Dorrit Willumsen

No Danish author can write like Dorrit Willumsen: so you can feel the rich ice cream melting on your tongue, the soft silk clinging to your body, the colours of fruit glowing in a crystal bowl. It is a sensuous universe she evokes in her writing, borne by a sensual fascination with everything that surrounds us. The beauty of her language and imagery stands in stark contrast to the material she deals with.

Dorrit Willumsen often describes women who have longing and emptiness chiselled into their bodies. The dream of love and a full life is rarely fulfilled. Instead, her female characters live in a world they must protect themselves against. This protective membrane may lead to a withdrawal into fantasy as in the novel Koras stemme [Kora’s Voice] (2000). Or in an incredibly narcissistic self-staging and striving for external beauty and perfection to compensate for a lack of self-esteem.

These patterns may be seen in one of her early novels, Programmeret til kærlighed [Programmed for Love](1981), in which a female engineer in a science fiction-like arrangement is given the job of creating the perfect woman who can fulfil any man’s needs, and in her collection of short stories, Honey Hotwing (2005), in which the title character loses herself in fantasies about glamorous liaisons with celebrities, even as she tries to re-create her appearance in a desperate dream, on the verge of bursting, that happiness can be found that way.

Dorrit Willumsen’s writings, beginning with her 1965 collection of short stories Knagen [The Hook], span all genres. She has won great popularity with her historical novels, which allow her to explore conditions for women far from the pressures of modernity and our uneasiness with the modern, artificial world for which she has such a good eye.

Yet, her historical novels describe the same distance to reality as her most modern portraits, the same sense of being left out, out of genuine contact with oneself and one’s surroundings,. Marie (1983) is a historical novel that traces the life of the creator of the wax figure, Madame Toussaud. There are many such wax figures in her writings – a motif pointing toward a frozen existence that uncannily resembles something living but is nonetheless lifeless.

There is a modernistic pessimism in this vision of the conditions and opportunities for women, but Dorrit Willumsen’s style and joy at the sensation of the things of this world lift her descriptions into a paradoxical beauty. In particular, she has cultivated the art of analogy to an elegant, exquisite perfection that creates her style. A pair of ordinary chopsticks become “a graceful heron beak that lightly grasps the fish and rice” in the short story with the superb title Lakstykker [“Bits of Lacquer”] from the collection Glemslens forår [Seeds of Oblivion](1988). This technique permeates her writings, often coupled with a well-developed sense of the bizarre.

The great Danish impressionist and fin-de-siecle author Herman Bang is the protagonist of her novel Bang (1996), which earned her the distinguished Nordic Council Literature Prize. Klædt i purpur [Clad in Purple](1990) is set in sixth-century Constantinople with the power-conscious Empress Theodora as the focal point; while Bruden fra Gent [The Bride of Ghent](2004) describes the child-bride Elisabeth of the House of Burgundy, who was betrothed to the Danish King Christian II in 1514 and forced to live in a foreign country. Her end is tragic; but, in contrast to many of Dorrit Willumsen’s other women, she is able to determine her own fate – with almost steely humility – and learns to love her problematic husband. In the family novel Suk hjerte [Sigh, Heart] (1986), which provides a picture of Denmark through four generations in the twentieth century, the author draws on material from her own past – transformed into an original linguistic style that, as always, allows us to see the seductive surface and the dark abyss at the same time, particularly in the interpretation of the lives of women.