The Shadow in the Underwood

Article on Underwood

By : Mai Misfeldt

It is with a brick of a novel that Christian Jungersen celebrates his debut as an author. And it is certainly something to celebrate. Underwood consists of 431 well-written pages that keep the reader glued to the novel until the last page is turned.

Underwood is about remembrance in that the story is told from the perspective of the protagonist when he is, respectively, 82 and 86 years old. However, Underwood is also about finding yourself – and running away from yourself. It examines what happens, when two people think they know each other so well that they become one another, while in reality, they live in two parallel realities. At the same time, the novel is a long, chronological Bildungsroman that follows a man from his youth to just this side of the grave.

"Reality vanishes before anyone who tries to find it with Eduard," thinks the 86-year old Poul Martin Poulsen, when he finally finds his boyhood friend Eduard again after a 4-year manic search and must acknowledge that Eduard will never be able to help him come to terms with what has happened in the past, never give him the answer to the question of who Eduard really was, who Poul Martin himself really was back when he was not – as he is now – a feeble wretch but a young man, full of hope.

Eduard steps into Poul Martin's life for the first time in 1921, more precisely in his second year at Øregaard High School. Poul Martin, son of the well-heeled vice-president of a large textile merchandising firm, harbours a dream of freedom within him and is drawn like a magnet to Eduard's arrogance and seductive powers of persuasion. The two enter into a special, almost cult-like, comradeship. Poul Martin, who feels inferior in the relationship with his more worldly-wise friend, begins slowly to merge with him, becoming Eduard's shadow and mimicking everything from his viewpoints to his gestures. Their intense relationship proves demanding, and it ends abruptly, when Poul Martin finds himself betrayed by his friend.

There is a parting of the ways – with Eduard, it is all or nothing. Poul Martin works his way up in the world, marries, has a child. As an adult, he renews his connection with his friend and makes him a part of the family, something Eduard does not have himself. Too late, Poul Martin discovers that, like a panther, Eduard has crept up on his life and attacked. The break is final. Poul Martin loses his friend, his wife, and, worst of all, his daughter Louise. How this happens is not revealed until the end, leaving the reader to sit on pins and needles throughout the remainder of the book. The author is quite good at dropping disturbing hints and leading the reader further astray into the Underwood.

At the beginning of the novel, it has been 42 years, since the two men had last seen each other. Poul Martin has tried to clean Eduard out of his system, to cut him and that time out of his life. He lives for his work, looks forward, not back. Not until he is hospitalised as an 82-year old do his repressed memories begin to stir. He walks through the garden of memory, but an impassable Underwood is growing. He cannot find his way to the truth about what happened. But is that even possible? For is he not also a different person today from the one 42 years ago?

It is difficult not to reveal too much, and it would be a pity to do so. Christian Jungersen is a dazzling writer. His description of the old man is particularly good. Without sentimentality, Jungersen captures the pain of being trapped in a body that is falling apart. At times, one is reminded of the greatest of all such novels, Marcel Proust's "The Remembrance of Things Past": for example, in the chapter in which a brusque doctor mercilessly demonstrates that Poul Martin is just as decrepit as the three other old men with whom he shares a room. Physical time and psychic time are two different things.

Like Poul Martin, the reader becomes obsessed with this Eduard, the demagogue who time and again seduces people, but whose understanding of the true and the false belongs to an entirely different system. There is a complete "absence of reality in Eduard. All bonds to any form of reality are dissolved. There is a void where there should have been a core." The novel cultivates associations with Hans Christian Andersen's well-known fairy tale, The Shadow. Poul Martin and Eduard are as dependent on each other as the man and his shadow, but, as in the fairy tale, they struggle against one another. Who was the man and who the shadow? Must you kill your own shadow to become free? Jungersen tackles some large philosophical questions without thereby becoming heavy or dry. With Underwood, Christian Jungersen today distinguishes himself as an author of rare and promising calibre.

Translated by Rusell Dees