Helene Uri, De besten onder ons.

Besten onder ons

Pål heeft een zwak voor taal en vrouwen. Zijn moeder neemt een prominente plaats in, maar ook niet onbelangrijk zijn de vrouwen met wie hij samenwerkt op het prestigieuze Instituut voor Futuristische Linguïstiek. Zijn hoofd is vol van verlangens naar zijn jonge collega Nanna en dromen over fonetische grafieken en eeuwige roem, maar de gevreesde en fascinerende Edith Rinkel leidt hem af van zijn werk. De vijftigjarige professor kan voor weinig zaken enthousiasme opbrengen, maar als ze ergens wel over te spreken is, doet ze dat met passie... Mooie schoenen, jonge mannen, maar bovenal haar wetenschappelijk onderzoek. Het wordt Pål duidelijk dat ze bereid is ver te gaan om haar doel te bereiken.

Uitgeverij De Geus

Helene Uri, The Best Among Us

The Best Among Us 

Reminiscent of a campus novel by David Lodge, Helene Uri’s The Best Among Us presents a picture of contemporary life in the Norwegian university scene. If anyone is familiar with this setting, it’s Helene Uri. A linguist and writer, she resigned from her university job several years ago after becoming fed up with the politics and pandering necessary to get ahead in the field. This critique in the guise of a novel focuses on Pål and Nanna, researchers at the prestigious Insitute of Futuristic Linguistics, who are at work on a very large and very important project on how language will look in the future. All goes relatively well until Pål falls for the fifty-year-old professor, Edith Rinkel, whose moral compass points in a dubious direction when it comes to satiating her passion for research. She will go to any length to fulfill her goals and, unfortunately for Pål, she happens to have a penchant for young men. One critic describes The Best Among Us as “a wealth of satirical sketches…and a sparkling source of philological humor in its broadest sense.”

Publishing Trends

Helene Uri. Forfatter og språkviter. Om Helene Uri.: 

Her novel The Best among Us (Norway's first campus novel) has sold more than 70,000 copies in Norway alone, and was on the national bestselling lists for more than a year. Her latest novel, The righteous, was published in May 2009.

E.L. James: Fifty Shades

Fifty Shades of Grey condemned as 'manual for sexual torture' 

EL James's books tell the story of the submissive/dominant relationship between billionaire Christian Grey and college student Anastasia Steele. 

Books review - guardian.co.uk

Bautman: Adventures with Russion Books

Batuman Elif, Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

And we thought our lives were like something out of a campus novel! It's a beautiful book, funny, informed, eloquent, passionate. Only two problems: sometimes Batuman crams her essays with so much, as if she were worried her readers would stop paying attention if not entertained at all times; two, while she writes rapturously about later literature, in particular Russian and other European novels, she shows very little understanding for pre-modern, non-European literature.

Goodreads

Review: 

To study first-year French is to enter a world of savoir-faire, beauty and romance. Instructive filmstrips show master chefs whisking halos of caramelized sugar; or Versailles woodworkers restoring antique marquetry; or Gallic lovers in deux chevaux, illustrating how “to go” and “to be” while tooting off for a weekend in Marseille. But this is not the world of Russian 101. In Russian 101, you get grainy black-and-white photos of concert halls “closed for repairs,” and you learn bitter dialogues like this one: ...

see: Book Review by Elif Batuman - NYTimes.com