Q. Which country has produced the most Nobel Prize winners in Literature per capita ?

A. Iceland. They've produced exactly one (Halldor Laxness, 1955) but with a population of just over 300,000 according to the most recent estimates, they've got about half as many people as my present home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico (America's 33rd largest city), which gives them a real strategic advantage in the per capita statistics game. And they know it. Citing per capita statistics is a national pastime.

Don’t believe me? Find an Icelander, find a bar, and see where the conversation goes. Around his fifth or sixth glass, odds are he will begin to swell with nationalistic pride as he tells you how Icelanders are world leaders in Coke-swilling, or book-buying, or text-messaging … all per capita of course. (When I lived in Iceland, I heard all of these, though I don’t vouch for the accuracy of any of these claims, as my source was invariably drunk.)

But the per capita statistic that impressed me most was a rather somber one. And I wish I could find a written source that would confirm or disprove it. A friend of mine told me that Iceland suffered more casualities, per capita, in World War II than the US did, even though they were not involved in fighting. They didn’t (still don’t) even have a military. The country was occupied, first by British then later by American troops, and the Icelanders went along peaceably with the Allied occupation. The casualties were almost entirely fishermen whose boats were sunk by Germans because their catch might otherwise have gone to feed Allied forces.

(Here, I begin rambling like a drunk myself.)

I have recently been thinking a lot about how it must have been to live in one of the Scandinavian countries during World War II. Because their governments didn’t take a clear side (Sweden was free and nominally neutral, Norway and Denmark were both occupied by Nazis, Iceland was occupied by Allies), individual citizens must have faced a more personal choice about what to do in the face of all that was going on around them—whether to become an active partisan out of principle, at great risk to personal safety, or to act pragmatically in self-preservation, either by laying low or accomodating one side or the other. Of course, everyone has these choices on some level, no matter where or when they live, but the significance of these seems magnified, in my imagination, by the idea of a neutral or occupied country during wartime. In some ways, the indecision about what to do at a government level makes the choice seem more open at the individual level. Everthing would come down more to character and circumstances. Which make Scandinavia in the World War II era a particularly fascinating setting for fiction.

I am thinking of this now, in part, because I am nearly done reading Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses. (I set it down on my bedside table yesterday with 20 pages to go, just to prolong the pleasure for one more night.) It is set in a rural area of Norway near the Swedish border, partly in the late 40s, when the war is over but the fallout for the protagonist's family is not, and partly in the late 90s, when he's still grappling with the consequences of what happened earlier. (All very humorless, in the way that Scandinavian books and movies can be--and beautiful despite that.) In some ways, the most interesting things about the book have nothing to do with the war, but without it, nothing would have happened as it did. There is a wonderful inseparability to the different elements, which is part of what makes it seem like such an interesting and beautiful work of art.