High Roads

By : Lone Ravn

Last spring, Lindhardt og Ringhoff republished Peer Hultberg’s highly praised stories Slagne Veje (High Roads) from 1987. Reviewers at the time were agreed that reading this work was a great and powerful experience. It was a work of international format, written by a modernist with a classical approach, rooted in distinguished names such as Joyce and Kafka.

High Roads, which is a precise and honest picture of modern America, divides into two distinct lanes. The first consists of 40 short, concentrated portraits of the Americans, and the second of six long texts assembled under the maxim: ”But what I hold against you is that you left your first love”.

The first part is a requiem for the inhabitants of this at once strange and closely related country. They do not speak to each other, but are examined. Their inner beings are revealed through an event, a situation and sometimes the course of a whole lifetime reduced to a single page. On the surface there is grey everyday life, beneath it a confusion of warped ambitions, secret killings and mythological patterns. Each account shows when a life took shape, how a specific action has a formative importance for the rest of a person’s fate, and how the meaning of fate always seems to be hidden to the person most intimately concerned.

The second part of the novel consists of six long accounts in the form of monologues. In contrast to the first part they are all told by a first-person narrator, and whereas the first part is determined by chance events and broken illusions, here it is the loss of love that is the starting point for each of the six texts. Whereas the dominant mood in the first part of the novel is austere and cool, the syntax here is governed by a witches’ cauldron of mania, paranoia and emotion. In the first part, it is a chance occasion that determines the narrative, in the second it is the same event that determines the various presentations.

The result is a complete picture of America. An account of America that is at once completely based on principle (the first lane) and on personal experience (the second lane), in which principle and personal experience interact on each other in a way that enables us to point to what cannot be seen or perceived – fate. High Roads is more than merely a story of modern, solitary humanity; it is equally America as an image, relevant and meaningful.


The article was first published in Danish literary Magazine 20, autumn 2001.