Death by Laughter

Af : Torben Weinreich

At the end of Bjarne Reuter's novel Den dobbelte mand (1986) (The Double Man) the leading character finds himself "in one of my old places, a big bare gable end near the railway, where the night train passes like a long sigh from Florence or Pisa, and leaves me empty and lost, but happily void of a hankering longing."
   We constantly come across this "hankering longing" in Reuter's work, often as a longing for "that other country", a country where you can be happy to be alive with all senses open. As the child may ‑ perhaps ‑ be. The longing is in fact often for childhood, expressed with particular charm in the memoir Månen over Bella Bio (1988) (The Moon over Bella Bio), in which the leading character, on the way to his very first day at school, says farewell to childhood: "Goodbye, Mother, goodbye hopscotch and flagstone court. So long, little Ole. Now we're off to war. To the front, two by two. Look straight ahead. Not a word. The letters and exercise books are waiting."

Hope and despair
Bjarne Reuter's first publication, Kidnapning (Kidnaping), appeared in 1975, a novel that had more than one reviewer "die laughing". It was humorous, but not merely that. As Reuter said: "I hope the humour will not prevent the reader from turning back to the serious aspects of the book."
   In this and the following five books in the series we meet little Bertram and his family, among them the inventive (all too inventive) Uncle Georg and the affectionate but always unemployed father: "My father does not go to work like other men, he's no good at that." Bertram and his family get mixed up in everything. It is a silent film in novel form when it is at its craziest. But there is also room to show that poor people never "escape from their miserable situation, never get the better of those who crush them or ill‑treat them.
   This is the Reuter universe, a hair‑fine balance between hope and despair, between joy and sorrow, yet one in which the author never succumbs to the temptation to overdo sentimentality.

A success with readers
Reuter has put his hand to everything: stories of realism and fantasy; picture books for the little ones, books for younger and older children, for adolescents and adults; novels, short stories, drama and film scripts. And people read him. There are 200,000 Reuter books in Danish libraries. It has been calculated that every single day of the year 5,000 Danes are reading one of his books:
   Reuter's greatest success has been with his Brønshøj books, which take their name from the Copenhagen district he grew up in. They include the trilogy Zappa (1977) (Zappa), Når snerlen blomstrer (1983) (When the Bindweed Blooms), and Vi der valgte mælkevejen (1989) (We Who Chose the Milky Way). Når snerlen blomstrer made its name outside Denmark through Bille August's film version Twist and Shout from 1984. Bjørn appears in all three books. It's he who is the bindweed, the climbing plant that always manages to find a place in the sun, but only by making use of others. The novels cover ten years of his life and development, the 1960s, to be precise. At the same time we accompany the author as he moves from an attitude critical of a society to one critical of a civilisation. Now and again ‑and this is the chief paradox in Reuter ‑ his affectionate solicitude for humanity is interrupted by angry and irritable censure of Mr and Mrs. Average Dane.

Buster's World
Most lovable of all Reuter's portraits is that of Buster, the world's most efficient loser. He too lives in Brønshøj. Everything is against him, but Buster is indomitable in his faith in life and its potential. He loves the play of colours in the rainbow and the scent of lilac, and apparently Reuter does as well, for his universe teems with flowering lilacs, just as it teems with fathers and grandfathers who play the mouth organ, as they do in the Buster books.
   Busters Verden (Buster's World) appeared in 1979, the following two volumes, Kys stjernerne (The Sheik of Hope Street) and Hvor regnbuen ender (At the End of the Rainbow) in 1980 and 1982.
   One of Reuter's most ambitious novels is the long fairy‑tale Shamran (1985) (Shamran). A boy lies at the point of death alone in his room in the house his family has just moved into. On the wall there is a painting, which suddenly comes alive. Three men approach across a painted bridge; they are kingdom of Trond. The process of dying is under way. But the boy fights against it, and this is the subject of the novel. In this imagined world the boy struggles for life and freedom, not only his own freedom, but the freedom of all fabulous beings, until victory is in sight and he can return to the bridge and to life. The idea is beautifully achieved.

The difficult farewell
We have seen that Reuter's characters find it hard to leave childhood. He returns to this conflict again and again, as in Suzanne & Leonard (1980) (Suzanne & Leonard), a gangster story about naïve Leonard, who dreams of life on a South Sea island, and is prepared to kill for the sake of his dream, but ends up as himself the victim.
   In Drengene fra Sankt Petri (1991) (The Boys from St. Petri), we meet the young freedom fighters who engaged in sabotage against the German troops during the second World War.
   They are borne on by the urge for justice and excitement. For the fight for freedom also provides the potential for prolonging the childhood games into threatening adulthood, a threat illustrated in this novel through love and death.
   Both Suzanne & Leonard and Drengene fra Sankt Petri have been filmed. Recently Bjarne Reuter was asked to reply to a series of questions put by a newspaper, “strictly Confidentially,” as the series was called. To the question “How would you like to be remerbed” he replied: “As one who abandoned himself in life.” With sixty books in twenty years it looks as if Reuter has found it hard to leave the work that gives life to others, the work of the writer.

This article was published in Danish Children’s Literature no 6