Stories from the Fringe

By : Torben Madsen

It is a widespread international publishers´ malady to "search for" what is already familiar. When a Garcia Márquez suddenly enjoys success, all the publishers who didn't sign him hurry to get a similar author for their house. When an Isabel Allende becomes a hit with readers in Europe, young female authors writing in Spanish are in clover - especially storytellers in the "magical realism" school. When Umberto Eco becomes a bestseller, medieval horror stories abound, imported and translated from whatever language. When Milan Kundera, when ...

At the more commercial end of the publishing spectrum, this malady shouldn't surprise anyone, but there is some indication that it is equally widespread among serious publishers marketing their new young "Spanish" Milan Kundera, "Italian" Günter Grass, "Swedish" Borges, or what have you.

The syndrome creates problems for the truly original authors in each language, who at best must wait much longer for their first foreign contract – at worst they never experience it before being posthumously canonized.

Everyone knows those certain names that keep popping throughout the conversation between a publisher and another publisher, agent, or critic - those authors whose works cannot be pigeonholed or compared with any others. They bring a gleam to the eye of the person speaking, but seldom a glimmer of recognition in the eyes of the listener. If it does happen, however, that particular author often winds tip being the special favorite of his new foreign publisher as well. The ball starts rolling, and maybe in ten years other publishers will start looking for someone who resembles this "new one".

All of this is to say that the present writer knows what he is up against in trying to present Vibeke Grønfeldt to the outside world. Her work is like that of no one else in her homeland or, for that matter, in any other country, even though it might be easy to fall into the trap of comparing her work to that of certain other authors whose work resembles no one else´s ...

Brilliant Portraits
Vibeke Grønfeldt was born in 1947 on the island of Samsø in the Kattegat. Here she has spent her entire life, aside from a short period in northern Jutland. Samsø is a small society being steadily depopulated. You can reach the island by ferry from Jutland or Sealand but most people come as tourists during a short, hectic period in the summer, when service industries provide a little income for the islanders, who are primarily small farmers threatened by foreclosure auctions or shrewd consolidations.

It might be called an isolated society in those few European countries where small enclaves still exist almost outside the influence of modern worldwide mass communications, such as Spain. In Denmark it is possible for people to be isolated from the rest of society economically, while remaining in the midst of the common media flow, with all the knowledge they could want about world politics, big-city life, cultural trends, and fashion phenomena.

Grønfeldt´s novels take place in this double world. On the one hand there is the memory of a tradition-bound rural existance that has long since lost its raison d´être. On the other, there is a bulldozed mass culture with a dearth of common norms and with a vision of the future that recognizes succes only in social and economic terms.

This type of success is largely an illusion in Grønfeldt´s world, so people strive to attain it with tremendous persistance. Her characters in general are larger than life. When they have an idea about the way the world should be run, they live it out, no matter what the reaction of the outside world or what it might cost them. They are examples in clarity in moral, philosohical, and existential terms. For instance, if they don´t think that something is really working out, they, literally, bring the world to a standstill. If they are convinced of their own perfection, they acquire a cloned successor who can relive and keep alive their own imblemished, magnificent life.
Many of them live out their daily lives questioning whether it is actually worthwhile to keep on living each day. However, this turns only a few of them into suicide candidates. Grønfeldt´s gallery of characters is made up of survivors who endure under the wildest conditions viewed from the perspective of a truly "normal" environment.

Her unique mastery is her ability to depict these extremes with a matter-of-fact realism that is both visible and tangible. The change of seasons is seldom so vivid or the countryside so alive as in her prose. Alongside the mundane activities of her characters, plants are blooming and withering, described with a poetry so original that it seems to be happening for the first time. The light and temperature change, and animals are in constant motion. Grønfeldt´s universe is full of smells both good and bad. You can taste it and feel it tickling and scratching.

She is just as direct with nature as she is with her characters: unsentimental, blackly humorous, empathetic. She can paint a brilliant psychological portrait but is not constrained by any old-fashioned explanatory psychological patterns. Her people are reminiscent of the rest of the animal kingdom, and that´s why they seem so modern and real.

Another of her strengths is the ability to portray a character so that he not only bears the mark of the author´s creative imagining but also can be experienced as a unique psyche with his own past. This is the case, for instance, in her novel, The Deathwatch Beetle ("Dødningeuret" ) from 1990.

The Nosiness of the Provincial Town
How would the world look if you looked at it without reservations? What if you don´t take the first impression at face value, but try to get to the bottom of the actual relationships between things, even if you carry your own petty prejudices, which at first tell you that you ought to retreat? In Grønfeldt's The Deathwatch Beetle, Severin Hansen is such a person. He lives in a small provincial town (not on an island this time) and makes a living as a maker of fine furniture. He lives a quiet life: "Every day is practically the same - and thus disconcertingly different in the very marrow of events".

Of course he has seen others seize the opportunity eventually and prosper on a small or large scale in the industrialized sector, but he has chosen to keep in touch with his one-man handiwork, and he can feel the sligthtest impression of his great predecessors on the furniture he repairs. He also creates new things himself but he is actually unaware of his own talent.

The novel about him is thus also a novel about an artist, in which the artist not only does not realize the scope of his talent but also is not descibed in the usual l´art pour l´art manner.

Severin Hansen knows his wood through and through. With warm interest he cultivates the insects that break down the wood and ought to be his enimies. Throughout the novel he reads aloud about insect life in general, which runs as a parallel to his own life.

One of the beetles has lent its name to the novel: the deathwatch beetle is the name of the little wood-eating beetle (Latin: Xestobium), which produces a sound like the ticking of a clock. In the olden days, superstition claimed that when you heard this ticking from inside the wood, it was an omen of impending death.

Severin Hansen can hear it, and he also sees a lot of death around him, both liberally and figuratively. His candid manner with his fellow human beings naturally puts him in close contact with people on the fringe. They notice his interest, perhaps exploiting it to help themselves through an illness or a fear of death. But Severin himself, in his own way, is immersed in life and has no death fixation. He has experienced a great deal and doesn´t think it´s worth the effort to keep trying new things. This makes him difficult - or "odd", seen with the eyes of his community; he doesn´t like to open mail or pay bills, doesn´t pretend to take part in the official mini-life of the town or in the political life of the big world outside.

On the other hand, he does know something about the peculiar lives of the eccentrics living in the town, whom other people avoid out of fear or passivity. Severin is personally checking up to find out whether the isolated pharmacist is really being persecuted or whether he is just paranoid. Up to a certain limit he also allows himself to be ordered around by women, even though sexuality no longer awakens his interest.

His old girlfriend and former fiancée, Minna Mikkelsen, keeps popping up and helping out, but she never catches him. For the reader, however, she puts him in a frame as an easily recognizable example of provencial nosiness - utterly contemporary and eternal. Along with her he is drawn into social events; set alongside his intimate private life, these events create the novel´s exhaustive picture of small-time life in our time.

Quiet Existences
Vibeke Grønfeldt's novels often make use of complex narrative structures with ruptured plots, parallel or opposing story lines, and many narrative voices. The Deathwatch Beetle is to date her most "traditional" novel in terms of structure. It proceeds at a steady pace and is filled with striking perceptions which abruptly stop the narrative and take on a life of their own. Certain passages even remind the reader of the great Danish impressionist author Herman Bang, who was known for his depiction of quiet existences. Like her predecessor, Grønfeldt piece by piece unveils the past that forms the background for the present day quietude.

Severin Hansen´s childhood was cut short by a charge of murder. He had just entered puberty –and was so unsure of himself that he accepted the others´ accusations of guilt without protest. And maybe it didnt really make any difference that they took him away. His time in the institution taught him to understand the essential purpose of the smallest object; to concentrate on the interrelationships in the hospital and perceive it as a great living organism; to make himself useful, willing, and alert in the hospital. So the adult Severin lives quietly against what some would call an extremely violent background, but in his own way he has drawn strength from it. And he hasn´t lost any of his capacity for concentration or unbiased observation, which he may have learned originally out of a sheer instinct for survival.

Like her protagonist, Grønfeldt takes nothing for granted; she examines and re-examines everything. And like other original storytellers, she has her own interpretation of human perception and the dilemma of the modern European. She also shows the reader the dissolution of values, money and power, the tiny fascism inside, and love, which is so hard to capture. But she does it within the rightful scope of the narrator, neatly wrapped in the story´s own flow.

It has been said that she alone, among her generation of Danish writers, might be considered to possess genius. She would undoubtedly protest and find this uninteresting. The very nature of her novels, each one a further experiment in an open-ended series, argues against this kind of glorification.

And yet it is clear that Grønfeldt´s insistence on keeping her focus on a small world has produced some of the most enlightening images of the modern world that contemporary Danish literature has to offer.

Today everything can be perceived and recorded in even the tiniest "isolated" place. From there the clearest description may be relayed, if the talent is sufficient.


This article was first published in Danish Literary Magazine 1, 1991.

Translated by Steven T. Murray and Tiina Nunnally