Borges meets Kafka on a good day

By : Lilian Munk Rösing

…Peter Adolphsen may be said to hone his texts to stylistic perfection. The texts in Små historier 2 (Brief Tales 2) are really small; most of them only half a page. Often they are woven over the typical syntax of the novella: ‘x was just about to…, when suddenly…’. But the novella grows no longer than half a page; it is compressed into a stylistic concentrate.

As in the novella, and as in Kafka, the situation or the perspective alters surprisingly, and we are forced to comprehend the world in a new way. Thus several of the texts are written from a time or space other than the one to which we are accustomed. We hear, for example, of ‘the slow giant’ that ‘at this very moment’ is taking a step over Sweden; ‘it sees the glaciers sliding away, the trees spray up like little fountains and the seasons experience it as an imperceptible quivering.’

Adolphsen is a master of play; he plays with fiction and facts, reminding one of Borges, and he plays with words, reminding one of the peculiar Danish tradition of children’s rhymes and nonsense verse (of which Halfdan Rasmussen is the leading representative). One cannot help being reminded of Borges when Adolphsen writes in minute and pseudo-scientific detail about the extinct hallucinogen ‘Shams Al-Mukhraiti’ (which he wants to rename ‘Tympobogon Fingiatus Adolphsenii’). And the word-play of the child appears when Adolphsen mixes up the letters, as in ‘Scene from an mlifnoitca’ (read backwards!) or in the really funny ‘Marie, Jud and the Yellow Man’, which also bears the subtitle ‘A Children’s Story’.

In a combination of unrestrained word-play and strict, elegant syntax, Adolphsen’s texts always build up to a pregnant point. His mastery of syntax is supreme, reaching heights of true comedy.

This article was part of a longer article on contemporary Danish short prose in Danish Literary Magazine no. 18 / 2000