Kirsten Thorup has written poems, TV and stage plays, but her main contribution to Danish literary history is her great, psychological social novels. Here, she presents a bleak worldview through a series of wry narrators that recount from their marginal positions the normal everyday life of contemporary Denmark. The stark realism has made Thorup one of the most widely read of Danish authors, popular among readers and critics alike and honoured with the greatest of Danish literary prizes, as well as the American Pegasus Prise for Literature (for her debut novel, Baby, 1973).
Interestingly, it is Thorup’s great insight into and precise, realistic rendition of the position of the outsider that has made her such a central figure in Danish literature. Her novels are populated by off-beat characters, who all exist in a kind of borderland – between present and past, between the desire to leave and the need to belong, between generational conflicts and culture clashes – and who all seek shelter from their lonely and fragmented lives in love affairs and relationships. However, the modern partnership does not make for a firm foundation, but is described as a psychological battleground in Thorup’s works, which lend a mythological resonance to the impossibility of modern love. Bonsai (2000), for example, explains love in terms of the Greek myth, according to which lovers are split in two on the day of creation and therefore “for ever damned to longing for paradisiacal oneness”.
Stylistically, Thorup accentuates the gap that exists between her characters by using inner monologue, the epistolary form, and other forms of one-way communication. She writes within the genre of the traditional formation novel, but with the crucial difference that order and harmony are never reinstated in Thorup’s books. Instead, her characters are left outside to flutter in the wind of their existential exile.
The tone of Thorup’s work is alternately caring and shrill, and she writes in an unadorned prose style that points to the emptiness and brutish desperation that lurk underneath the surface of normal everyday life. It is both a sombre and aesthetically fascinating project – and one, which makes Thorup one of the most important chroniclers of contemporary Denmark culture.
