s more difficult to gain the attention of editors and publishers, but there are also many more literary journals, presses, and even fellowships and retreats, a writer can apply to in English.
Then there’s the great pleasure of
connecting with other writers from all over the world, both writers who are writing in their first language, and other writers who are also writing in their second (or third) language.
Writing in a second language of course presents some challenges. There almost seems to be an asymptotic phenomenon: no matter how well you know this language, no matter how much you read or write in it,
there will always be errors and mistakes. So you need to like the language you write in a lot, and wanting to keep learning new words, new meanings and new expressions.
Another issue is that of dialect or slang. Since English is not my first language, I hesitate to write any kind of local dialect or slang, because that would feel like a cultural appropriation and perhaps be inauthentic. Hence,
I mostly use a neutral standard English in dialogue. But maybe that places me as a western middle-class writer from the start?
I nevertheless love to hear local expressions, slang and dialect in all the languages I’m familiar with. I also enjoy learning words that have no direct equivalent or translation in other languages, words that are highly specific to a situation, place, or culture, are fun to learn.
They capture emotions or situations other words can’t.
There is also
something invaluable in being able to read another writer’s words directly, without having to rely on translation, which is always approximate and subject to interpretation. Not to mention the fascinating event when two people are able to communicate in a common language, even if they don’t speak each other’s first language.
That brings a personal understanding and the chance to bridge large gaps in culture, background, or geographical distance, which people who insist that others must speak their language in order to communicate with them will never experience.
Through common languages we can directly experience for ourselves that humans have more in common than what separates us. As a biologist and writer, I believe this was the reason why abstract language evolved in humans in the first place.
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Berit Ellingsen is a Korean-Norwegian writer whose stories have appeared in Unstuck, SmokeLong Quarterly, elimae, Birkensnake, and other literary journals. Her short story collection,
Beneath the Liquid Skin, was published by firthFORTH Books in November 2012. She was also nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the British Science Fiction Award in 2012. Berit’s novel,
The Empty City, was translated and published in French as Une Ville Vide (Publie Monde) in the summer of 2013. Find out more at
beritellingsen.com and follow her on twitter @
BeritEllingsen
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AND
In SmokeLong
‘s “Why Flash Fiction?” series, flash fiction writers and editors explore what draws them to the form. In this column, Berit Ellingsen provides an overview of flash and shares selections from Lightspeed Magazine’s
People of Colo(u)r Destroy Flash Fiction! special issue, which she guest edited. Submit your own “Why Flash Fiction?” article or other flash-related essays on our Submittable page!
Berit Ellingsen is the author of two novels,
Not Dark Yet (Two Dollar Radio), and
Une ville vide (PublieMonde), as well as a collection of short stories,
Beneath the Liquid Skin (Queen’s Ferry Press). Her work has been published in W.W. Norton’s
Flash Fiction International,
SmokeLong Quarterly,
Unstuck,
Litro, and other places, and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the British Science Fiction Association Award. Berit travels between Norway and Svalbard in the Arctic, and is a member of the Norwegian Authors’ Union. Learn more at
http://beritellingsen.com.
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Interview about the novel
here.
Bruno George reviews the novel this way:
“Are you going to shoot them all?” a fellow soldier asks Brandon Minamoto, protagonist of Berit Ellingsen’s new novel Not Dark Yet. These words come in a flashback sequence, where Brandon is a sniper deployed on a “southern continent” in what might be a humanitarian intervention or police action. The spotter, Kepler, is asking Brandon whether he will shoot the child-guerillas they can see laying an IED in the road. Brandon’s tour of duty takes up only a few scant pages of Ellingsen’s novel, but his answer to the spotter is telling. Will he shoot all the children? Ellingsen writes: “‘No,’ he said, exhaled, and entered the space between one breath and the next.” The space Brandon enters is that of taking aim; and so his elliptic answer becomes all the more grave: “no” means “not all” means yes, he will shoot one or some.
Perhaps it is misleading to begin a review here. In the rest of the novel, Brandon is neither an ice-cold killer nor a resolute man of action. But this passage illustrates the difficulty of demonstrating the beauty contained in Not Dark Yet, a beauty of construction. It isn’t until later in the novel that Brandon’s stillness (“the space between one breath and the next”) is revealed as more than just a temporary military habit, taken on in basic training and shucked with demobilization. Brandon’s abiding passivity, in fact, makes the novel less a plotted progress than a rising series of arresting tableaux. The narration, too, often works by ellipsis and even a kind of focal misdirection. In the combat scene, whatever shots Brandon takes go unnarrated; also unnarrated are the cries of the wounded child-soldiers and the night in which they suffer and probably die. But war is the least of the horsemen in Not Dark Yet’s soft, subtle apocalypse; what wreaks havoc in this novel is climate change.
One might describe the novel as set in the “near future,” but it would be better to say its world is just a half-degree warmer, or its sea levels only a fraction of an inch higher. What obtains from this change? In the unnamed northern country of
Not Dark Yet, experimental agronomists till the soil in winter,
a land once snowed under now laid bare by a warming climate. But the novel’s world is otherwise indistinguishable from our own. Of the emergent disasters cataloged by the novel—“droughts, forest fires, crop failures . . . flooding, storms, loss of drinking water and arable land”—every one of them has already begun in our own world. Before
Not Dark Yet even begins, futurity has undergone a swift and silent collapse: every environmental calamity we were once warned of, every baleful but distant eventuality, is already underway. Somehow, without anyone’s having noticed, “the troubling, uncertain future ha[s] become the volatile, menacing present.”
But Ellingsen has not written an On the Beach or On the Road; she presents no hellscape and no descent into atavism. Brandon and his friends and family live in a world of functioning cell phones and laptops and automobiles; they eat steak dinners with green salad and they prudently stint on the carbs; they inhabit a world of modern university campuses and convenient trams and nicely appointed condominiums. Cosseted or at least comfortable, they nonetheless subject themselves to the television news: “floods to the north, crop failures on the eastern continent, hurricanes on the western continent, drought on the entire southern continent, demonstrations, riots, war.” But as with recent wars and storms in our own world, these harbingers of catastrophe function almost as public secrets: known but unnoticed, publicly announced but not yet fully apprehended.
Had Ellingsen further heightened the catastrophe, she could have drawn on the eerie talents she has exhibited in previous writings. In a short story called “
Vessel and Solsvart,” a man who is scarcely more than an animate corpse staggers through a post-apocalyptic world of burnt-out cities and boiling oceans;
her prose is restrained but her vision excoriating. The stories in the collection
Beneath the Liquid Skin, too, are far from realism. That Ellingsen has not further upped the ante much beyond our present-day reality in
Not Dark Yet means that readers are deprived of a certain hypocritical pleasure, that of self-satisfiedly tutting over the ruin its characters have made of their fictional Earth. The German critic Walter Benjamin once wrote of the modern novel genre—disparagingly—that “what draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” How much more warmly might fiction’s fire blaze when we read about deaths on a planetary scale.
But that isn’t the novel Ellingsen has written; it’s not a spectacle of the world’s end, served up for our complacent delectation. Midway through the novel, Brandon has a dream about just this kind of hypocritical enjoyment: In an ocean-liners’ graveyard, ships arrive under their own power, still carrying passengers, and then slowly begin to sink in the gelid water. The dream’s sublime moment is a blinding white light; flashbulbs go off on one of the ships, where passengers crowd the rails, “eager to watch the sinking of the others while taking [o]n water themselves.”
Not Dark Yet is ultimately a Robinsonade, its Crusoe, Brandon, willingly isolated in a cabin in the woods. Even the novel’s first line harkens back to Crusoe the world-traveler: “Sometimes, in Brandon Minamoto’s dreams, he found a globe or a map of the world with a continent he hadn’t seen before.” But unlike Crusoe, Brandon doesn’t save himself and his isolate world through deep-sea salvaging and strict accounting. Standing before his cabin for the very first time, Brandon has a yielding, melting, anonymous experience that sharply separates him from Defoe’s energetic and autonomous Crusoe: “He closed his eyes and there was no body, and no world either, only the simple, singular nothingness he recognized as himself.”
If Crusoe endeavors and perseveres on his island, the lesser characters of Not Dark Yet also make efforts to take command of their warming planet’s fate, but Brandon is witness to their serial failures: the farmers’ experimental winter crops are destroyed in a flood; the space exploration program is cancelled; the militant environmentalists undertake a propaganda of the deed, but on the eve of their attack Brandon withdraws from their group, less for ideological reasons than by dint of his passive temperament. The novel is structured a bit like Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, with its experiments in different ways of being, except that Brandon tries on ways of not being: in the army, he practices a soldier’s self-extinguishment in duty; in a visit to a monastery, he identifies with the story of a Buddhist monk’s auto-mortification;* in epileptic seizures, he feels a magnetic union with the earth’s telluric pull ; and, in a late sequence, he yields himself up to the ocean: “The motion surged him forward, and there was no resisting or refusing being engulfed.”
In the French novelist Michel Tournier’s Robinsonade—entitled Friday—Crusoe is a philosophical man. Cast up on shore all alone, he considers, as Heidegger might, that to exist is to be thrown into the outside: “sistere ex,” says Tournier’s Crusoe, “That which is outside exists. That which is within does not.” His island, named Speranza, is a natural world fundamentally separate from and outside of himself. He finds Speranza’s externality maddeningly seductive, and he negates it: “Lying with his arms outstretched, his loins in turmoil, he embraced that great body scorched all day by the sun . . . His sex burrowed like a plowshare into the earth.”Tournier’s Crusoe is the obverse of Ellingsen’s: a conqueror. For Brandon, the natural world is not alien, but continuous with the self, albeit in spooky and unsettling and dangerous ways.
The interior that Tournier’s Crusoe finds so nonexistent is exactly where Brandon keeps situating himself: he and the militants are “inside the night”; with his lover Kaye he is “inside their now mutual, monumental secret”; alone in his cabin, “he welcomed the stillness and sat inside it”. Likewise, in a strikingly parallel scene to Crusoe’s penetration of the island, Brandon lies down on the earth; the motifs here are not tropic sun and conquering sex, but merger and deliquescence and mortification: “He lay down . . . and breathed in the fragrance of decomposition and soil, letting the earth’s moisture seep into his clothes, while earthworms, slugs, and beetles crawled over his face and hands.” This death-like stillness is Brandon’s answer to the militants; immediately upon parting from them, he merges with dirt and worms and slugs, and it is hard not to read the scene allegorically: against militant deeds, Brandon, and maybe the novel, prefer to yield to what is, even if that is death.
Having a “singular nothingness” as a protagonist, the novel is not without its longueurs. Brandon loves and betrays a boyfriend, he joins and leaves a militant group, he chases his ambition to be an astronaut and then sees that ambition come to naught, all with a certain weightless languor. Whenever he parts from someone—a candidate in the astronaut tryouts, a fellow militant, or his partner or his lover—he displays not the least anxiety about when he will see them again, and so in parting he makes no reassuring gestures of sentiment or sociability. In turn, reading about Brandon’s interactions is sometimes a struggle with that weightlessness; something keeps slipping away. At the level of propositions, the novel is rich with complex social life; a scientist character provides up-to-date theories of altruism, affect, and evolution: “empathy, the ability to care for another being, preceded humans, was older than humanity itself. It was a trait shared by many mammals.” But at his most sociable, isolate Brandon consorts mainly with ghosts, with the diminishing traces of the other people: “the residue of the other candidates’ presences and voices, the sights and smells of the past week, played themselves out in his mind and slowly faded.”
Like Robinson Crusoe, Ellingsen’s Not Dark Yet plunges its hero into the ocean. Typically passive, Brandon reflects that a death by drowning is not a frenzy of action—frantic waving—but extinction, suffocation. The shore Ellingsen then casts him up on is our own; the coming storm is here, and it won’t be outflanked or outthought. Nonetheless, the novel’s diminuendo in the final chapter offers some hope, in the upsurge of a clear spring and in the fall of dusk: “Outside, the fields lay black and empty, with no one to till them. The gray light of day dimmed to a blue dusk and settled into distant, pale stars.” Not dark yet. - Bruno George
