«BOB» by Helle Helle – Reviews and recommendations
It’s not excitement, it’s a craving. It’s not drama, it’s intensity. It’s not desperation, it’s … well, sometimes it’s desperation.
In the novel «BOB» you see it on many things, as on many buses Bob easily passes while sitting in the bus and is on his way home. Or «home».
Helle Helle has a unique way of bringing out moods: Her books are gift packages for those who think it can be claustrophobic under the skin of novel characters.
Outside the skin, on the surface, Helle Helle finds it very strange to happen with few and seemingly simple tools. It is as if you have deselected large parts of the toolbox and then utilize what is to the full.
The lonely hiker in Bogholder Allé
It’s Bob (22) this time. He has moved from his childhood home, a farm on Lolland, to Copenhagen. The little brother has said that he will take over the farm and then it will be like this. The sambuar (20) will study and become that Copenhagen.
And while the sambuar is on study trips and participating in colloquium groups, Bob has plenty of time. Very good time. He gets a job on a ferry, but Bob comes for his first days.
It was a lady who stumbled just in front of Bob. Ho trong both comfort and coffee to get to the hooks att, and when Bob arrives at the quay the ferry has unloaded. Thus, Arbeidsformidlinga is closed to him; you just do not come too late the first day.
In short: Bob let himself be controlled by others, and by what appears right in front of his nose. As a child, he got a lot out of twisting and turning the words that were on the corn flakes package on the breakfast table.
On the aimless walks around Copenhagen, he sticks to street names. He fills his head with Kastanje Allé, Bogholder Allé, Linde Allé and Grønlands Parkvej. It is not unreasonable to believe that he is trying to keep heavy thoughts away in that way.
What’s up with Bob?
Bob does not connect. Here he is related to a large number of characters from previous books by Helle Helle. For example, think of the young girl in the novel «Rødby-Puttgarden» (2006) who had worked in the perfumery on this ferry route and drove back and forth day in and day out, without getting off the spot.
Or the girl in “they” (2019) who lives with a mother with cancer, without them ever talking about it. When mother is in hospital, the girl sits alone at home and one of the things in the house.
Helle Helle’s novels are about those who do not have the word in their power, who know themselves in the world and who do not know where they are going.
Is it the welfare state that is to blame? Sit down quickly in person «the moldy backside of freedom»As a Danish critic put it? Or does the author explore images that would stand on the side of himself and life regardless? It is not good to say whether the condition is political or existential, whether it is about class or place of birth. But most of the time she draws them up in a way that creates deep sympathy with the reader.
Helle Helles genitrek
Heilt på tampen must, for example, admit that it is an important thing I have held back about the novel «BOB». Helle Helle has made an unusual move that makes me almost speechless with joy.
At the risk of being taken for a grammar nerd: it has to do with pronouns. And grammatical tenses like present and past tense – and yes, with narrators.
Right: It’s not Bob telling the story of himself, this is a third-person novel. And the one who tells is not an ordinary omniscient narrator, no, it is his cohabitant.
The sambuar who is rarely present in Bob’s life, knows everything: She knows that he was drunk at the horn festival parents he took with him on a Sunday morning, she knows that he flirts with a lady who also wanders around Copenhagen, she knows what he had on the slice of bread for lunch and that he is lying on the bed and trying to think of nothing when he is at university.
What does it say about her? About Bob? And about Helle Helle, as her doing something in the literature that is definitely unwise to achieve in life?
And the present tense is used only in two places, it is in the first and last sentence, and it is not accidental – of course it is not. But dizzying it is. I want to advise all readers from to peek at the last sentence.
Helle Helle takes very little from the huge toolbox of modern novelists. Precisely why it actually uses such incredible strength.
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