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Fewer in Denmark read books, despite publishing growth

Although the number of books to be found on the shelves of libraries and bookshops in Denmark is steadily increasing, the number of people reading them appears to be on the wane.

Published: 23 October 2018 18:23 CEST

Fewer in Denmark read books, despite publishing growth

File photo: Morten Germund/Scanpix 2017

The number of 30-39 year-olds who regularly read novels and short stories has fallen by ten percent since 2010, according to a report published on Tuesday by the Ministry of Culture’s Books and Literature Panel.

A number of other findings also pointed to a reduction in the amount of literature being devoured by people in Denmark.

“A record number of books are being published, but at the same time, there are fewer keen readers. That could be the result of a number of factors and trends which we will need to follow closely,” minister for culture Mette Bock said in a press statement.

The report also found that people with high levels of education – normally the keenest reading demographic – are reading less than in the past.

But although fewer are reading novels, audio books are seeing a surge in popularity.

232,453 audio books were borrowed from Danish public libraries in July 2018, the highest number on record.

Use of ebooks is also growing, although only 3.5 percent of the population said that they read daily or almost daily using the digital format, the study found.

Anne-Marie Mai, a member of the Books and Literature Panel, said that books are facing stiff competition from streaming services and social media.

“There’s hardly any doubt that the growing and more comprehensive media selection of the last decade is making the battle for consumers’ attention a tougher one, in which time for reading is under pressure from other options like film and television streaming and social media,” Mai said.

A British study has shown that the average time spent on media and communication by adults in 2016 was 11 hours per day.

Although Danes were found to be spending less time reading novels and short stories, textbooks did not see a similar fall-off in usage, according to the new report.

The Ministry of Culture’s Books and Literature Panel was established in 2014 in order to follow trends relating to the market for books. The panel consists of seven researchers from the literary field.

READ ALSO: Murakami wins Danish literature prize

'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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