Stolen Spring

By : Carsten Clante

Det forsømte forår (Stolen Spring) is, first and foremost, a novel about powerlessness – the feeling of powerlessness everyone in this country has felt at crucial times in his or her life: in school, in childhood and youth, when you feel completely downtrodden by authority, parents, teachers, in short: the adult establishment. That, later in life, the vast majority of these same adults are crushed by the system and those who run it does not make the matter any better. Stolen Spring has become in the true sense of the word a popular book, read primarily by young people but also by many adults, because to an extent unknown up to that point, it was an expression of rage, a cry for help - indeed, a ritual murder of everything about smug authority figures who keep people down. With its wildly exaggerated description of an inhuman school, its sick, self-loathing teachers and boorish parents, the novel provides an eminently hygienic effect on the soul, because it skewers all those figures everyone has been oppressed by: teachers, parents, pillars of society. And with the poisoning of a hated teacher by the high school student Edvard Ellerstrøm, Scherfig fulfils every reader's secret dream of murdering one's tormentor in life – be it father, teacher, boss, politician, authority figure, exploiter.
   Stolen Spring is, as Scherfig himself put it on several occasions, an indictment, an attack, but with its explosive power, its repressed rage, it is an indictment on behalf of all who are oppressed. Every reader can identify with the novel's mistreated schoolboy, because it is an identification with the role of victim as such.
   The novel is a release valve for pent-up and accumulated feelings of powerlessness, and this is probably the reason that, in spite of everything, during the war, after the war and today, it has been read and re-read by grammar school students, apprentices, as well as a variety of adults who do not necessarily have any connection with secondary education. For it is, as mentioned before, a flamboyant, funny, and easy to read book. Stolen Spring has no tedious commentary by the author to provide meaning, context or ideology, and the episodes from which possible moral lessons could be drawn are few and unobtrusive. At the same time, Scherfig is an incredible evocator of memories. Tiny details that we have forgotten or repressed are brought to life: the smell of school, violent schoolmates, grumpy parents, food you did not like but had to eat, because it was good for you, the girl at the corner store (or wherever it was) whom you coveted from afar, spring and starling songs and pangs of the heart.

From Carsten Clante, Normal People: Hans Scherfig and His Novels (1975)

Translated by Russel Dees