Newcomer Søren Jessen

Af : May Schack

It is a fantastic and absurd universe Søren Jessen unfolds in his novel Zambesi (Zambesei), for which he received the prize for the most promising newcomer at the Danish Book Fair. It tells the story of eight people whoes paths happen to cross to greater or lesser devastating effect. Finally, they meet in or outside of a café called Zambesi, where most of them encounter their untimely end.
   Jessen's prose is disciplined and pure. He passionlessly paints a world verging on the grotesque. Life is depicted as a conjuring trick worked by the Creator, personified as a computer animator, plays without sense or purpose.
   One of the characters discovers one day that he has begun to hover lightly above the floor:

"He did not look more closely at the paper but put it down on the floor in front of him, the white reverse side up, and then pushed it slowly toward his big toe. The white edge disappeared beneath the toe, but he pushed it even farther and where the paper normally would have met the toe – at the exact point where skin and floor should meet – there was no resistance. The white surface continued beneath his toe. Beneath his instep, arch, heel, and out again at the back. He moved the paper a bit. Back and forth. No resistance. He moved his other foot onto the paper and crouched down with both feet above it. Then, he once again moved the white sheet.
   "Damn," he whispered, biting his lip. There was no doubt. He was hovering a few millimetres above the floor."

Later, we follow him as the law of gravity gradually becomes rescinded until, to his horror, he at last slips the bonds of earth and goes into orbit.
   We also meet the Dreamer, who decides to build a tower, when his view is obscured by the construction of a skyscraper. He gets his tower, but he meets his end by falling out of it to be crushed on the asphalt.
   There is a neurotic compulsion about most of these people: the Faultfinder suffers from a cleaning mania and holds his life together by finding errata in books. The love-sick girl on a date at a fancy restaurant ironically suffers from anorexia. The Turtle is a fast-track yuppie, whose precise, schematic agenda is ruined, when he discovers that the clocks are running fast. It turns out that he himself is becoming slower and slower – a turtle.
   The Radiographer is horrified to discover numbers engraved on a patient's backbone – are we merely manufactured products? And the cosmetics girl is horrified, when her face begins to crack and finally fall apart, revealing a gaping, black emptiness.
   Nothing remains of these people, when the novel concludes, and there is not much in them at the beginning, trapped as they are by their idiosyncrasies and routines. Søren Jessen has demonstrated that he can compose a prose narrative and write in a controlled, rhythmic language. You are lured almost against your will into his frightening portrayal. It remains to be seen whether he has more in mind than just playing with fiction and describing the world as one big con game.

Oversat af Russell Dees