Your Fate is in Your Own Hands

By : May Schack

The first thing that strikes you when you read Vibeke Grønfeldt’s latest novel Om Mig (About Me) is the artistic use of meat and deli food imagery. In Lili’s childhood home - Lili is the first-person narrator - everything is cut into immaculate thin slices. Dressings are mixed and melt on the tongue, meat is cooked until tender and roasts are succulent. Shop counters are wiped, cold storage rooms are cleaned. Vibeke Grønfeldt manages to evoke this whole sensual world of tastes, smells, temperatures and food hygiene so effectively that you can feel the chill on your bare summer limbs as Lili sits at the kitchen table and eats creamy dressings with a teaspoon.
   Her ever-respectable mother rules in the delicatessen shop and her rather more flighty Aunt Vinca is the third person in the household. Lili’s father has never managed to get a look-in. We meet Lili as an adult. She works as a librarian in a provincial town and is forever harking back to her squeaky clean childhood. Her husband Karl is also her boss in the library. He drinks; Lili covers up for him and bosses him about.
   She steps straight out of the cold storage room of her childhood into a frigid adulthood, dominated by an urge to imitate the respectability her mother struggled to attain. You need will-power and style. The façade has to look right. Lili’s constant refrain is that you mustn’t let yourself be dragged down, and her determination is made all the steelier by Karl’s derailment. In the same way that her mother created an inviting atmosphere in the shop, Lili goes all out to surround herself with beautiful objects and the right people, that is, the town’s bourgeoisie. The surface must shine, however rotten it is underneath.
   You don’t really warm to Lili, but it is to Grønfeldt’s credit that you understand her. At the library she fights for survival for herself and the institution. The library becomes, indeed, a metaphor for and a satire of the state of literature. What is important is raising the profile of the institution so that more government grants become available, but the actual content of the library, the books, are peripheral. Writers don’t live in the real world; the real world is committees, boards of management, flash web sites and the proper parameters. The pediatrician says:”It’s better to be in touch with the real world than the way books represent it. Isn’t that right?”
   When Lili’s alcoholic husband is fired, for a while she tries to get herself noticed in the library. So she sues for divorce, hands in her notice and sells her house. To fight a new campaign. She wants to be a wreck master and with her iron will she persuades the local authority to create a position for her. Better no status than low status: that’s how she deals with her fear of a social debacle. The fear had been with her ever since she was a child, like a knife in her back.br>    The image we get is in many ways a satire of the bureaucratic welfare state. And it is also a pessimistic view of what literature can achieve and what its role is, symbolised by the image of the enormous rubbish dump Lili walks past on her beachcomber duties. At the edge among all the debris of civilisation, discarded by the library, lie the books written by authors consigned to oblivion. Lili, however, stretches out on the moss and reads. In her new life she has disconnected herself from any sort of social context and with this image Grønfeldt evinces both a glimmer of hope and great humour.
   The novel as a portrait of a woman, and especially the way we see the world through Lili’s eyes, is a comment on modern day pressure on us to be involved, to be on top, to be successful and to belong. Lili is a rigid person with an exaggerated fear of weakness and untidiness. At the same time she is, however, an extreme example of a modern social being, a parody of someone of our times with all her ridiculous strivings.
   The novel is disturbing and compellingly relevant. Our constant demands for perfection, measured against extremely limited yardsticks, and the hysterical struggle within social institutions to make themselves visible – an insane symbol of success – receive bitingly ironic treatment in this novel by Vibeke Grønfeldt.

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

Translated by Don Bartlett