The Bookworm: 'The Year of Living Danishly'

The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country, by Helen Russell. 354 pages. Icon Books. 2015.

I’m also beginning to get my head around the Danes’ libertarian attitude to life. They cherish their freedom to indulge every whim and really enjoy themselves, safe in the knowledge that they’ll be looked after if (or rather, when) anything goes wrong. It’s a bit like the school system and even the job market here—the individual has freedom within safe boundaries. Danes have a choice about what to do with their bodies, their minds, and their careers, but they agree to work together towards a collective goal: maintaining and championing The Danish Way. (p. 251)

My son Jam has Danish ancestry. He gets it from The Foxy Lady, whose maternal grandfather emigrated from Denmark and settled in Waterloo.

I don’t know much more about their Danish heritage than that, but it is something I want to learn about since it is now forever entwined with my ancestry, which is something like 75 percent German and 25 percent “Heinz 57,” as my grandma called it (a mix of Welsh, Scottish, Irish, probably English since the rest of Great Britain is represented, and Ojibwe). My newfound curiosity about the Danes and all things Danish is why The Year of Living Danishly caught my eye at the library.

When journalist Helen Russell’s husband is given the opportunity to move to Denmark and work for Lego, she is unsure about leaving everything and everybody she knows and life in London for a tiny town in the middle of a foreign land. However, after a quick trip to the area and leaning that Denmark’s “large gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, high life expectancy, a lack of corruption, a heightened sense of social support, freedom to make life choices and a culture of generosity” (p. xix) makes Denmark the happiest country on earth, she hesitantly agrees to relocate and start what she calls “[t]he happiness project,” a “personal and professional quest to discover what made Danes feel so great” (p. xxx). The Year of Living Danishly is the result.

Danishly is very engaging and personable, very engrossing and informative. Russell’s experiences and chats with her new Danish friends and neighbors, as well as all sorts of officials and experts, impart “the Danish Way” and why Danes are so satisfied. I could especially relate to her experience of uprooting herself and arriving in a new, strange place where nothing is familiar: “We know no one, we don’t speak Danish, and we have nowhere to live. The whole take-a-punt, ‘new year, new you’ euphoria has now been replaced by a sense of: ‘Oh shit, this is real’” (p. 2). It’s akin to when I stepped into the cold Pacific Ocean in cloudy, dirty, dreary Santa Cruz and thought, “What the hell did I just do?”

The book provides an immersive experience about the Danes and life in Denmark, both good and bad. Though there are lots of positives about living in Denmark, there are also negatives, and Russell does not avoid them. It’s the type of balanced reporting I expect from a journalist. Along with recounting Denmark’s commitment to equality in all things, she reports that there is still a lot of sexism and violence toward women. Despite being trusting, so much so that babies are left unattended in strollers outside restaurants while parents dine, Danes like to fight and there is a lot of Viking machismo. Danes care for one another with an incredible welfare state but don’t have much compassion for animals. (Read about the saga of Marius the giraffe.) Though very liberal in many ways, the Danes are very strict in others: Russell and her husband get a lesson on the placement of bike lights from a farmer (“‘Head and tail lights must be permanently installed and emit light straight forwards and straight backwards’” [p. 76]), flying flags other than the Danish national flag needs to be approved by the government, and there is a list of approved baby names that parents must use when naming their children. Even though Russell may not cover everything, I feel like she paints a very big picture, which she mostly sums up this way:

it’s no wonder Danes are so happy. They have an obscenely good quality of life. Yes it’s expensive here. But it’s Denmark—it’s worth it. I don’t mind paying more for a coffee here because I know that it means the person serving me doesn’t a) hate me or b) have a crappy life. Everyone is paid a decent wage, everyone is looked after, and everyone pays their taxes, just as I pay mine. And if we all have marginally less money to buy more stuff that we don’t really need anyway as a result, well I’m starting to think it’s a deal worth making. (p. 342)

A lot of the picture she paints is painted using conversations. Long conversations. I assume they are verbatim, having been recorded somehow, but they sometimes became annoying, especially the banter she has with her husband.

Despite being about the Danes and Denmark, the book is British through and through. It was written by a Brit using British-English and printed in the UK. It may be the first UK-printed book I have ever read. I note this because, as an American, reading British-English is sometimes like reading a different language. Russell uses lots of terms, phrases, and cultural references I have never encountered. I thought I knew quite a bit of B-E—I am the family translator during The Great British Baking Show—but Danishly humbled me. I mostly got along, and the differences are fun to discover and learn—like terms such as “removal men,” “hire car,” and “ceiling rose”—but they can sometimes be a challenge. Russell started using a phrase with “much cop” or “cop to” toward the end of the book (I did not note an example) and I had a hard time with that one. Needless to say, I am going to be glad to read a book that uses double-quotation marks. (To be fair, double-quotation marks are included in Danishly, though inside B-E-style single-quotation marks.)

On that note, the writing is clunky at times and lacks an even rhythm. (Brits and Americans write differently, and I assume it has to do with how we learn to read and write.)

Overall, Danishly is a good read, and a good primer for learning more about Jam’s heritage.