One special feature of Danish prose in the 1990s is a series of bold experiments by women writers - narrators working simultaneously in a physical dimension - the world of the body, and in a metaphysical universe - the world of angels, heaven. We feel a special spaciousness in these young authors, an insistence on giving literary form to humanity in its entirety and its multiplicity of dimensions. That such an approach was on its way around 1990 was signalled not least by the short novel with which Christina Hesselholdt (b. 1962) made her entry into the world of books.
Køkkenet gravkammeret og landskabet (1991) (Kitchen, Burial Chamber and Landscape) actually only occupies 63 pages, but it tells a strange and complicated story about a boy who first loses his mother and then his father. Marlon is the name of this central character, whose upbringing the book reveals in ultra-short chapters with titles taken from the various rooms in the action - the kitchen, the nursery etc. The style is cool and phenomenological; but beneath the descriptive surface there is a flaming intensity of feeling. Physical space and bodily sensation are described in a highly detailed text that is far removed from everyday language, but close to silence and attentive listening. It is as though the pauses fill it all and as though these voids at any time could be transformed into a divine plenitude.
The same tension marks the sequel, Det skjulte (What Lies Hidden) (1993), a still shorter book of only 47 pages in which the reader encounters Marlon as a grown-up. He is living out that emotional world of his which was damaged at such an early age, in sadistic and necrophilic fantasies which meanwhile grow and demand a physical object. This means death for the young girl, Greta, who is killed and from whose body Marlon extracts a bleeding heart. What he does after this emerges in the next volume Udsigten (The View) (1997), in which the author actually approaches the religious plane which in the first two books was only present as a potential. The overall result is a highly idiosyncratic novel trilogy about the individual and its space, about the distance between body and heaven, about our vulnerable lives.
At first, Christina Hesselholdtīs literary practice seemed alien to most readers. But during the course of the 90s she has accumulated a steady readership, and her oeuvre challenges many scholars and students who quite rightly see something new in her sensitive and yet quite unsentimental style, something that is developing and emerging.
It is too early to prophecy where it will go and how it will develop. For in addition to her trilogy, Christina Hesselholdt has published two other works of prose which reveal two entirely different aspects of her imagination and talent. Thus 1995 saw the publication of the short novel EKS (EX), in which two strangers hesitantly approach each other. A man and a woman reveal themselves to each other through a long dialogue borne by attentive listening and cautious confidence, and gradually the story changes focus so that instead losing themselves in their individual past (their ex-lovers especially), they are able to give the present moment to one of the opposite sex. Christina Hesselholdt stands on the borderline between epic and drama in this book, which also provided the basis for a radio version.
Another borderline area is examined in her latest work, Hovedstolen (The Principal Sum) (1998), which consists of 50 very short prose pieces. The material is autobiographical, and the title suggests the problematical aspect of using your lifeīs private psychological capital; but in terms of genre she is moving in the intermediate area where epic becomes lyric. The memories taken together form a fragile pattern - the work can be read as a novel based on a series of glimpses - while at the same time each can stand out individually with a shining, freezing clarity of its own. Psychologically it is about separation and loss with the parentsī divorce as an epic theme running through it all, and the interesting feature now is that theme and technique almost become one and the same thing: the fragmented world is presented in a further fragmented book which virtually makes each individual chapterīs inner stylistic coherence into a question of the survival of the individual.
Alongside her original work, Christina Hesselholdt has edited the literary periodical Den Blå Port together with her colleague Solvej Balle.
