Fifteen minutes changed a life

Following her success with the documentary novel Moonie, Iben Melbye is publishing a new book

By : Lars S. Arndal

A man comes in the door of a bank and fifteen minutes later leaves with the loot. That's how briefly the sequence of events can be described when a bank robbery is committed. But those fifteen minutes appear very differently if the focus is shifted to the persons who are affected by the bank robbery, such as the bank clerk.

Iben Melbye has ventured an experiment, and the experiment has resulted in a short novel which zeroes in on both the victim and the culprit. Underlying the novel is a solid job of research, in which Melbye has attempted to study the psychological patterns of the event's principals. In carrying out the research Melbye was led to the idea that a confrontation between culprit and victim would be able to remove many of the traumas a bank robbery leaves. Her book therefore takes the form of a powerful argument for the introduction of "conflict sessions" where victim and perpetrator meet face to face.

Ramt (Hit) is a continuation of Melbye's authorship, which has always set off debate, and with the new novel she picks up the thread from her breakthrough novel Moonie (Moonie). There it was the Tongil movement, and the question of how young people are swallowed up by the sect, which had captured her interest. Melbye's sympathetic descriptions of the young person's irresolution and searching didn't only appeal to Danish readers, the book was also quickly published in Germany and Norway.

Even though Hit is also a book that revolves around a concrete social phenomenon, this has in no way clipped Melbye's literary wings. In the novel the solid researching and problem posing becomes invisible behind a living narrative. The material is transformed by Melbye also in terms of language, so that it rises above the quotidian. In Ramt just as in Moonie, Melbye writes straightforward and readable prose which in spite of its simplicity takes the reader deep into the characters' interior universe. So it is no accident that Eva Glistrup, who is one of Denmark's authoritative reviewers of books for children and young people, described the book as "a very well-composed novel, with an economy of language in which every word appears to have been weighed."

Translated by Kenneth Tindall