Sound of the Heart

Jens Christian Grøndahl's new novel Hjertelyd (Sound of the Heart) takes up threads from his earlier novels but also points in new directions.

By : Lone Ravn

Sound of the Heart is the story of a man and his life as it took shape. It is the story of his close friendship with the similar-aged Adrian, of the women, both those he chose to leave and those who wouldn’t have him, of his career and of the child of whose existence he at first only had a peripheral knowledge, but who was later to become the point around which his everyday life revolved.
   The narrator, in his late thirties, lives with his son Theo, and runs a small art shop. Centred on the friendship between the narrator and Adrian lasting from their years at school until the death of Adrian at the age of 39, the story is told in the first person and is shaped as a series of memoirs. And it is written in the kind of language in which Grøndahl is at his best - succinct and taut, but at the same time precise and full of images. The narrator’s memoirs are not presented chronologically, like beads on a string, with one even logically following on after another so as to draw in the outline of a life and the events fashioning it and making it what it was. Certainly that is the knowledge with which the reader is equipped on finishing the book, but this is equally due to the reader’s own work in gathering together the information provided so as to form a narrative.
   Sound of the Heart consists of narrated memoirs in which it is the actual story or presentation that creates meaning, not the narrator’s interpretation of the events related. The novel moves between past and present, and the two periods act individually in such a way as to provide each other’s background, which illuminates elements in the memoirs that have been of significance for the friendship between the narrator and Adrian. It is thus clear that the memoirs are closely associated with oblivion, and so it becomes the perspective, the friendship, that is crucial to what is put before the reader. There is a relationship between the narrator and Adrian’s sister, Ariane, and the description of how this originates succinctly epitomises the poetical theory on which the novel is based:

“She laid back her head so her long hair brushed the spot where the spinal column bends down towards the loin, like the curve on a seahorse. The shadows almost stretched as far as the fringe of the wood. She turned around and came back towards me, and here there is just a blank patch, the image is shattered, and I don’t know how we can reach the next. I wish I could remember it, but what is it one says? It simply happened” (Sound of the Heart, p.7-71).

Things simply happen. They happen irrespective of their significance in a larger context, and in the same way the memoirs are placed before us without having been given a significance beforehand. It is not the actual motif, but the task of building up a picture that is the essential feature.
   Sound of the Heart is the story of a man and the life that took shape without, in each individual situation, his always being aware that this event now confronting him would be of significance, while at other times he thought he was facing important events hat were later to turn out to be of no significance. It is not, as in like Silence in October, a man trying to find a meaning in everything that happened - but rather a man who merely tells his story without reflecting on it. But the man whom Grøndahl allows to tell his story is no relaxed, non-committal, passive being, but a man who is himself trying to shape his life at the same time as things happen which he cannot himself control or see the outcome of, and who accepts life’s own way of fashioning itself. Sound of the Heart is borne by a lightness of touch that relieves the tension; it is not like Kundera’s work a lament at life’s lack of substance, but an acceptance of the arbitrary tension between lightness and substance.

Translated by W. Glyn Jones