Absurd and Banal

A look at contemporary Danish Short prose shows a genre in full bloom.

Af : Lilian Munk Rösing

A novella and a short story are not the same thing. Novella means ‘novelty’ and deals with a new situation, a break with the usual, a surprising event that puts valid systems out of order and forces us to make new interpretations of reality. In Danish literature Karen Blixen is the queen of the novella; her novellas are landslides, where the action constantly takes new, unforeseen turns, so that characters and reader must constantly find a new floe of world interpretation to stand on.
   The short story genre came to us from the United States: Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver whose short stories portray the typical situation. They show us a life in an excerpt which contains that life; which captures the special characteristics of that particular life. The short story gives us ‘examples of lives’, to paraphrase the title of Danish short-story queen Helle Helle’s first book, published in 1993.
   In contemporary Danish short prose stories are told, and writers work in the narrative genres within a consciousness of tradition. Stylistic mastery is at such a high level that the texts now and then appear like a concentrate or skeleton of the genre; this is the case with the short stories of Helle Helle, and also with the novellas of Peter Adolphsen that we present together with two of this spring’s other short prose publications written by Sidsel Falsig Pedersen and Jens Blendstrup. Hemingway meets Herman Bang
Helle Helle (b. 1965) is a direct heir to the American short story tradition; like Hemingway she shows us the tip of the iceberg, omitting all introspection.
   The stories in Biler og dyr (which is her fourth book) are set in a provincial summer Denmark: heatwave, rape fields, apple trees, sleepless nights at an open window, the butcher’s unloaded monthly parcels that are in danger of rotting in the sun. Helle Helle gets off the bus (or the train, or turns off the motorway) at one of the those places in the provinces which the rest of us usually drive past, and takes the reader to a voyeuristic feast: a peep into the bungalow or the parked car on the station square or the flat above the filling station. Often a peep into the relationship of a couple.
   The summer becomes a condition that at once holds the world in apathetic stagnation (the hot asphalt one dead Saturday afternoon on the station square) and brings temperaments to boiling point (a pair of crazy wives throwing things or slamming the door). Apathy and explosion merge in the short stories’ elegant polish (shimmering asphalt); there is infidelity in the pharmacy assistant’s thermos flask, there are rotten sausages in the monthly parcel, there is death and mourning in the office lady’s lacquered fingernails, there are foetuses behind the ironed summer dresses.
   These small behaviouristic short stories are honed to stylistic perfection. But it is not a question of pure, cold stylistic mastery. There is an undercurrent of warm empathy in the stories. Empathy with all the women, whom the author (very often in the first person) makes carry the point of view: married women, pregnant women, young women, widows, daughters and mothers.
   In Helle Helle the American short story tradition meets the empathic view of quiet provincial lives with which we are familiar from Herman Bang.

Oversat af David McDuff