«Store Kongensgade 23» by Søren Ulrik Thomsen – Reviews and recommendations
Maybe it’s that we all have our own private mythology. With places, people and events that take on an almost sacred status, stories we want to tell, again and again.
For the Danish writer Søren Ulrik Thomsen, Store Kongensgade 23 is such a mythical place.
This was the place he and his family moved to when he was sixteen, in 1972. He was to live there just for a year. But when he moves out, it’s as if Store Kongensgade 23 moves into him.
This becomes the place around which his life “revolves”, it is revolutionsthe point, the place where the tip of the passer was located.
So what happened? According to the essay, surprisingly little. Thomsen doesn’t actually write much about it, he doesn’t seem to remember much either.
Yes, there are indeed a few obligatory pages here about the poet’s first fuck, with the lovely Jane, to whom the book is dedicated.
Otherwise, it seems that much of this time is lost behind the veil of oblivion, or perhaps we should say it is hidden in the mists of mythology.
A tender portrait of a mother
The paradox lies in the fact that the seventeenthyear-old Søren Ulrik Thomsen found himself at about the same time as his mother disappeared.
Because it is at this time, in Store Kongensgade 23, that the mother Hanne Thomsen sinks into a dark depression, a mental disorder that would take her years to get out of.
The mother was a languagehuman being, a poet, as in the fresh periods of office life.
It is not stretching it too far to say that Søren Ulrik’s languageendowment and authorskap is linked to the mother’s love of language and literature, and also to her deep psychological problems.
With this book, Thomsen delivers a tender and very alive motherportrait of her.
In the essay, the father must find himself playing someone elseviolin. Mostly because he works so well, he belongs in life and is well adjusted in the world.
This is how Søren Ulrik Thomsen describes the aging father:
The Middle Ages of Psychiatry
The father was the stable one, just as he cycled whistling to the bank every day, and kept the family going, both mentally and financially.
He is overshadowed by the deafening darkness of the mother. She leaves her mark on everyday life in the small family, even though she has not been at home for many years, but goes in and out of various institutions.
After many years in this way and several suicidesattempts (and constant calls to her father to leave her and start a new life) Hanne Thomsen suddenly becomes cured.
According to the son, it is finally a psychologist who has to say time to sit down to actually listen to what she has to say.
This gives the poet occasion to deliver some more or less well-directed spark against psychiatry, a couple of salvos he obviously longs to deliver (the twentieth century as psychiatry’s remedyelectricity!)
That does not mean that the last word has been said in the eternalthe long discussion about therapy or chemistry, of the type: Did you have a traumatic childhood, or do you want happy pills?
But ever, you must never underassess the therapeutic effect of a good exhalation.
Stormin love with bigthe city
I myself remember Søren Ulrik Thomsen from precisely the twentieth century, from when he was still a relatively young, very urban attitallspoem.
He was known for the debut «City Slang», a poemcollection i associate with keywords like teenagers and containers.
The poet was a stormin love with the big city, as only a young immigrant from the province can be. Here, Store Kongensgade 23 also marks the distinction, it was the first time the family lived within the vibrant largethe city Copenhagen.
Thomsen has subsequently divided his time between writing poems and essays, and naturally he writes essays with a clear poetic ear, with great feeling for the sounds and values of the words.
These are sometimes large formulationsart. Thomsen writes some sentences, or periods, which are far too long to be remembered. Men for any thoughtjumped!
He plays pure jazzimprovisations, or equilibristic dribblesseries, far too long and utter, we must believe, to be set in full, or to be admired in the province.
On the threshold of life
This essay has become kind of impressionistic itselfbiography, which says a lot about what a person is and how it comes to be, and not least how it eventually disappears.
So if Store Kongensgade 23 is Søren Ulrik Thomsen’s longing back to the past, what does it stand for?
Well, as a mythological place it is obviously not open to a single interpretation.
But part of the answer is that this occasion stands for one further back to seventeenthe young man’s feeling of standing on the threshold of life, that the world, the city and poetry lie open.
Nostalgia is, among other things, missing the future.
He Me!
My name is Ola Hegdal, and I read and review books for NRK. Preferably crime and suspense literature, or non-fiction. Feel free to read my review “The Anomaly” by Hervé Le Tellier, “You are a farmer” by Kristin Auestad Danielsen or “The Night Runner” by Karin Fossum.