Men without clothes

In Kim Fupz Aakeson's new novel Mellemvægt (Middleweight), the writer convincingly and humorously sends five men anno 2002 into orbit on their own distorted axis.

By : Marie Louise Kjølby

One is the boxer Bjarne, who is ” weak in the balls” and therefore unable to give his girlfriend the child she so ardently longs for. Another is Troels, Bjarne’s retarded brother, who can both read and go by bus. Another one is ex jail-bird Carsten, a fourth is Svend, the boxing coach, who not only takes too much both of food (he weighs 120 kilos and has the same attitude to take-aways as junkies have to drugstores) and from others – not least his wife, Eva. Finally, there is Michael, an ex-world champion and former prize bastard, who can say very little and who barely knows his own name or where he lives after a nervous breakdown and a car accident.

Kim Fupz Aakeson uses these five narrators in his new novel Mellemvægt (Middleweight). This is a remarkably well-written ’little’ book that in its way can be viewed in the light of today’s minimalistic trend. The characters in the novel would say that not an awful lot happens in its 360 pages: a boxing gym is the common place of transit for four of the five main characters, and on looking closely one notices the concept that unifies the book: eighteen chapters with an almost equal length of fourteen pages, in which viewpoint changes in smaller units (one-and-a-half to three pages), often enabling each of the five men to tell his version of what happens.

This concept does not prove limiting because Fupz is able to make rough, banal everyday language vibrate with meaning and move one with its tacit sensitivity. He generously shares a baroque fascination of things and expressions with his characters. I am wild about the book when Fupz loosens the tongues of those who do not say much freely: Men with only a basic education, who express themselves physically, and who go for what looks like easy winnings, but is not.

In fact, none of the five men, who are all about thirty, fit into the beer-cunt-and-brag-macho-pattern that society offers them. The manliness of these men is experimental. They are on their way through the body, sexuality and feelings: Michael does not find himself, but he practises being New Michael in the same way as he spontaneously rattles off odd words. Michael, who starts doing people favours – one of these is that Krista, Bjarne’s melancholic girlfriend, miraculously becomes pregnant.

Troels, the Happy Simpleton as he is called, gets some but not all of his wishes fulfilled: ”He wished that there was only Bjarne and him, and that neither of them had any good-looking, naked girlfriends. Because it was unfair when only one of them had.” While Svend, outwardly a pleasant man, subconsciously avenges himself for his fouled-up past (and his dominating wife, Eva) by ensuring a defeat for the eleven-year-old boxing talent, Nidal. ”You don’t know my dad,” the defeated Nidal mumbled as Svend drove him home. Svend does not interfere, either, when Eva attempts to take their little foster-daughter away from Bettina, the girl’s biological mother. Bettina is a junkie who genuinely loves both her child and Carsten, who becomes her boyfriend. Thus, the ring is completed for these lives that are interwoven like an image of life.

But also as an image of the male anno 2002. It is interesting, after the 1990s’ obsession with searching for the original male (cave-type, liberated from female twaddle, squabble, and false sensitivity), to see how fiction is leading the way, working quietly and subtly with the identity of the modern male, who has both body and sensitivity. The men do not get all they want, and certainly not all of them. They do not find everything, but they find something: responsibility, love, self-awareness. Or, to break the sentimentality and maintain the style: gearbox, miser, Stalingrad, socket.

Marie Louise Kjølby is a reviewer for the daily paper, Information.
, where this article previously has been published.

Translated by Ian Lukins