Reviewed by Craig Cox
Plenty of nostalgic genealogy buffs set out to locate their dusty origins, but how many spend a year in their forebear’s homeland, witness the birth of their first child, and eat a whole lot of weird fish in the bargain? That’s just part of the story this fourth-generation Norwegian-Minnesotan spins in this fascinating memoir/travelogue. Dregni, a local writer, musician (Vinnie and the Stardusters), and assistant professor of English at St. Paul’s Concordia University, takes us on a sometimes rollicking, sometimes tragicomic tour of modern Norway, where the welfare system rules, the language vexes, and the food challenges even the most determined cook. On the subject of lutefisk, for example, Dregni receives this advice from one of the Trondheim natives: “First you dry the cod for months; then you put it in lut -- do you know lut? You can use it to take the paint off of wood. It is what you use to clean out your sink when it is stuck. . . . When you are ready to cook it, you soak the fish in water. There should be no yellow left; otherwise, it has too much lut left and doesn’t taste so good.”

--------------------------------------------------------------
In Cod We Trust: Living the Norwegian Dream by Eric Dregni (University of Minnesota Press, $22.95)
Book launch: Oct. 4, 3:30 p.m. Virginia Street Swedenborgian Church, 170 Virginia St., St. Paul. Slide show, with music, food and beverages. Sponsored by Common Good Books.
Book signing and slide show: Sun., Oct. 5, 6 p.m. Magers and Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis.
Book signing and lutefisk tasting: Sat., Oct. 25, 12-2 p.m. Ingebretsen’s Scandinavian Gifts & Foods, 1601 E. Lake St., Minneapolis.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Through it all, Dregni, his patient wife, Katy, and their colicky newborn, Eilif, experience the Norwegian Janteloven (really subdued) culture in a way no ordinary tourist would ever dare -- living in a cramped apartment with only a wood stove for heat, struggling with the various Norwegian dialects, tramping down to the fiskehallen for their daily ration of fish, and navigating the sometimes rigid, sometimes informal local culture.

Getting a phone, for instance, took some doing because only residents could have phones, and you couldn’t become a resident unless you had a phone number. “After numerous phone calls, Arne [their landlord] solves the problem,” Dregni writes. “His son Trond agreed to put his name on the phone, so Telnor would have no problems with illegal foreigners. By the time we walked back to our apartment, the phone was already hooked up.”

The government bureaucracy was a bit daunting, and the laws against driving after having even a single beer were draconian. But having a baby? Piece of cake. Katy’s delivery in the country hospital was supervised by a calm and talented jordmor (midwife) who deftly untangled the umbilical cord from around the newborn infant’s neck, cleaned him up and delivered him, nicely swaddled, to snuggle between the new mother and father in their cozy hospital bed.

“The midwives told us that we should stay at least three or four days in our family room to make sure that the breastfeeding was going well,” Dregni writes. “In this large room with a view of the snow-capped mountains and meals delivered, why would we leave?”

That was sometimes a bit of a problem, the head midwife admitted, but most families took the hint eventually. “On the fourth day, when they served us a dinner of risegrot (heavy rice porridge smothered in butter) with hard salami, we took it as a hint that our time was up,” he notes. All this, by the way, was paid for by the Norwegian government -- including the taxi trip to and from the hospital.

Dregni does encounter some unexpected obstacles in his ultimate quest in search of his family’s homeland, and the answers he hoped to discover are not exactly what he expected. But the journey remains a rewarding one for the reader, who is treated to a quirky, yet clear-eyed glimpse at the immigrant experience -- in reverse.