Fiction
Publisher:
Bonnie
Translator:
Hilde Rød-Larsen
Release year:
2023
«Sensational. Nothing less.»
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We write Nørre Ørum, a village in Denmark, and a period of approximately three years around 2011. The boy Tue, the book’s narrator, grows up on a farm with two younger siblings, calves and cows, an unruly pack of dogs and two equally unruly parents. Tue’s nearly forty-year-old mother screams that she wants to die, and plays online poker for money the family does not have. Emptying a portion of French fries into the letterbox at the roadside inn in pure anger, she does too.
The father jerks off to the weather woman, and uses a New Year’s Eve to dump dung on the doorstep of a neighbor he doesn’t like. Tue’s visits to the school inspector are countless – and even the boy with dog’s breath is more popular than him at school. Life doesn’t get any easier when strange feelings start to appear in the teenage body.
Absurd episodes
Like Andrea Abreu’s funny as well as poignant novel “Skydekke”, the narrative in “Hvis det skoll komme et menses” often resides in the boundary layer between humor and seriousness. Other crazy episodes than already mentioned, I will not reveal. But there are many more of them, and that the next one is more absurd than the last. Nor had I imagined that depictions of calf carcasses would arouse so much joy in me:
“Dead animals don’t rot until they’ve been lying around long enough for the ground to get under their skin and take over their bodies. Then the hair lays down in smooth, greasy folds, and when the flies shit in the dried-up eyes, they start to smell.”
Laughing until the tears fall
Emotional
The quote serves as a good example of the book’s lifting of boundaries. The language is as beautiful as you can get. The content just as gloomy. The author gets a lot of credit for refusing to take linguistic shortcuts. When Tue helps a friend onto a tractor, it says: “I intertwined hands and stretched them down, and Lasse took hold and swung himself up.”
The author explores the boundary between adults and children. Swearing is a regular feature whether your name is mother or father, grandmother or grandmother. But curse the children, then it becomes moonlight. Otherwise, Tue overhears words and phrases that probably set things off in the reader’s mind, but which remain uncommented in the narrative. Like when a nurse in an early scene condoles the father in the hospital. It is in this that so much of the book’s qualities lie. The narrator Tue neither judges nor calculates. Events occur, and for him life goes on without disturbing reflections. Here the book gets its rhythm, fluid and emotive.
A pleasure to read
Seeking security
Behind Tue’s restless and inventive exterior, we can glimpse a boy who is looking for security in the world without finding it. He is rarely listened to, not even when the parents put themselves or him and the other children in danger. To call the book strong would be an understatement. Translating Hilde Rød-Larsen’s choices along the way, the radical Bokmål and the preservation of the Danish expression “fanden gale” in one of the lines, elevates the narrative in Norwegian. This use of language suits Tue well.
Korsgaard lets the end go into dialogue with the beginning and could not have given the book a more fitting rounding off. “If there should be a human being” is a gem that ebbs into a semi-variant of free thought.
