Plain Text
on Bonsai
By : Marie Tetzlaff
There are no circumlocutions, but there is great art in Kirsten Thorup
Kirsten Thorup occupies a very special place in Danish literature. She stands
as one of the few to appeal to a vast range of readers. She impresses
professional writers on literature in a way they find difficult to define - and
the broad mass of readers in Denmark wait for her books and rush to buy them
when, at very considerable intervals, they appear. The subjects - or perhaps
one ought to call them pain spots - around which Kirsten Thorup’s oeuvre
constantly revolves, are the borderlines between social classes, between strong
and weak egos and between the sexes. Her main characters’ sense of wearing
masks and their uncertainty about their own identity brings in its train a
clear disparity bordering on perfidy between externality and the inner self. In
women it is especially their social identity, in the men their sexual identity,
that is at play. It can be no surprise that mirrors are frequently used as
accessories. In December 2000, Kirsten was awarded the Danish Academy major
prize. The decision was made before the appearance of her latest novel, Bonsai.
However, Bonsai confirms the picture of Kirsten Thorup as an uncompromising,
doggedly intractable and nevertheless very accessible writer to the broad
reading public. Her style is uneven and awkward and can best be described as
eclectic: realism, lyricism, fantasy and pulp fiction are blended in both
language and psychology.
Kirsten Thorup’s new novel is called “Bonsai”. In it, she returns to the social
and sexual pain spots that have become her trademark. In a compositional sense,
Bonsai consists of seven sections of almost equal length. The first and last
parts mirror each other and form the framework around a five-part story of
marriage and death. Both the prologue and the epilogue involve the
psychotherapist Charlotte. In the prologue, a bereaved husband is recording on
tape the story of his Barbie-like wife and her suicide. Then - in five parts -
comes the story of the marriage between the author Nina and the theatre manager
Stefan, and finally there is an epilogue in which, after the death of the
bisexual Stefan from AIDS, Nina begins to record a story for the psychotherapist
Charlotte. Perhaps both this and the prologue are trial pieces from the hand of
Nina the author, and perhaps it was the narrator in the prologue who infected
Stefan with AIDS.
Most of the novel is about Stefan's protracted deathbed and the
meticulous and psychologically almost cannibalistic stratagem he persuades his
long-estranged wife Nina and their daughter Elin to arrange so that he can
commit suicide at the right time and place. It gradually also becomes clear
that in her weary concern to follow even his least instruction, Nina is
enjoying finally having her husband for herself. The sweetness of being in
control is scarcely something with which we can reproach this woman, who, as an
gauche and socially oppressed little smallholder virago from the provinces was
as a young woman exploited, humiliated and imposed upon by the youthful Stefan
- at that time a hopeful, but subsequently unsuccessful painter with an
inflated, patriarchal ego. He refused to confront his own homosexuality, and
she was a convenient alibi - who was nevertheless excluded from his circle of
friends. She moreover had to give up her studies in order to support him. It is
all dispensed in letters which both explain away and reveal, letters which Nina
writes to her parents with whom, as a necessary, almost affectionate
consequence of her social mobility she has broken. This parricide, which was
characteristic of the embryonic welfare society that offered an academic
training to people from modest backgrounds is something that Thorup shows in a
classic, brilliant distillation.
We learn nothing of all the years between the time when Nina was pregnant with
her daughter Elin until the now well-known theatre manager Stefan, unwilling to
admit the nature of his illness, is dying. His long monologue from his hospital
bed to his ex-wife and his now married and pregnant daughter constitutes the
central section in “Bonsai”. We now hear the story from Stefan, the
affection-starved boarding school son of a lone, slightly callous and self-centred mother. And here, the
mirror is reversed to allow us to look at Nina and discover the despotic
support, not to say compulsion, that was necessary to make an author of her.
Nina, too, turned to lovers for a time, the more casual the better. Her life-long
obsession with Stefan is beyond doubt, but her insistence on their mutual
devotion in their lives together seems to be wishful thinking - on the part of
both Nina and the author. Stefan is a monster, always was and always will be -
though towards the end he is a pitiable specimen. Yet perhaps it was he who
made an author of Nina.
In the prologue, “To Charlotte”, Kirsten elegantly reverses the mirrors,
providing sudden and unexpected alternating glimpses of the two main characters
in the drama. She draws a profoundly fascinating, faithful and merciless
portrait of an average male sexist, sensitive and in love, but unable to raise
himself above seeing women as objects. In the “Epilogue”, Nina tape-records the
story of a woman, a fictitious account of herself, who “has worn men’s clothes
for far too long”. When, very occasionally and in the deepest secrecy, she puts
on a thin dress and high-heeled shoes, she feels naked like a transvestite and
cannot recognise herself in the mirror.
This, in ultra-short form, is what this fearless novel and to some extent
Thorup’s oeuvre is about: disguise, transformation, denial, alienation from
self and the question of the truth of the mirror image. Nina and Kirsten Thorup
have undoubtedly a great deal in common. How much, is of no matter. The novel
is a success. In the novel’s special field of tension between piquancy and ploughed field,
bohemian and boor, Kirsten Thorup can scarcely progress further.
MARIE TETZLAFF reviews for the newspaper Politiken
This article first appeared in Danish Literary Magazine 19, Spring 2001
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
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