Grondahl

Often I Am Happy by Jens Christian Grøndahl – #NovNov Day 3

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Like Amsterdam that I read yesterday, Often I Am Happy by Jens Christian Grøndahl opens with a death.

Now your husband is also dead, Anna. Your husband, our husband. I would have liked him to lie next to you, but you have neighbours, a lawyer and a lady who was buried a couple of years ago.

The novella is narrated by Ellinor as one long address to Anna, the first wife of Ellinor’s husband Georg – he has just died, and Anna has been dead for four decades. Anna and Ellinor were friends, and Ellinor has now been stepmother to Anna’s twins for far longer than the seven years that Anna knew them. Ellinor is now 70. Her life is far from over, but many of her ties to the past are disappearing.

This novella was published in 2016 and translated from Danish by the author in 2017. It is certainly very short – 167 pages in my edition, but with a large font and enormous margins. In that space, Grøndahl covers an impressive amount. We start in the present, with Ellinor detailing the way that her stepsons and their families have reacted to Georg’s death. Or, moreso, how they have reacted to her reaction. Ellinor has sold the house even before the estate has been properly settled, and she is moving to a house in a disreputable part of town – the part that she came from.

Ellinor’s narrative wanders further back – to the friendship she and Anna had, as well as how she met the man she married to before Georg. And to the event that led to Anna’s death. Without losing a certain gentleness in her reminiscences, Ellinor slowly shows us that the relationships were more complicated than they might seem at first:

You must allow me to place that image here, Anna. We must look at it together; please don’t lower your eyes. The worst thing was to lose you, but the second worst thing was that you never got a chance to ask for my forgiveness. You don’t hear what I am saying, and that is the worst. You don’t remember; you are not. I speak to you only because I want to be something more than an accumulation of facts and their succession.

And Ellinor goes further back still – as though, having begun to explore the past, she can’t help go further still. To her own childhood, to her mother’s younger days – as told to her, of course. As she considers a new start in the present, Grøndahl shows us all the ways that Ellinor is tethered to events in her past and those that happened before she was born. As with his brilliant novella Virginia, the war shows the long shadows it can cast across generations.

This is the third book I’ve read by Grøndahl – two very short, and one quite long. From that sample size, I prefer him in novella form. He can get so much of life into a short span, told sparsely but in such a way that we sense the depth behind the brief accounts we hear. Ellinor’s story isn’t told in many words, but there is a whole life in Often I Am Happy.

Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl

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I bought Silence in October by Jens Christian Grøndahl in 2011, and have been intending to read it pretty much every October since. Finally I managed to schedule it in! It needn’t be read in October, of course, but it felt too apposite to miss.

The novel was published in Danish in 1996, and translated by Anne Born four years later. Grøndahl has a long and prolific career in Holland, but only a handful of his novels have been translated into English – including the excellent Virginia, which I read not long before I bought Silence in October. That slim novel is all about regret caused by a childhood decision in wartime. Silence in October is rather a different kettle of fish.

As the novel opens, the narrator’s wife, Astrid, has just left him. He doesn’t know exactly where she is, but can trace where she has been by the credit card receipts that trail behind her. They’ve been together for more than eighteen years – ever since he was her taxi driver, as she fled her abusive husband with their young son.

This premise is almost all the action that happens in the novel. For almost 300 pages, what we witness is the unnamed (I think!) narrator’s thoughts, recollections, philosophising. We move back and forth in time, often with little warning – but equally often the memories are not dramatic, but lend a layer to the profundities that the narrator is compiling. Whether you find them profound or not may depend a lot on the mood you’re in while you read it.

It’s difficult to write about Silence in October, because it really did depend on my mood. The writing is beautiful, and Born translates in such a way that no awkwardness is ever apparent. It deserves – it requires – slow and patient reading, letting the unusual images and stumbling thoughts wash over the reader. Grøndahl is excellent at the minutiae, and bringing small moments and reflections to new, vivid life. To pick something at random from early in the book, here is when Astrid says she is leaving:

She had announced her decision in such a run-of-the-mill and offhand way in front of the mirror, as if it had been a matter of going to the cinema or visiting a woman friend, and I had allowed myself to be seduced by the naturalness of her tone. And later, in bed, when I thought she was asleep,there had been a distance in her voice as if she had already gone and was calling from a town on the other side of the world.

So, yes, I read much of Silence in October in patient appreciation, recognising Grøndahl’s ability as a prose stylist. And then there were other times – when, sensibly, I usually put the book down and picked something else up – where I had less patience. I don’t need a book to have a lot of action, but this amount of introspection is a little low in momentum. Pacy, it was not. Also – my tolerance for the self-absorption of the middle-aged, middle-class, white, male narrator wore thin at times. He is obsessed with his own thoughts, awarding them significance, whatever they are. His mindset is a bit like one you see on Twitter a great deal. I rolled my eyes when we got to the inevitable women-don’t-realise-they’re-prettier-without-make-up moment. He writes about women’s bodies a lot.

Could I really not meet a woman who thought and talked on the same frequency as myself without immediately getting ideas from the sight of her thighs just because they were lovely, and because she unwittingly exposed them to my ferocious gaze?

Of course, the author need not be the narrator. Indeed, I know from Virginia that Grøndahl can take his writing talents to a far worthier topic than the self-importance of an adulterous art critic.

I always say that the writing is more important than what is being written about. There are exceptions, of course – and you know that I will read more or less any novel about people opening a cafe – but Silence in October is a good instance where I enjoyed it despite its premise and its ‘plot’. Grøndahl is a fine writer and Born is clearly a very good translator. I look forward to read more of his novels, and hope that they’re about people I’m readier to spend time with.

Virginia

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Hands up who saw this post title and thought that I’d be talking about Mrs. Woolf? Well, that was the immediate connection in my mind when I saw Virginia on the shelf in my local £2 bookshop. If it was the title that made me pick it up, it was (a) the beauty, (b) the brevity, and (c) the Scandinavian..ity… that made me buy it. You know what a sucker I am for all those things. And it felt just the right book to read after church, in the park, on a beautifully sunny afternoon.

Jens Christian Grøndahl is a Danish writer who’s probably really well known, but was new to me. Virginia (2000, translated 2003 by Anne Born) is a deceptively simple novella about guilt and the ways in which brief encounters in other people’s lives can change the paths taken for both. If that’s ringing Atonement-sounding bells in anyone’s minds, then you’re not entirely off the mark – but Grøndahl treats the topic rather more calmly. I haven’t read enough Scandinavian literature to comment, I suppose, and I can’t read any except in translation, but I’m going to generalise wildly nonetheless. Scandinavian literary fiction seems to bathe the action in a haze – the beautiful landscapes are reflected in the choice of language, which isn’t short and sharp, but slightly dreamy and pensive. The Guardian reviewer wrote that Virginia ‘makes even Chekhov seem effusive.’ Of course there’s The Girl With The Gruesome Shocks to prove me wrong, but I did say ‘literary fiction’…

Virginia begins in 1942 in occupied Denmark. A young woman (I’m going to take a plunge and say that she’s unnamed, because I don’t *think* we’re told that she’s called Virginia – that name becomes important elsewhere) leaves Copenhagen to stay with a family she barely knows on the North Sea coast – presumably to avoid a city in wartime, although this is never really spelt out. Here is the first paragraph of Virginia, which gives you a taste of the prose:

You could never get used to the sound, the distant drone of aircraft engines passing high overheard in the night. It was hot under the sloping timber roof, and she kept her window open. She lay with one leg outside the duvet, breathing in the stuffy holiday cottage air and feeling the cool breeze on her calf and thigh, listening to the small dry click when the wooden edge of the black-out curtain bumped against the window-frame. She’d just had her sixteenth birthday that summer, the only time she stayed at the house by the sea. She didn’t belong here. She slipped out of our life and we slipped out of hers.

One of that family is our narrator (also unnamed?) who, at fourteen, is a couple of years younger than her, and something of a distant admirer. There is precious little dialogue between them, and almost no indirect speech – in fact there is barely any direct speech throughout Virginia – but Grøndahl evokes their dynamics perfectly. He is full of calf love, and she doesn’t really notice he’s there. The awakening of first infatuation is a topic which has been treated time and again, and although Grøndahl’s approach is gentle and subtle, it would not suffice as the pivot of even so short a novella – and indeed it is not the pivot.

In a local outbuilding there is an English solider, whose aeroplane has come down. While the narrator is infatuated with the girl, she in turn is experiencing her first love – for a man with whom she cannot converse, and whose presence she must keep secret. We learn this piece-by-piece, through the eyes of a fourteen year old boy. Or, rather, through those eyes as remembered by the same boy fifty years later – for Virginia is a novella of remembering, and incomplete recollections. The narrator calls the boy ‘he’, even though it is himself. We see the scenes through a glass darkly – and this is the pivot on which the novella turns. The boy has accidentally discovered the English pilot’s hiding place:

The German soldiers had stopped on the other side of the planked wall. He could hear their voices quite clearly now but couldn’t understand what they said. When he looked up again the pilot gestured excitedly at him as if to urge him away, out of the shed to where the soldiers were coming round the corner to the doorway.

He did not move while the other repeated his desperate, soundless gesture. Not a single thought passed through his mind in the seconds that followed, but through all the succeeding years I have asked myself whether the German soldiers had seen me go into the shed and whether it would have made any difference if I had gone out to them alone instead of letting them find us together.

Maybe they would have searched the place anyway. On the other hand it is not impossible that they might merely have laughed at the terrified boy who came out of his hiding place before they went along the path, while in fact the boy stayed there watching them and holding his breath. The possibility has stayed with me always, like a thought I have never been able to think through to the end and so have never finished.

These thoughts stay with the reader as well as the character through the rest of the novella – we move forwards fifty years. The narrator saw the girl (then a middle-aged, grey-haired woman) only once more, in Paris – he later meets her ex-husband and children. These scenes are haunted by his uncertain guilt – even more subtle than Atonement, because he cannot be certain that his actions were wrong, or just simply tragically unfortunate. It is a moment which has defined much of his life – but one over which he may have had no control.

In so slight a novella, so much is evoked. There is even something of a twist, which I shan’t spoil, but which is elegant and sobering. As I wrote at the top, Scandinavian authors seem to have a beautiful way of encasing a narrative in a sort of hazy beauty. Grøndahl enhances this by having almost no direct dialogue – which makes the novella so much more authentic as the recollections of a 64 year old man for his youth, as well as putting the events at a suitably nebulous distance. For those of you who love novellas as much as I do, Virginia is a really beautiful, thoughtful example (and there are copies from a penny on Amazon!) – I look forward to finding what else Grøndahl has written. Anyone?

Books to get Stuck into:

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson: this portrayal of rural American [edit: I mean Canadian, thanks Elizabeth!] family life, and the sister who left and has felt guilty all her life, has an equally clever twist, as well as being funny, sad, and thoughtful.

Atonement by Ian McEwan: well, it had to be, didn’t it? I’ve not reviewed it on SiaB, but writ on a larger scale than Virginia, it’s undoubtedly a clever and moving examination of how momentary decisions cause lasting guilt.