Hanne Marie Svendsen´s fiction embodies the theme of change; in addition, her technique is one of change, as she experiments with genres and points of view. Often the changes written into her plots occur inside characters on the move, either by land or sea. The sea is an everpresent, multivalent symbol in Hanne Marie Svendsen´s art. Strange and beautiful beings, even monsters, emerge from the sea, as they may from the human imagination.
Svendsen had her literary debut at the age of forty-three with Mathildes Drømmebog (1977), an allegory of Everywoman growing up, dreaming of a special life, then marrying, becoming a mother, yet feeling neither special nor fulfilled. Mathilde copes with her mundane existence by creating luxuriant dreams. Svendsen´s vision of reality and fantasy recalls the work of Andersen and Blixen, Kafka, Laxness and Garcia Marquez. Hanne Marie Svendsen has been described as a writer of magical realism.
Her best-known novel, Guldkuglen: Fortælling om en ø (The Gold Ball) (1985) is a saga about generations of eccentric settlers on an unnamed northern island who undergo fabulous evolutions. Witches and dreamers, children and men move across the narrator´s vision of human joy and tragedy. Svendsen´s tale presents storms and shipwrecks and supernatural events. The settlers on the island finally have to flee, as the island has become uninhabitable, partly due to industrial pollution, red tide. In its largest sense, the story is a warning to western industrialized society to preserve planet earth, the only space we own. The Gold Ball is fairy tale, allegory, and a modern social critic´s lucid view of the damage we can do to ourselves and the environment.
Kaila på fyret (1987) repeats the transformation theme, as Kaila the girl becomes Kaila the woman. Svendsen´s play, Rosmarin og heksevin (1987) recreates Odysseus´s story of voyaging far from home where he experiences fabulously transforming encounters before returning home. Margrethe Thiede is the protagonist in the novel Under solen (1991). She returns to her home in a seaside town to face down human monsters and recover a lost son. Svendsen´s thriller Karantæne (1995) uses medical imagery to illuminate the malaise of fin de siecle society. In this work, Svendsen experiments with an unsympathetic male protagonist, a Dantean traveller on a journey to discover the irresponsible self he has refused to acknowledge. The author, however, offers neither damnation nor salvation for this modern pilgrim. He may still be infectious even after quarantine. Svendsen´s novel Ingen genvej til paradis (1999) combines third-person narrative and fictional letters - shifting points of view - offering a moving picture of intergenerational family relationships in small-town Denmark. Hanne Marie Svendsen's works resonate with her exceptional ear for the cadences of Danish, her instrument to explore and clarify unfathomable human desire.
In 2003, Hanne Marie Svendsen publishes Unn fra stjernestene (Unn from Star Stones), a capacious historical novel in which medieval Christian faith comes up against renaissance skepticism. The author bases her story on research into explorers’ narratives and medieval documents in order to evoke convent life in fourteenth-century Greenland. Similar to The Gold Ball, Unn features a heroine, an island setting, magical realism, and descriptions of flora, fauna, and landscapes.
The native islanders and foreign immigrants eke out a meager existence in a southern Greenland settlement. The nuns and novices have come from Iceland and Norway to the convent deep in a fjord where hot springs offer their healing waters. Unn, an orphan, and one of the few literate women, questions Church dogma; she is intelligent and restless. Unn sympathizes with the persecuted “skraelings” because they are hunters and free people. Her tiny community, ruled by Church leaders, includes mad monks, witches, and murderers. The learned nun Edmonda, Unn’s mentor, practices medieval medicine using astrology and bloodletting. But Unn and her Oxford-educated lover Nicolas discuss pre-Copernican astronomy. The empiricist Nicolas sets out for the North Pole; he dares to write down his observations, risking punishment for heresy. Nicolas and Unn decide to flee. Among shimmering blue-green icebergs, the two explorers set out for Vinland.
The imagination can go wherever it wants. Svendsen’s imagination travels to Antarctica in her novel Nilaus under sneen (Nilaus under the Snow) (2007). This new work continues her theme of the quest for the Promised Land that moved Unn and Nicolas to leave Greenland. Two boys, the dreamer Nilaus and the realist Fergus, set sail. They barely survive the cold and hunger of their expedition, so brilliantly rendered that we shiver and starve with them. The boys return as men; the two friends have learned the journey matters more than the goal. Meticulously researched and inspired by the author’s own Antarctic expedition, the work provokes us to reflect. Svendsen asks the ultimate existential question: What gives life meaning? Her conclusion is: the love, friendship, and natural beauty we encounter on our journey. Svendsen’s empathy and stylistic mastery take us to the ends of the known world and beyond.
(2007)
