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Roman
Publisher:
The intercourse
Translator:
Ingvild Holvik
Release year:
2021
«Morbid family history»
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Meet the Christiansen family – child murderers, spirit men and necrophiliacs. All in the good and profitable service. Here the grotesques and perversity develop into a business idea.
In Maren Uthaug’s novel “A happy ending”, the Christiansen family are the owners of Copenhagen’s most lucrative funeral home.
Maren Uthaug is an interesting author who is probably better known in Denmark than in Norway. She was born in Kautokeino, but moved to Denmark when she was eight. There she has created a career as a writer, blogger and cartoonist, both in Danish and in Sami. Through the newspaper Politiken, she is known for the strip «Things I did». In 2018, she received the DR Novel Prize for «Where there are birds», and last year she received the Readers’ Book Prize in Denmark for “A happy ending”. For it, she is also nominated for the prestigious EU Literature Prize this year.
Red eyes
It is Samlaget that has picked up this authorship and published Maren Uthaug in Ingvild Holvik’s translation into Nynorsk. Both “Where there are birds” and “A happy ending” deal in part with controversial topics, where sex is an important ingredient.
Shocking script from Manus
Sex and death, the combination is tantalizing on several levels. Already in the introduction to the new novel, the I-narrator admits that he trembles in the face of cold skin. “Everyone in our family has something to fight for. My lot was to love the dead too much, in the wrong way. ” His name is Nicolas Christiansen, he is the sixth generation in this funeral dynasty, where everyone before him has had Christian as his first name.
Nicolas is a modern practitioner; he equips his favorite corpse with rose-scented body lotion and shimmering lip gloss before heading to the agency’s cold room.
Child murder
But the story begins in the early 1800s. Christian Christiansen – referred to as Christian 1 – is the only survivor after a shipwreck and floats ashore on the Pacific island of Tikopia. There is only room for 990 souls, and superfluous infants are sentimentally removed. The islanders consider it interrupted intercourse, and call it weeding. Christian 1 and his chosen Cyclope are so careless to get two. To prevent a little sister from having to be killed, 10-year-old Christian 2 goes out to sea in a canoe to die. Luckily, he is picked up by a ship and ends up in Amsterdam and then in Copenhagen.
A pure friend hell
In every other chapter, Maren Uthaug tells about the Nicolas of our time, and in turn about his ancestors Christian 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on. It is a bizarre family history, where each generation possesses a genetic form of insanity that is expressed by the eyeballs turning red when situations escalate. The move is known from horror movies. I also have an idea of Maren Uthaug’s involvement with the comic book genre in the character portrayals. They are outrageous, clear, but multidimensional. The effects are not saved here. Here are plague, cholera, dirt, mud, lice, syphilis, poverty and rotten corpses, lots of corpses, of course.
Historical perspective
In the abundance of tantalizing, nauseating and morbid depictions, the novel has the interesting bonus that it provides a cultural-historical perspective on our changing view of death.
She describes the development from viewing death as an everyday and ubiquitous phenomenon, where portraits were taken of the corpse that lay stinking in the pen room for nine days, to today’s sterile and almost taboo approach to death. It’s exciting novel material.
Superstition lasted a long time. Flax seeds were once sprinkled on the grave, so that the deceased became so busy counting the seeds that he / she did not have time to visit the survivors before sunrise.
Maren Uthaug’s dive into this realm of the dead is thorough, grotesque and well worth a visit.
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