Readers and fans from all walks of life mourn the passing of Ingvar Ambjørnsen, a prolific Norwegian author who started out as an advocate of outsiders and became, much to his own surprise, a part of Norway’s cultural heritage.
Ambjørnsen also generated millions upon millions for Oslo-based publishing firm Cappelen Damm and other players in the cultural sector, not least from witty books and movies about his neurotic anti-hero Elling who attracted a wide international audience.
“The sensitive and vulnerable people among us were rarely more recognizable and real, and never closer to ourselves, than when Ingvar Ambjørnsen placed them in front of us,” commentator Mari Grydeland wrote in Aftenposten. She compared Ambjørnsen to the late Jens Bjørneboe, another rebellious writer famous for shining an upleasant light into dark corners of Norwegian society.
“Ambjørnsen went from the long-haired counter-culture to the golden echelons of popular literature,” Grydeland wrote. “And his opinions that once caused lots of controversy, like demanding help, not punishment, for drug addicts, are now written into the party programme of (Norway’s Conservative Party) Høyre.”
Ambjørnsen died on July 19 after a lengthy battle against COPD, a chronic lung disease. He was 69. An author of 33 books, he wrote little during his final years as his health failed. But his last work, a collection of short stories, was published just a few days after his death and before his upcoming funeral this week. It was already receiving rave reviews over the weekend, just after being rushed to the bookstores.
Ambjørnsen lived and worked almost his entire adult life in Hamburg, Germany, mostly writing and seeing few other people than his wife. “In Germany I found good working conditions for the first time. There were no friends who came and disturbed me. A large home and an office, that I’ve really never walked out of,” he told fellow author Kaj Skagen in an interview for the weekly newspaper Dag og Tid in 2021.
“Writing has taken all my time,” he added. “I haven’t made friends with anyone down here, and I have lived completely outside of German society, You could say I have lived in double exile, like an emigrant who never arrived in a new homeland.”
Shortly before his death, however, Ambjørnsen moved back to Norway and into a private health care center. His funeral will also take place in Norway on Thursday, at the same former church-turned-culture center in Oslo where another cultural icon, Ole Paus, was put to rest last year. Ambjørnsen’s death notice in Norwegian newspapers, signed by his German widow Gabriele Haefs, stated that her late husband would have appreciated a gift to the Salvation Army “at least as much as flowers.”
That’s an appropriate wish for Ingvar Ambjørnsen, who perhaps knew more about the Salvation Army’s clientele than any other contemporary author. His characters are the types that more than a few good citizens would rather avoid; the drunks, the drug addicts, the downtrodden and the mentally ill.
This marginalized underworld became a market for Ambjørnsen’s work early on: Stories from the underground, written by one of their own, and often depicting them with unusual warmth and sympathy, found readers who perhaps never opened a book. “He had readers that no one else could reach,” friend and fellow author Erik Fosnes Hansen noted, with a hint of envy, in an obituary in Aftenposten.
According to Fosnes Hansen, Ambjørnsen’s insightful stories sometimes made citizens of this gloomy underworld believe that he wrote about them personally, and that the tall, long-haired Ingvar with a dope career of his own, was the only one who understood them. That could be a problem at times, when complete strangers rang the doorbell in the hope of a chat with their very own freak celebrity.
Ambjørnsen was around 14 when he decided to become an author, and he pursued that dream all his life. Those who knew him say that even if he had not been successful, he’d probably never have picked a different career. He was not interested in fathering children, and moved permanently to Hamburg in search of peace and quiet to work. A notable exception from his reclusiveness was his 1985 marriage to Haefs, a prominent translator of Norwegian literature (including her husband’s) into German. Some of Ambjørnsen’s work has been translated into French and other languages, but remarkably little of it is available in English.
Ambjørnsen’s writing career spanned almost five decades, starting humbly with a homemade, self-published collection of underground poems and comics called Pepsikyss (Pepsi kisses) in 1976, which he sold on the street for just NOK 3 a piece, roughly equivalent to the price of a bus ticket at the time. When he had sold half of the copies, earning NOK 600, he threw the rest of them in a garbage container. Neither the publishers nor Ambjørnsen himself liked Pepsikyss much. But a few years ago, a rare copy of it reportedly fetched almost NOK 20,000 at an auction in Bergen.
Instead of doing military service, Ambjørnsen opted to serve at a mental hospital in the mid-1970s, taking notes intended for a political pamphlet on the ghastly shortcomings of Norway’s psychiatric care at the time. Around 1980, he showed his notes to a colorful underground publisher named Torstein Hilt. “Take this dry stuff home, turn it into a novel, and hurry back to me,” Hilt responded. Ambjørnsen did as he was told and wrote about the horrors he had seen at the hospital’s lock-down unit, having no idea that the resulting 23-salen (Ward 23) would be the start of an extraordinary career. But in the preface, he showed a moral attitude which would shine through in a lot of his future work: “This book is an attempt to bring a tiny bit of fairness to the patients that I took part in ‘caring’ for back then.”
Ambjørnsen’s fame grew quickly over the next few years, triggered by a fast-paced violent thriller set mostly in Oslo called Den siste revejakta (1983). It tells a pitch-dark tale of two professional cannabis smugglers planning to retire, but not before they’ve administered a massive LSD overdose to literally blow the mind of a drug kingpin who had betrayed them. The novel was later adapted to cinema and launched internationally under the apt title The last joint venture.
The 1986 Hvite Niggere (White niggers) about the friendship, love and risky lifestyles of young dropouts, was Ambjørnsen’s breakthrough and a huge commercial success. It’s often described as a nøkkelroman, a key work to understand an author’s ideas. It’s set in Lillevik, a small Norwegian coastal town with a striking resemblance to Ambjørnsen’s native Larvik. The good people of Larvik were not amused at the time, but Ambjørnsen has since been hailed as one of Larvik’s great sons along with explorer Thor Heyerdahl and artist Carl Nesjar.
By this time, Ambjørnsen had embarked on another life project: Children’s books and crime novels for boys. A nine-volume series called Pelle og Proffen follows the adventures of two teenage detectives in Oslo’s underworld. Ambjørnsen apparently got the idea for this after a disappointing re-read of a Hardy Boys novel from his childhood home, and decided that kids needed better quality stuff if they were ever to become readers and book lovers like himself. The series did very well, and some of its volumes were turned into movies. Through Pelle og Proffen and subsequent stories for grownups, Ambjørnsen signalled his concern for the environment, Aftenposten’s Grydeland noted: “Beautiful and precise tales of nature, with solitary, insightful hikers wandering through it, started popping up in Ambjørnsen’s prose.”
In the 1990s he invented Elling, a knowledgeable, engaged but neurotic middle-aged man trying to gain a foothold following the death of his mother who has taken care of him for 40 years. These witty and bittersweet novels became an additional money machine, much to publisher Cappelen’s surprise. They also resulted in three movies, the first of them becoming an Oscar candidate in 2001.
These developments altered Ambjørnsen’s image among Norwegians; a little less angry and dangerous, and a lot easier to enjoy. Or as the Norwegian cliché goes: Ambjørnsen became folkekjær, or “loved by the people,” something he’d probably never expected to be.
He was also loved by Norway’s literary elite, winning almost every prize available to an author of books in Norwegian. In other contexts, he was honored with Norway’s Tabuprisen (Taboo award) which promotes openness about mental disorders, and the Salvation Army’s award for work in the spirit of its founder William Booth.
So much has been written about Ingvar Ambjørnsen that he, long ago, stopped trying to follow what the media wrote about him, or to remember what he had said to whom. Instead, he gave a few very deep in-depth interviews towards the end of his life, to some of his fellow authors. “The public Ingvar Ambjørnsen is a guy I only know kind of partly,” he said in one such interview, with author Kaj Skagen for Dag og Tid in 2021. “He is not me. He lives his own life. (He’s) the people’s very own freak, the king of deviationists.”
Another such occasion was an interview book with author Alf van der Hagen, building on nine days and nights of conversations in Ambjørnsen’s Hamburg home. It’s been on the market since 2023, but following its subject’s passing it is now scheduled for a rapid reprint. The title: Ønsk meg heller god tur. It’s a reference to the illness slowly suffocating him, and means something like, instead of sympathy and a longer life, “I’d rather you wish me happy trails.”
NewsinEnglish.no/Morten Møst