Background
Finn Carling was born on October 1, 1925, into an upper-middle-class family in Oslo, Norway. He is the son of Sigrid and Bjarne Carling.
1949
Problemveien 7, 0315 Oslo, Norway
At the University of Oslo Finn Carling studied psychology.
1958
2400 6th St NW, Washington, DC 20059, United States
Finn graduated from Howard University with Fulbright scholarship.
2003
Finn Carling talks about his latest book "Kan hende ved en bredd" in an interview for NRK.TV.
(A stunning novel from one of Norway's most distinguished ...)
A stunning novel from one of Norway's most distinguished writers. This is the story of Felicia, who, after her husband's death, begins her diary to keep him in touch with what is going on in the world of living.
https://www.amazon.com/Diary-Dead-Husband-Hardback-1999/dp/B01M7QW87S/?tag=2022091-20
1999
Finn Carling was born on October 1, 1925, into an upper-middle-class family in Oslo, Norway. He is the son of Sigrid and Bjarne Carling.
He was born with cerebral palsy and did not walk or read until he was fifteen years old. However, physical challenges were not the only difficulties that Carling had to overcome during his childhood. His father, according to Sigrid B. Moe in World Literature Today, “was cruel and selfish,” while his mother “was a pathetic soul who had to be guarded against suicide.” The early experience of physical and emotional distress, noted Paul Binding in Times Literary Supplement, has “driven Carling to explore and empathize with those who are excluded from what is conveniently defined as ordinary life: with animals, with gays, and with elderly women.”
During hist early ages, Finn studied psychology at the University of Oslo during 1945-1949. Subsequently, he moved to Howard University to study on Fulbright scholarship from 1957 to 1958.
Carling made his literary debut in 1949 with "Broen; to noveller med en enakter". As Mary Kay Norseng wrote in Encyclopedia of World Literature, “Broen’s unusual form, consisting of two separate but related short stories and an incorporated play, signaled the experimental nature of Carling’s work in general.”
A central theme in Carling’s early career was the relationship between dream and reality. In two highly personal and autobiographical works from the late 1950s, "And Yet We Are Human" (written in English) and "Kilden og muren", he comes to regard dreams as a flight from reality. During the 1960s Carling wrote documentary essays about people who, because of various “differences,” are treated as social outsiders. Among these are "Vanskeligstilte barn I hjem og skole", about disadvantaged children; "Blind verden", about the blind; and "De homofile", about homosexuals. By the late ’60s, Carling had again turned to fiction; though works from this period are considered more positive than his early books, his writing has remained centered on the isolation of the individual searching for permanent meaning.
English translations of Carling’s later works have received consistently enthusiastic critical response. In particular, his fictionalized autobiography, "Gjensyn fra en fremtid", was hailed as an innovative book. Written in 1988, it is set in the year 2000 and imagines the author’s life in a backward trajectory, beginning with his escape, in advanced old age, from a nursing home. After stealing a doctor’s luxury car, the character Carling, accompanied by his son, drives off into his past to revisit key experiences in his life. “Take a conventional account of a man’s life, cross it with an H. G. Wells novel, and stir in the ingredients of an entertaining sci-fi film,” wrote Muinzer in World Literature Today, “and you have something rather like "Gjensyn fra en fremtid".”
An unconventional narrative approach also characterizes the novel "Under aftenhimmelen", in which, over the course of five evenings, two unlikely strangers on a Greek island dine together and swap outlandish tales. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called the book an “intriguing, constantly unpredictable meditation on illusion versus reality.” "Oppdrag" contains elements of the mystery genre as well as fantasy. In this novel, a disillusioned writer who has secluded himself on the island of Corsica suddenly receives a commission from a wealthy family to write a book about their youngest son, Sebastian, whose death in Singapore was either a suicide or a murder. New York Times Book Review critic Marilyn Stasio deemed the book a “spare but searing mystery” with an “ending that leaves one shattered.” A reviewer for Publishers Weekly, hailing the novel as “beautifully crafted and rendered in exquisitely spare prose,” suggested that “this powerful literary novel will richly reward those who are interested in reading beyond the ordinary.”
In the novel "En annen vei", a doctor is taken hostage by terrorists in a war-tom country apparently based on Somalia. The doctor uses his intense imagination to survive his captivity, envisioning himself from a distance or putting himself back into the past. A central motif concerns the staging of Hamlet in a damaged theater, during which the actors playing the title role and most major parts suddenly die with no explanation. “Whereas the theater is originally seen as a protection from reality, the last refuge of the human spirit,” wrote Sverre Lyngstad in World Literature Today, “eventually the separation breaks down. Existence, grown too horrible to contemplate even through art, is renounced, in a gesture that makes Schopenhauerian pessimism look bland and harmless.” Observing that the novel is as suspenseful as any mystery, Lyngstad concluded that its “issues are of central concern to every civilized person.”
The creative process is also central to "Matadorens hand". In this novel, which takes its title from Picasso’s remark, “An artist’s hand is like the hand of a matador. He kills in order to create a truer reality,” a writer returns after an absence of forty years to the summer home of his childhood. His reminiscences explore the inspirations for art, while also suggesting the futility of trying to go home again. Amanda Langemo, in World Literature Today, remarked on tire book’s difficulty, with its shifts from narrative to exposition and in time and place. “As is true of Carling’s other novels,” Langemo concluded, “the style of Matadorens hand is compact, intense, and convincing.”
“Frokost i det skjpnne” is a dystopian novel with elements recalling “Brave New World” and “Nineteen Eighty-four”. In World Literature Today, Sverre Lyngstad found the work lacking in the “intellectual amplitude and passionate intensity of classics of the genre.” More fabulist is “Gepardene”, in which an elderly man’s meditations on the human condition make overt references to the mystical Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. In the novel, which contains elements similar to those Carling used in his play “Gitrene”, a character named Rabindranath sits outside the zoo every day on the same bench and speaks to an invisible girl named Gitanjali (the title of a volume of Tagore’s poems). Rabindranath tells the girl fables about the caged animals, suggesting parallels between their caged existence and that of humans. Though World Literature Today contributor Tanya Thresher felt that the spiritual dimensions of the novel are unconvincing, she commended it as a “dark, if well-written, fable of human existence.”
Carling returns to his concern for marginalized persons in “Dagbok til en død”, a novel about the first year of an elderly woman’s widowhood. The book, deemed “beautiful, unforgettable, and important” by Langemo in World Literature Today, is structured as Felicia’s diary addressed to her dead husband. As Binding put it in his Times Literary Supplement review, Carling “has projected himself into the being of an aging woman in order to confront the universals of loss, physical and mental degeneration and approaching death.” The book, according to Binding, “makes a plea for social inclusiveness that will not marginalize an unremarkable elderly bourgeois widow like Felicia; Carling also shows us that marginalization itself promotes insights from which society can benefit.”
Among Carling’s nonfiction works, “Hva med Hippokrates? Om legerollen og del hele menneske” has been welcomed as a sensitive and reasonable examination of contemporary medical practice. Much of the book recounts the suffering endured by the physically disabled, the elderly, and the dying - who need but often do not receive, compassionate attention from their doctors. “What would Hippocrates say of modern physicians?” the author asks. Though Carling criticizes medical arrogance and urges patients to ask questions and become more active in their treatments, he points out that he respects much about modem medicine and does not hate doctors. Walter D. Morris, in a World Literature Today review, observed that “Carling’s well-written, well-documented book should be required reading for all would-be physicians.”
Carling has traveled extensively both in the United States and in Africa; as a matter of fact, he frequently uses African settings in his more recent books. He is also a sought-after speaker and has been active in cultural debates in his native Norway. Carling’s books and plays have been translated into several languages, including English, German, Dutch, and Czech.
(A stunning novel from one of Norway's most distinguished ...)
1999Finn Carling was a member of Den Norske Foifatterforening.
Carling’s severe physical handicap naturally influenced his life and his writing. As a boy, while others roamed the streets of Oslo, he could only explore the city through the windows of his car during trips downtown. So he compensated by inventing an entire miniature town in his room. His father did the carpentry, while Carling himself created the inhabitants in the form of animals acting like people. Louis A. Muinzer wrote in World Literature Today that “the small inhabitants of Animal Town provided Carling with a specialized power tool that has virtually become his trademark: the use of animals to probe and portray human beings in his writing.” Merkelige Maja, about his dog Maja, and Gepardene are typical of his technique.
During his life, Finn Carling had three wives. His last wife was Anne Carling. On the second marriage, they had one child, and on the third another son: Jorgen Carling.