Fretex, Oslo.

Smith, Sarah

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Past Var Frelsers gravlund (graveyard), posthumous home to such Norwegian literary greats as Henrik Ibsen, Henrik Wergeland, and Camilla Collett, lies Ruuds Antikvariat, a tiny bookstore for old and rare books, and a Fretex (a chain of secondhand stores owned by the Norwegian Frelsesarmeen, or Salvation Army). Visitors to the first floor of the Fretex on Ullevalsveien find clothes: lots of black dresses on neat racks and, at the back right wall, a few hanging shelves sparsely populated by bland travel books. But the literary curious who can get past the denim skirts see a stairwell past the travel books and, upon descending, will find a basement whose entire front wall is a bookshelf filled with titles in Norwegian.

Literature from all over, translated into Norwegian, is available there, with authors from Cormac McCarthy and Carsten Jensen to Dostoevsky and Proust. But mixed in with all those are plenty of Jorgensens, Petters, and Nilsens, in addition to Norwegian classic works by Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Camilla Collett, and the requisite Henrik Ibsen. Little poetry books are stacked on top of the shelves: Wergeland, yes, but more Jorgensens and Hansens and other Norwegian everymen, published 2007, 2008, 2010. In a secondhand bookstore anywhere else, you'd expect to find those classic works of national fiction--likely they're required reading for young students--but perhaps you'd be hard-pressed to find contemporary national authors, a sure indicator that the people are in contact with the literature their nation is currently producing, not just what it's broadly known for.

The social mission of the Fretex--to provide for people however they need it, often in the form of employment opportunities--proliferates social capital within Norwegian communities, creating a feeling of closeness among Norwegians who, united under a mother-state, begin to feel cared for by each other as well. That overt mission of the Frelsesarmeen then blends with a more subtle cultural effect of the Fretex book section: the creation and proliferation of a continued Norwegian national identity through the accessibility of its literature, both classic and contemporary.

Sarah Smith is a WLT intern studying writing at the University of Oklahoma. She hopes to someday write a book that high school students will be forced to read. When she isn't writing, she serves as a volunteer barista in a local nonprofit coffee shop.