Helle Helle is apparently Denmark’s most popular novelist. The Danes must have rarefied tastes, because this is a novel so quiet you can almost hear yourself swallow as you read. “What a racket it made,” says the narrator, 21-year-old Dorte Hansen, when she chews some gum. The book, translated by Martin Aitken, is quiet because her life is quiet, and because, she says, to tell us her story she has discarded lots of material. What’s left is a book with all the bigness hidden away, and where even current events are reported as passed (“I hated the narrative present”) to make them less immediate, to distance Dorte from how her life has turned out.
Helle’s coy, evasive style may madden or bore some readers, but there are pleasures here. There is absurdity, as Dorte, who is prone to crying at length, gets work writing party songs. “If I could avoid it I wouldn’t rhyme on a verb.” And there is the emotional centre of the book: Dorte’s aunt. “I was named after Dorte because she couldn’t have children of her own ... The doctor peered between her legs and shook his head.” We learn more about Aunt Dorte than we do about her niece, including a loss of innocence that results in her happiness being reduced to shopping and rearranging furniture, and then her admission to hospital for “what you weren’t supposed to call a nervous breakdown any more”. Dorte asks the hospital staff if something happened. “No, nothing in particular, as far as I know. Sometimes it just happens, bang.”
Dorte meets a would-be writer, who gives an insight into Helle’s methods. “I’m always asking myself, why does that have to be there? And if I can’t find a reason, it goes.” We might picture an earlier version of this book, then, fatter and filled with bangs. It would be more exciting, but a lot less interesting.
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- og så fornemt som anmelderen svarer på kommentarer nede i kommentartråden:
AggieH
When I read This Should Be Written In The Present Tense,
it struck me that it is a difficult book to convey precisely because
it’s so spare & restrained. This review conveys it well. It is
indeed a book ‘with all the bigness hidden away’, a book that makes you
sit still and listen closely.
At times I listened so intensely that I started to hear noises which may not have been there. At one point far into the book, I suddenly wondered if there was a meta-ness about Dorte and her Aunt Dorte. Their names, little parallels, the book’s temporal tricks and my own doubts about the narrator’s reliability caused me to wonder if they were really one Dorte.
On my bookselves, Helle Helle belongs with in the section with Amélie Nothomb, Ingvild Rishøi, Marie Darrieussecq, Kjersti Skomsvold, Gerbrand Bakker, Per Petterson, Jon Fosse. European writers all. Coincidence? Their tense, taut books make the alleged ‘Great American Novel’ seem garish.
At times I listened so intensely that I started to hear noises which may not have been there. At one point far into the book, I suddenly wondered if there was a meta-ness about Dorte and her Aunt Dorte. Their names, little parallels, the book’s temporal tricks and my own doubts about the narrator’s reliability caused me to wonder if they were really one Dorte.
On my bookselves, Helle Helle belongs with in the section with Amélie Nothomb, Ingvild Rishøi, Marie Darrieussecq, Kjersti Skomsvold, Gerbrand Bakker, Per Petterson, Jon Fosse. European writers all. Coincidence? Their tense, taut books make the alleged ‘Great American Novel’ seem garish.
Guardian contributor
Thanks Aggie. I did wonder about Aunt Dorte's reality too.
Certainly it's a book that deliberately wrongfoots the reader (for
example, by referring to characters as though we are familiar with them,
and then only introducing them many pages later) so anything is
possible. I think the unanswered questions and the gaps are indicative
of a very good authorial control of viewpoint. We don't have things
explained to us just because it would be helpful; so we feel ourselves
to be in Dorte's mind all the more authentically.
- en kommentator anholder, at Helle skulle væøre den bedstsælgende danske forfatter, oversætteren Martin Aitken anholder anholdelsen:
Re. the popularity stakes. This week's bestseller list in
Denmark has Helle's latest coming in at #3, topped only by Ken Follett
and New York Times bestseller Adler-Olsen, and ahead of Murakami. I'd
say popular.
http://www.arnoldbusck.dk/bestsellerlister
http://www.arnoldbusck.dk/bestsellerlister
Guardian contributor
JohnSelfsAsylum
Thanks for this information. I presume you are the Martin
Aitken who translated the book. In reviews, I tend not to comment on the
quality of a translation, because it seems to me unknowable unless you
can also read the parent language (which I never can). But it is a
tribute to your work that the book reads as well in English as it does.
Gentlemanlæser, gentlemananmelder!
Gentlemanlæser, gentlemananmelder!
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