Smart, cutting, witty, lamenting, meditative, and sociological, these private thoughts reverberate throughout the novel’s 19 chapters. And with them Basran’s novel serves up a social commentary that wouldn’t be out of place in a Jane Austen novel. There’s family, there’s tradition, and there’s the inexorable force of them; and then there’s the price paid — compromises, sacrifices, postponed dreams, exclusion, conformity, resignation.
Like the work it describes, the subtitle of the Sámi poet Linnea Axelsson’s AEdnan: An Epic is a marvelous provocation. In her translation from the Swedish, Saskia Vogel has rendered Axelsson’s multigenerational story of a Samí family over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st in a vernacular so close to silence that it invites the readerly equivalent of straining to hear a whisper. The poem’s clean lines resemble some perpetual noon where ambiguities, like shadows at the sun’s zenith, must be compacted into such small zones that those who aren’t looking for them are likely to be fooled into thinking them nonexistent. AEdnan’s matter is the dispossession and forced assimilation of the Sámi—an Indigenous people who have traditionally lived in the north of the Scandinavian and Kola peninsulas—into Swedish society. Axelsson resists the sprawling sonority so often associated with epic poetry in favor of a tightly focused examination of the way historical tragedy reverberates in unexceptional lives: a couple named Ber-Joná and Ristin lose their child to the hazards of nomadic life in the first generation and the poem tracks the experiences of their descendants as the appropriation of their ancestral lands and Swedish prohibitions against their way of life accelerate, including the outlawing of Sámi languages and customs and the forcible removal, after the Second World War, of Sámi children to “nomad schools” meant to absorb them into the Swedish citizenry.
Al Pacino grew up running the streets of the South Bronx with his buddies, getting into whatever trouble might present itself. In his new memoir, “Sonny Boy,” he calls his little crew “a pack of wild, pubescent wolves with sly smiles,” and describes how his three best friends, Cliffy, Bruce and Petey, eventually died of heroin overdoses. Pacino would confine his junkie life to the screen, in his 1971 breakout performance in “The Panic in Needle Park.” He would be the first to tell you that he was saved by art.
Throughout this discursively soulful book runs a series of interconnected questions: Why did I make it when so many others didn’t? Why can’t I just practice my craft and leave the stardom and celebrity part out of it?