Roll the dice 6: Absolutely Hell! – BOK365.nr
Few can, like Helle Helle, write about anything and make it become a lot. Her new novel Bob is an excellent example of this.
Since Danish Helle Helle made her debut in the 1990s, she has distinguished herself masterfully with several novels that cultivate the slightly short, effective language in her portrayal of the everyday. Her characters are usually very ordinary people who live very ordinary lives, where they also like to grope a little indecisively in the future on the path of life.
This also applies to new novels BIR, which stylistically starts and ends in the present, while everything in between is told in the past. A dramaturgical move that creates a frame story where we can follow the main character Bob, a young man who in the mid-1980s moves with his girlfriend in a small apartment in Vanløse, in the northern parts of Copenhagen. (By the way, the couple met towards the end of Helle Helle’s previous novel De, so that Bob in that sense acts as a kind of stand-alone sequel to this one.)
While Bob’s girlfriend was the nameless protagonist of the mother-daughter story the, she takes the position here as a kind of omniscient narrator’s voice. It is she who goes in and out of Bob and reads his thoughts and describes his life, and it is through her that we get to join his walks around Copenhagen. A few times in the beginning she uses a “we” which signals that they are a couple, but for the most part it is as if she is writing herself out of the story. She is just present as an observer, where the feeling of distance is strengthened by everything being told in the past. The reader is left with a sore feeling of telling if Bob and his nameless girlfriend are the story of something that was, something that slipped.
Copenhagen in the 1980s
Helle Helle:
BIR
Roman
Published October
154 pages
Trude Marstein
Specifically, we get to follow Bob through some Copenhagen months in the 1980s, with small detours to his ordinary and seemingly harmonious upbringing on Lolland. The family is drawn with a loving look, he has many good friends and Bob also obviously has a good grip on the ladies. Life looks generally good, however, he voluntarily leaves all this to go with his girlfriend to Copenhagen when she has to start studying.
While studying, Bob has only vague ideas about his own future. His ambitions do not seem to extend much beyond the desire to build a nest with his girlfriend in the young couple’s small studio. But the courage and energy we encounter in the initial phase is increasingly replaced by indecision and passivity. He is unemployed and does not know what he wants with life until he gets a little foothold in life when he finds a part-time job at a hotel in Nyhavn.
There he gets to know the little older Rudi and Kola who work in a shop as nearby, and between Bob and Kola a tension arises which the rest of us can lead to something. But without saying yes or no to Kola, he prefers to take the bus home and go to the grocery store, rather than embark on an adventure.
The great emptiness
Thus, the reader is taken both along the streets in Copenhagen and on many bus trips between Vanløse and Nyhavn, and occasionally also elsewhere. Wherever the journey goes, the loneliness is to touch and feel, and beneath it murmurs desperation. It’s as if doing around, cleaning and other trivial goals act as an emotional buffer against life itself.
The couple also shows no strong feelings either way, and for a long time it is as if the food and the meals are what bind them together. But even these fragile common moments become rarer, without raising the outside temperature of the story. Some of the most dramatic thing that happens in Bob is probably when an old car he has standing on his parents’ property is stolen. But it was to be sold anyway, so the great drama does not appear here either.
And it is in this that Helle Helle shows her greatness. Most of the characters around Bob are drawn as rather blurry sketches, and as the novel’s narrator’s voice, the girlfriend remains faceless and anonymous throughout the book. But even though Bob’s life seems rather uneventful and highly unexciting all his loneliness, in Helle Helle still manages to make it exciting for the reader. Through small linguistic twists and seemingly innocent adverbs, she creates mood markers that almost invisibly carry the story forward. Much of the everyday drama is found between the lines.
It gives life to both Bob and the book, and although we early sense that the narrator’s voice flashes back on and depicts a relationship in disarray, we are constantly waiting in suspense for what is to happen. It hurts, and while we ponder what choices Bob should make, we can enjoy Helle Helle’s precise language. With a stroke of climax when she rounds off the frame narrative with a superb stylistic grip, the last sentence ordered becomes an exact mirror image of the very first. But the lack of punctuation at the same time creates an uncertainty which makes the ending a little more open.