There are many wanna-be avant-gardists among young Danish authors, but Pablo Henrik Llambías (b. 1964) is just about the sole true non-believer. He does not believe in literature, but nor does he oppose it; he makes use of it for his own sinister purposes. Paradoxically enough, we then find in his works a whole lot of elementary, classic literary qualities which his warm-blooded colleagues
would give their lives to get near to. Pablo takes it quite easy and is incredibly hardworking – he has written four books in five years – which of course makes him even more infuriating. It is not without significance that
instead of attending Forfatterskolen, the Writers’ Training College, he became a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where a cool, conceptual approach to works of art was instilled in him from day one. Llambías’ first
book, the “collection of short stories” Hun
har en altan (She Has a Balcony), 1996, is also his most straightforward; it is a series of deceptively digressive and easily flowing texts about a young man who has reached the age of
discretion and is now expecting a child with his girl friend, the eponymous woman with the balcony. It sounds terribly banal, but the main character and the author are only too well aware of this, and so the book moves with a
curious intractable virtuosity between poetic sensitivity, satirical lampoon and a quite merciless, searching realism.
The main character and the author all the time know better, but this, too, they know only too well, and so they take
the liberty of indulging in their total ambivalence.
“Collection of short stories” was a doubtful genre definition for the unruly tissue of tracks in She Has a Balcony. For good reason, Llambías’ second book, Rådhus (Town Hall), 1997 contains no statement of genre, for it really is a strange and recalcitrant work. Active readers in Denmark both hate and love it. We are back with the young man from She Has a Balcony, who is now a father, something that has not made the world any more straightforward. As a kind of counter-move, both he and the book have been the victims of a conceptual
project affliction, the man having appointed himself town hall examiner. The town hall is seen as the embodiment of the Social Democratic welfare vision, and the main character reflects profoundly on that idea at the same time as experimenting with it in a concrete-burlesque fashion through the establishment of a “free municipality”, through questionnaires and interviews with mayors and through the boring snapshots taken by the author/main character himself of the 275 town halls in Denmark, which occupy the last 20 pages of the book. It is a dreadfully irritating and
stimulating book, wry and hopelessly original.
Den dag vi blev frie (The Day We Became Free), 1998, at last asserts it is a novel, and it is a big one at that, but for good reasons it did not find its way on to the bestseller list. Again the book plays around with
autobiography at first: the chronicle of everyday life continues, and the child has now been placed in a crèche. But the picture of everyday life, so brilliantly and clearly conjured up, quickly moves out on a Borgesque, sci-fi-like slippery slope where the truth of the book’s reality begins to be seen in a dubious light: from little things such as the fact that there are suddenly only two prongs on forks to major ones such as the vision of suburban districts uniformly reproducing themselves. The
result of this is a long, upending action full of tiny delightful, vertiginous, sharp details. Whereas the ambivalence in the first book pertained to established adulthood and in the second book to the established welfare state, this time it is the established feeling of reality itself that is treated in a confusion that at every
level is vital and generous.
In Llambías’ next book, the novel A.P.O.L.L.O.N (A.P.O.L.L.O.), 2000, the
autobiographical pretence is dropped, which undeniably seems rather a shame, to the benefit of all-out science fiction of the ingenious old kind: In a dystopian
welfare state in which everyone speaks in the first person plural, including the first-person narrator (who must now be a first person plural narrator), death has been abolished and instead the state runs a kind of life lottery. There is
complete Big Brother-like control and something of a brave new world-like gene hierarchy. And then everything and everyone is given names from Greek mythology! The action is the usual one: obedient main character is tempted by
rebels in the underground. It is all terribly cleverly worked out, and the tone is both grim and grotesque and alarmingly jolly, and perhaps it is all really
about traffic policy – that, at least, the author has claimed in interviews – and a sudden conclusion does indeed suggest such a perspective!
A.P.O.L.L.O. does in fact resemble a novel,
indeed, as has been suggested, it is in fact the living image of a science fiction novel, and of course some of us find this disconcerting. In Trojaner (Trojan), 2001, Llambías puts our concerns to shame, for despite the title, it is not an obviously immediate successor to A.P.O.L.L.O.. It is a novelette, a melodramatic study with interruptions, telling the story of a nuclear family, this time with names taken from Nordic mythology, which suddenly finds itself confined in a loft together with unknown criminals and dead grandparents. The thriller-like plot can be read as an
allegory of adult responsibility and fragility, which is something that is touched on several times in the swarm of brief reflective fragments, but it actually also acts as a high-frequency, exciting yarn in its own right. When
the little boy falls ill, the fiction subdivides, and almost in the form of a computer game we watch a tiny white corpuscle trying to strike the evil virus, the Trojan of the title. The whole bundle of tricks culminates in a kind of hallucinatory, apparently happy, ending, and the reader is left with a sharp, flickering after-image. Trojaner is at the same time Llambías’ most provocative book (no, that must after all be Rådhus), and his most compelling.
After this experimental opus, I am certainly not afraid that Pablo Llambías is on his way into some kind of
mainstream writing, for he is simply too inquisitive by nature. He is constantly on the move, inventing interesting new experimental set-ups from which he can view and interpret reality, while he reluctantly accepts that he
writes so confoundedly well, humorously, satirically, realistically, imaginatively, so full of suspense, as surely no one has done since Hans Scherfig. He simply has to accept that, as he has to accept the insistent
admiration of his readers.
(2001)
