The Almost Nearly Perfect People
First read May 2015
Rambling. Rambling! This is the sort of rambling digressive writing that I imagined my collegiate blog contained, until I used the wayback machine to actually look at it and it was bad. Direct recollections of events with some swears thrown in. “The waitress was mad at me for ordering French Toast even though the menu said Freedom Toast” was peak 2003, and also she probably didn’t care but I likely felt awkward breaking even this completely arbitrary social norm and so assumed she was mad and hated my anti-war precocity. This was a real event that I wrote down.
I love the internet archive but I wouldn’t be that sad to see any trace of my old blog erased from existence. It is like Pandora’s box but for nostalgic forty-year-olds.
I don’t remember Almost Nearly at all, and can’t recall why I read it. When I move these old reviews I tend to edit them for clarity, but this one feels like maybe the impenetrable and often grammatically unsound writing it half the purpose of the looking back at it.
Could I edit and rewrite the scene from my blog with the freedom toast? Sure. Should I? Probably not. It would kind of defeat the purpose of the archived material. And so it is with Almost Nearly: you get what you get, and you don’t get upset.
book by Michael Booth
I do not know when the sea change occurred in non-fiction that gave rise to the strong narrative voice; when I’d pondered this issue before I had given credit to the popularity of Game Change and Too Big To Fail. We could start a whole chicken-and-egg thing, though; if those are even the first two (which is unlikely), why did they get the greenlight? Whatever the cause—and, publishers, I would certainly read a first-hand account of the rise of strong narrator presence in non-fiction—I am thankful to be reading at a time when non-fiction books are written with personality. Older non-fiction, The Death and Life of Great American Cities notwithstanding, are often didactic to the point of soporific. The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia contains more joie de vivre than, according to its narrator, the entirety of the Nordic countries smashed together. Which, as he cheekily points out, is technically different from Scandinavia:
That term refers to the people of the original Viking lands—Denmark, Sweden, and Norway—only. But, as I discovered on my travels around the region, the Finns have reserved the right to opt in or out of the old marauders’ club as and when it suits them, and I don’t think the Icelanders would be too upset to be labeled Scandinavians, either. Strictly speaking, if we are going to lump all five countries together we really out to use the term “Nordic.” But this is my book and so I reserve the right to bandy both terms about pretty much interchangeably.
I like this guy already.
There is probably a guttural word in German for the concept of learning something useful particularly because you were not looking for it. There are long, incredibly specific words for every feeling in German to the point it is kind of a joke. Freundschaftsbezeigungen, the demonstrations of friendship? No, as serendipitous as it might be to be able to slot Danish or Swedish or Finnish into that joke, you know if the word exists, it would be German. But much like the story of penicillin—the legendary paean of lazy people everywhere who want a reason to leave dirty dishes in the sink while they rush out the door—or the radar-to-microwave-oven creation story, science is so littered with “accidental discoveries” and “happy accidents” that reshape the world this way and that. So it is with non-fiction; you never know exactly what you’re going to pull out of the text. As I continue to write and edit this paragraph, I recognize the irony posed by the fact that “serendipitous” is the English word for “happy accident.” Non-fiction’s biggest strength is the, uh, serendipitous collection of facts you had no driving urge to pick up. You’re welcome for the schadenfreude as you watch me struggle with simple vocabulary.
Almost Nearly is surprisingly candid with its subtitling—it presents itself as a travelogue of the Nordic region and then doesn’t present the author’s relationship with haunted houses or speculative jewel heists—it is truly the story of the author amidst the five Nordic nations. The sardonic “almost nearly perfect” signifies the dryness you’re about to encounter while the patter of light British banter slides you smoothly from one topic to the next. I tend to personally rely on the Virgil-leading-Dante metaphor when conjuring narrative voice within non-fiction novels, but it has never been less apt than in this novel; the subject matter is not a purgatory that requires a guide but a theme park that is cool and made cooler by being escorted by your friend’s older brother, back from college. Especially for those of us that know the region largely through an Ikea catalogue:
One thing in particular about this newfound love of all things Scandinavian—be it their free-form schools, whitewashed interior design, consensus-driven political systems, or chunky sweaters—struck me as particularly odd: considering all this positive PR, and with awareness of the so-called Nordic miracle at an all-time high, why wasn’t everyone flocking to live here? Why did people still dream of a house in Spain or France? Why weren’t they packing up their mules and heading for Aalborg or Trondheim? For all the crime literature and TV shows, why was our knowledge of contemporary Scandinavia still so abysmally lacking? How come you have no idea where Aalborg or Trondheim actually are? Why can no one you know speak Swedish or “get by” in Norwegian? Name the Danish foreign minister. Or Norway’s most popular comedian. Or a Finnish person. Any Finnish person.
The morning I started this book, New York’s local NPR station name-dropped Borgen, a Danish TV show that, by virtue of Almost Nearly I had just seen in print. Serendipity! Or was it? I could have potentially heard references to Borgen dozens of times and just not recognized, processed, or cared that I had. Similarly to my experience with cochineal, how many things do we only notice the second, third, or umpteenth time they are waved in front of our faces?
When I started reading The New Yorker right after college I would skip the stories covering topics that didn’t interest me; why waste my time? After I began to write a blog and fancy myself a writer-to-be, I began to read everything in the magazine—it wasn’t the topics that motivated me, but the idealized writing structure, heightened vocabulary, and general worldliness that drew me in. What I uncovered was what I have dubbed the standard The New Yorker format—articles will start off covering whatever the title mentions, will break somewhere in the middle to do a deep-dive into something wholly unrelated, and close by tying the two disparate concepts together. I was—and still am—in love with this format. My writing has always been imprinted with this ideal—finding the common thread between this and that—and strives to show the reader why it is better to come away with more information than you came in for in the first place. This is the strength of modern non-fiction: you don’t need to care about the subject matter if the writing is good enough, the narrator affable enough, the information fascinating enough. The wider a net you cast—the more books you pick up, topic sentences be damned—the more exposure you’ll get to things you didn’t even know you didn’t know. That is how we gain knowledge; the same facts being thrown at us a dozen times from a dozen different perspectives. And the dozen different perspectives are something the Nordic countries apparently lack:
As Danish anthropologist Jeppe Trolle Linner once wrote, “When people hygge, they engage in a mutual sheltering of each other from the pressures of competition and social evaluation.” In this way hygge can seem like self-administered social gagging, characterized more by a self-satisfied sense of its own exclusivity than notions of shared conviviality. Linnet wrote that hygge “acts as a vehicle for social control, establishes its own hierarchy of attitudes, and implies a negative stereotyping of social groups who are perceived as unable to create hygge.” The inference here is that only Danes really know how to have a properly hyggelig time; pity those poor foreigners with their la-di-da cocktail parties, their gladiatorial dinner-party discussions, and sophisticated soirées. Similarly, in his book Being Danish: Paradoxes of Identity in Everyday Life, British anthropologist Richard Jenkins has described hygge as “normative to the point of coercive.”
I learned so many answers to questions I didn’t even know existed. I want to read more about the region, and I hope to find another narrative voice as enjoyable as Almost Nearly's to lead me around. So I’ll give him the honor of the last word:
Whale sushi, guillemot, and smoked puffin—all of which I tried during my time in Reykjavik—were relatively pleasant, but hákarl did get wondering about the Icelanders. What kind of a people, when surrounded by some of the greatest, freshest fish on the planet, along with ice in which to store it, would decide they would rather eat toxic, putrefied shark? It seemed evidence of an extraordinary bloody-mindedness.