The Dream of a Woman

By : Thomas Bredsdorff

It is the oldest story in the world, the dream of a woman - who is dreaming of a man. But Jens Christian Grøndahl tells it as though it were for the first time, in a prose that has the power to draw its readers to it like a magnet.
   Tired of modernism´s hundred-year-old question of what the words achieve, the author has turned towards the thousand-year-old question of what the sexual drives achieves. In unadorned, transparent language he has given the age-old answer that it drives people together - and then on into isolation.
   Jens Christian Grøndahl´s latest novel Indian summer denotes a break with the line he has adopted in his work so far. This novel is more reader-friendly and thus more traditional or at least less modernistic than the author´s earlier work, for instance Det indre blik (The Inner Look, 1990) and Skyggen i dit sted (The Shadow in Your Place, 1992). In these novels he explores language´s own, untrodden paths and performs an infinite series of variations on the themes struck, as though the formal language of music was what he was striving for. The result of this practice is that the novels concerned close hermetically around themselves and are not immediately accesible to the reader. Modernism´s conviction that nothing is constant and eternally valid means that the chronological, single-stranded story is replaced by co-ordinated strand of action and beautiful, individual images painted with the colour from a poet´s palette and only allowed to last for a few fleeting    Thus the earlier novels by Grøndahl demand an approach able to abstract from the fact that the action leaves only faint traces in the surface linguistic texture which, however, is chased with great care and aesthetical sensitivity. In contrast to this, Indian summer expresses itself more directly and straightforwardly, Jens Christian Grøndahl renounces the opaque linguistic equilibrism addressed to a small circle of equals and instead tells a story with broad appeal about a man in whose development (or rather decline) one is tempted to see a parallel to the author´s own, though in no way should this be taken as suggesting that Jens Christian Grøndahl´s work is in decline.

A disillusioned writer
The narrator is a former modernist novelist who became fed up with what he was doing. He stopped writing years ago, but his first novel is about to be republished. In connection with this he meets Alma, the woman with whom he was then in love, and who was snatched from him by The Great Ruthless Painter.
   The Painter, unlike his friend the author, has continued as a painter and has had a considerable turnover of women to his credit. Alma longs as much for him as the narrator for her. All that is left for the ageing narrator is the impossible repetition in the shape of an infatuation with Alma´s and the painter´s daughter. In the Indian summer of his life, he pursues this girl to Paris and only flees down the steep staircase into final isolation when he sees the girl in her late father´s    Confounded first by the woman in his life, then by his best friend the painter and finally, vis-a-vis the next generation, by a man of his own age. Indeed, after the brief new lease of life in the Indian summer, comes the real autumn.

Precise characterisation
Two things make a lasting impression. The precise nature of the psychology and the author´s ability to create a character. Grøndahl needs few words to bring his characters to life. And he digs deep into their personalities with the aid of a small number of deftly drawn scenes.
   The portrait of Alma is quite amazing. Seldom has there been such a tangible portrayal of a woman who is always distant in her love affairs. Until she meets the man who doesn´t care. That makes her totally present. And still more when he leaves her and their child; and most of all when like a good fairy she can fetch him home from Paris and tend him on his deathbed in their weekend cottage. Her love was "both deeper and more terrible than the love of an oppressed woman".
   The language here is typical of the novel, the metaphors are not poetical, but analytical. The emphasis is on the descriptive, not the picturesque.
   However, the most amazing thing is the portrait of the main character, the man who experiences and goes on experiencing until he discovers that experiences are no good for anything, for they only teach you what to    When he was writing, the main character was enjoying the springtime of his life. Then came the dry summer, and he stopped. Now it is summer again, and he is sensing and loving. But the leaves are yellow. It is a long time since I have read such a commanding picture of being alive late in life, of an Indian summer.

An illusion of reality
Grøndahl´s language is such that after reading to the end you are left with a memory of the characters in the book, not its words. But this is an illusion, for the characters are of course created via words. And that is the book´s real artistic achievement. It is, as is said of one of the characters, pregnant with pictures of itself that flee inwards towards perspective´s illusory distance. In Grøndahl´s language as in his female psychology there are reminiscences of Hans Christian Branner´s prose when it was at its best.
   Grøndahl has with his work created that thing which is most stigmatised by the writing fraternity; an illusion of reality. And when all is said and done, this is probably the most sensible thing for which you can use the gift of writing. At least it is the most difficult one. For it presupposes that you have been so conscious of your writing that you can make the consciousness of it totally imperceptible.

This article was first published in Danish Literary Magazine 8, 1995.

Translated by W. Glyn Jones