Book Alert / In Cod We Trust

In Cod We Trust -- Living the Norwegian Dream by Eric Dregni, Minnesota UP '08, $22.95, 216 pages, ISBN #0816656231. Only one illustration.

This is surely one of the quirkiest family memoirs you'll run across. Seems author Eric Dregni's great-grandfather fled Norway in 1893 when it was the poorest nation in Europe. When Eric returned there to pursue a Fulbright Fellowship more than a century later, oil and natural gas discoveries had made Norway the richest.

Dregni's recounting of that year is, by turns, hilarious and hair-raising. Among the events he chronicles "are staying warm in a remote grass-roofed hytte (hut), surviving a dinner of rakfisk (fermented fish) thanks to 80-proof aquavit, and identifying his great-grandfather's house in the Lusterfjord only to find out it had been crushed by a boulder and then swept away by a river."

Eric Dregni teaches creative writing at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, MN and has written several other books.