Denmark - Culture - Literature

Denmark
4. Culture
4.7 Literature

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H.C. Andersen
Karen Blixen
Georg Brandes
J.P. Jacobsen
Peter Høeg
Adam Oehlenschläger
Ib Michael
Klaus Rifbjerg
Villy Sørensen

Photo; Peter Høeg, author Peter Høeg, b.1957, had great success at the beginning of the 1990s with Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne (Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, 1992), a thriller critical of civilisation and portraying a woman's schismatic relationship to European and Eskimo culture. The novel, the tone of which ranges from cool analysis to compassion and poetry, has been translated into a vast number of languages and filmed by Bille August.

Before this comet-like ascent, Høeg had already established himself as one of the major writers of contemporary Danish fiction, with the novel Forestilling om det 20. århundrede (The History of Danish Dreams, 1988), a magical realistic presentation of Danish dreams and notions throughout a century, and with Fortællinger om natten (Tales of the Night, 1990), nine stories written in a style reminiscent of Karen Blixen. Each of these centers on one of the classical forms of art or sciences; a motif common to them all is love and its conditions.

Høeg's critical view of culture and his ability to understand sympathetically lives that go wrong appears in his fourth novel, De måske egnede (Borderliners, 1993), at one and the same time an analysis of time as a subjective phenomenon and a moving description of a boy fighting to avoid being crushed by the school system.

The sceptical approach to the world of science in Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne is echoed in Kvinden og aben (The Woman and the Ape, 1996). This novel examines the sense of fulfilment felt by an alcoholic upper-class woman who saves a monkey of a hitherto unknown species from the clutches of the scientists.

The main characters in the latest three books written by Peter Høeg all inhabit the shadowy area on the periphery of normality and social structure: Miss Smilla who stems from an ethnic minority and finds it impossible to fit in, the boy at the bottom of the social hierarchy in De måske egnede, and the ape in Kvinden og aben, more human than the human beings themselves. The woman, the child and the animal are used symbolically by the author to remind us that there is something fundamentally wrong with our modern-day existence. Peter Høeg's imaginative and uncompromising examination of the problems in our culture, and of our unsatisfactory grasp of love, the sexes, money and power, sets him apart as a great Danish and international writer.
May Schack
Rigmor Mydtskov
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Ib Michael, b. Rasmussen, 1945, is Denmark’s answer to Latin America’s magic realism, a cosmopolitan, travelling writer of fairy-tales. His books, especially novels but also short stories and pictorial poems, are fantastic, dramatic and melodious narratives, full of both exotic travels, miraculous coincidences and sensuous reality. They are characterised by mystical experience which e.g. draws on Indian and Buddhistic philosophy and fantastical literature. Time, space and persons are juxtaposed despite enormous jumps in time and transformations, opposing tendencies are kept together in a dynamic balance of excitement. Having written his first imaginative books, Ib Michael travelled to meet Indian cultures in South and Central America and collected material about nature, myth and politics which he made use of in books such as Mayalandet (1973, The Mayaland) and the great, visionary novel Rejsen tilbage (1977, The Journey Back). In this book "the immortal soldier" is an important mythological figure who walks through time and space under different aspects. He is one of Ib Michael’s most constant transformation figures and a central figure in Kejserfortællingen (1981, Tiger’s Tale) dealing with the history of China and Kilroy Kilroy (1989) where the tibetan culture and fight for freedom resonate with the characters’ search for identity. In his three "novels of memory" Vanillepigen (1991, The Vanilla Girl), Den tolvte rytter (1993, The Midnight Soldier) and Brev til Månen (1995, Letter to the Moon), Ib Michael makes use of a surprising mixture of ethnography and mystical-realistic fiction while telling the story of his own childhood and genealogy. He switches brilliantly between now and then, between the local and global, between sensuous description of the situation and the transition to myth and history. In the great novel Prins (1997, Prince) Ib Michael also endeavours to combine imagination and reality, and this dream characterises the whole body of his work, including Kejserens Atlas (2001, The Emperor’s Atlas).
Anders Østergaard
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