A Child of the Turn of the Century.

By : Lars Bonnevie

As soon as I was able to read, I would flee hell bent for leather away from the sickening reality that surrounded me, and I still do. Everything I write is an attempt to get out from the debris under which I am buried. Every time I begin a new book, I hope not for a new and better world but for a new and better way of shaping this world. It is a barbaric world, but if you were born during World War II, you have never experienced another. I want to investigate it, to take it apart, out of its shell of language, for I am convinced that the real stupidity, the real evil, is in language – the way it is used by idiots and criminals. The devil is a rhetorician. All my life, the question of how the world appears has been a question of propaganda. As I write this, people are sitting in front of their television screens with their mouths gaping open, being fed lies about a new European war in the Balkans, accompanied by pictures of bombs and missiles raining down, as if the war were a computer game. I think it is hard to sink any lower. When I was small, people were actually shaken, when pictures from the concentration camps were first made public. Today, they lap up similar horrors along with their morning coffee, having become accustomed to a callousness that makes it even easier than ever before for those in power to wage war behind the scenes. (. . .)

I have lived in twenty-four different places over the course of my life, which is not the best way of becoming the sort of author who has roots in his local society. When I was small, I had no influence over this wandering about, but when I grew older, it was already in my blood, and I continued with it. The best moments I know are just between leaving and arriving. I have always thought it was a good idea to have an escape route. The French author Clarisse Nicoldski once told me that she wrote in order to give herself false papers. Every author needs false papers; through them, the truth comes into view. Of course, it only appears metaphorically, just like the insight from which it springs, and writing it down is like trying to keep a soap bubble above an ocean of words and other texts. Perhaps, that is why I have at times felt so attracted to Africa and have written a couple of novels there; that continent is a metaphor for everything that is wrong with our own and with ourselves, a laboratory for the final collapse, which is not, of course, a very welcome point of view. But as I have tried to decolonise myself throughout my whole life, I have nothing against those who, with even greater right, strive to do the same thing, and as I belong to a family of wanderers, I have no problem with the mass migrations the next millennium will offer in great quantity. Even when I first began to write some thirty years ago, the sun was beginning to set on Europe. We are bathed in the golden light of late afternoon, as bombs explode, moral norms decay, and rhetoric deteriorates. And as I write this, it has suddenly dawned on me what I have been writing towards all this time without even realizing it, driven by an instinct inexplicable to myself: to look at the Western world, as if I lived in the Third World with three thousand years of European civilization in my head, colonized and decolonised at the same time, or as a fellow writer once said to me: a strange bird in the Danish nest.

Translated by Russell Dees