By Claes Kastholm Hansen. Translated by Barbara J. Haveland
 

Herman Bang’s (1857-1912) writing is as fresh as a Scandinavian summer morning.  And to read his newspaper articles is to be a fellow eye-witness to the way in which the Industrial Revolution changed the face of European history.

Like his older and world-renowned fellow author, Hans Christian Andersen, Bang is possessed of acute powers of perception and a scintillatingly wry pen.  In 1875, when Andersen died, Bang was a precocious, stage-struck teenager, but he had also been raised on Andersen’s fairy tales.  The intellectual kinship between these two is quite remarkable.  Both were adventure-seeking cosmopolitans with a deep love of their country.  Both were devotees of modernism.  Both had a keen eye for pretentiousness, moral ambivalence and social inequity.  And both were eccentrics, hyper-individualists doomed always to plough a lonely furrow.

Another Danish contemporary of European renown, the critic Georg Brandes, wrote of Herman Bang: ”He is a writer in close touch with reality.  His style is that of the tremulous life of the moment, presented against a backdrop of melancholy.”  Bang himself wrote of one of his Norwegian counterparts: ”You never tell us anything about anything.  You show us everything”.  Here, in a nutshell, he presents the guiding principle behind the scenic, or impressionistic, novel: a modern fictional form for which he, more than anyone else, deserves the credit.

It is this cinematic narrative style, in which the action is in the scene itself and the characters come to life through their words, which lends it its freshness and renders it so dramatically gripping and shockingly modern.  The novella Ved Vejen (Katinka, 1886), the tale of one woman’s unfulfilled love – and the main story in Bang’s short-story collection Stille Eksistenser (Quiet Lives, 1886) – and Stuk (Stucco, 1887) his major, symbolic novel about contemporary Copenhagen, a city in the vice-like grip of economic speculation, are the works of a master at the very height of his powers.

'She stepped out of the train car, down onto the platform, and she allowed herself to be kissed by Bai, and Marie took her things, and she had only one thought: to get inside the house - inside.'

Read extract from Herman Bang 's "Katinka"