Excerpts from
Virtue and Vise in the Middle Time
By Svend Åge Madsen
Ato Vari has undertaken the amusing experiment of writing a novel (a fictitious description of a portion of reality). AV sets the novel at the end of the Middle Time (1500-2000), more precisely in the 1970s, just after the second European war, a time in which there flourished a crude and unspoiled life, shortly before The Great Collapse.
The book gives a splendid and realistic insight into the mores and customs of the period, which the author appears to have studied in detail. Simultaneously, AV displays an intimate knowledge of the two dominant forms of the novel then prevalent: one form deals with individuals in relation to other individuals (the love novel); the other deals with individuals in relation to socoety (the hate novel, also called the crime novel). By utilizing these two narrative forms, AV allows us to experience the period through its great problems as well as through its everyday life. We find amusing examples of humankind´s pangs of love resulting from an uncertain differentiation between a spiritual and a sensual love, and we find shocking descriptions of the miseries caused by mankind´s outmoded concept of justice. Everything is described with such familiarity and directness, down to the smallest detail, that after reading the novel one feels as if one has paid a visit to Århus in 1975. (AV uses poetic license once, however, in that the anti-C movement started in 1979, not in 1974, as he claims. And a single mistake has crept in: the electric light had, in fact, been introduced everywhere by that time.)
The value of the novel - or the romance - lies above all in the light it sheds on the conditions of our own time. Precisely in the period under discussion there arose,as the book demonstrates, many of the ideas which we now regard as fundamental. For that reason it is for us a decisive time which AV has set out to recreate.
Komani,
Historian,
specialist on Denmark of the Middle Time
Translated by James M. Ogier
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