Turning Points of Existence

A collection of stories about defectiveness and half-deceptiveness

Af : Torben Brostrøm

Breve (Letters) is the title of Jens Smærup Sørensen´s latest collection of short stories, his third during more than twenty years of prose which has ranged from extremely analytical narratives to free-wheeling fantasies.
    His latest books could be characterised as compositions of individual stories, as for instance the novel Katastrofe (Catastrophe), which consists of accounts of about ten people on the same day in April 1986. These people were picked from a newspaper photo taken during an anti-EC demonstration in Copenhagen in 1972, comrades in an ideological fellowship. The fellowship is long gone, but their human frustrations and superficial successes are rather similar.
   Catastrophe means turning point. And turning points are the motif in the 15 stories in Breve, which in one way could also be called a novel about life in various parts of Denmark - and, consequently, about western civilisation. The book ranges in time from village life in the old days to the professional city life of our time.
    Letters is the term directly used to describe four of the texts, which divide the book into movements, but all of them are composed in the nature of a message. They are the writing of self-understanding in the form of communications, attempted analyses of crucial situations in life.
    We are moving on the borderline between self-knowledge and self-deceit. Most of the characters are people (men) in their forties who are trying, rather wordily, to find motives for their actions - and the reasons why something goes completely wrong. Explanations and rationalisations enter into inciting liaisons in passionate linguistic creativity - in the characters and in the author. The narrator writes the people onwards and upwards and into a web of lies and deception. The reader must exercise a certain measure of perspicacity not to be beguiled into the credibility of errors. After all, these are usually likeable, ordinary people - and in several cases cynical murderers.
    The story may be about modern marriages, where people have agreed to mutual "openness" - the most deceptive type of relationship: "a number of tacit understandings, unwritten contracts, non-negotiated but perfectly clear agreements that you/I will do/say this/nothing else". That is how it is explained by the husband who has gradually caught on to the intimate understanding between his wife and the friend of the house - and through a kind of "absentmindedness" happens to utter the killer command to the newly trained bulldog, who breaks the lover´s neck ("Shibbolet").
    There are several psychological thrillers like this, and underneath all of them lies an unacknowledged and perhaps unrecognised sexuality. As in the story about the TV reporter who triggers an avalanche of hatred in the village where he is doing research. Arson on the outside, spurned eroticism as incendarism on the inside. The story has the equivocal title "Damned Dump".
    Identity is at stake in the question of whether you even exist in reality. Playing a role is just accepted by everyone in the outside world, including yourself. Does anybody actually see anybody else? That would imply a sudden emergence. This is how the question is put in "Letter 4" by the man who has left home and wife to find himself.
    Delayed motivations, half truths, oblique intentions - where eloquence conceals the guilty conscience, that is the general formula.
    One of the seven deadly sins could have been half-heartedness: not being able to admit to one´s passion or to suppress it. This occurs in "Eternally", where a coincidence in the life of the woman whom a man is going to meet through a personal ad merely demonstrates his vacillation. He is struck hard by something that resembles fate. A pattern has formed.
    This then is the perspective of the book: we are each other´s fate. Your qualities and character fill in the pieces of the puzzle. Is it a pattern of civilisation or a fundamental condition of life?
    This is reflected in the text Brev 2 where a man wants to negotiate with the devil the terms on which he will sell his soul. It is easy to understand why the devil is interested in this ordinary, devious, petty soul. He is of course the epitome of half-heartedness. Under all circumstances doomed to his own hell.


Denne artikel blev første gang bragt i Danish Literary Magazine nr. 4, 1993

Oversat af John Erickson