Secrets, lies and riddles

On My Horrible Face

By : Mai Misfeldt

In her collection of short stories Mit forfærdelige ansigt (My Horrible Face) Pia Juul writes about loving and losing oneself and one other.

Pia Juul’s first book, a collection of poems entitled levende og lukket (living and locked), appeared in 1985. She has since written four critically acclaimed poetry collections, most recently sagde jeg, siger jeg (I said, I say, 1999). She has also published a novel, Skaden (Magpie<, 1990), and now we hear that she is working on another novel. Actually, Pia Juul does not really need to write novels because her spellbinding and adroit style can ingeniously reveal a novel in a poem. She has even written a poem called “Novel”. It is also characteristic of Pia Juul that her contribution to an anthology on the theme of happiness simply comprised three words: “Syrener, syrener, syrener” (“Lilacs, lilacs, lilacs”).
   My Horrible Face contains 17 relatively short stories, of which a number have been published before. It is a fascinating assortment: ranging from manic, searching monologues by lonely women, to old-fashioned, almost pastoral and quite erotic tales with breast-feeding women, ardent uncles and sullen soldiers, to humorous, subtle stories, which despite their tone are about the gravity of life, about choices which defy understanding, betrayal, loneliness and sudden insight.
   The title story is a nightmarish tale about an inebriated woman at a party, imprisoned in her sleeping bag as well as in herself. She falls to the floor and into herself and her face becomes a bloody pulp. The bloody, horrible face is not really as bad as she thinks, but under the surface there is an actual bloody and tragic secret – about loving and losing.
   Many of the stories return to this theme: loving and losing oneself and one other. “En storslået død” (“A Remarkable Death”) is about a woman who has given away all her secrets and now realises that she should have saved some for herself. And when she finally gets a secret – the thought that her husband is cheating on her with her best friend – the secret is not sweet, but feels like a tumour, which might cause her a remarkable death, for which she has absolutely no desire. She has got hold of the wrong end of her life and now she cannot have a re-run. This is true for many of the characters – they have, just like the woman imprisoned in her sleeping bag, misconstrued their lives, but even though they know it they cannot do it differently; they cannot find the zip, as it were, which leaves them with the drastic way out of either destroying themselves or their fellow human beings. This is the case in “Opgang” (“The Stairwell”), in which the narrator cannot free herself from her old, tyrannical downstairs neighbour before things finally get to such a state that – oops – she happens to kill the neighbour.
   It is not that they are violent stories; on the other hand, there is a kind of sleepwalking fate to the characters’ lives. It was just going to happen like that, and it does happen like that. There is something secretive and inscrutable about Juul’s short stories. It takes a while before the reader understands what is actually going on. As in “Indianer” (“Indians”), a curious dialogue, conducted through a net door, between a big, fat American Indian and a girl who is searching for her father.
   Other voices are often heard in Pia Juul’s poetry, as they are in her prose. Her style is characterised by the use of a paratactic sentence structure, giving the text a breathless tone somewhat akin to Herman Bang’s writing. “It took five hours by train, it could be called a bit of a journey, her mother had arranged everything, it was only family, which wasn’t very big, they were going to have saddle of pork.”
   Throughout the stories it is evident that Pia Juul likes words and likes the resonance of great literature to play a part, while the tone can shift from a blunt regional dialect to a soft, erotic twisting and coiling. Seen as a whole, My Horrible Face is a first-rate collection of stories.

This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 20, Autumn 2001.

Translated by Gaye Kynoch