Two parts human understanding and one part humour is a good mixture. Christina Hesselholdt delves down into her characters one by one and discovers what is going on down there.

 

By Thomas Bredsdorff. Translated by W. Glyn Jones.
 

The setting and the gallery of figures in I familiens skød (In the Bosom of the Family) are trivial, a family holidaying in their country cottage and adjoining land in the north of Zealand. But what is taking place in each individual participant is fascinating. Christina Hesselholdt shows once more that she can write her way straight into the very core of human relationships.

The head of the family is a publisher. The other figures are his second wife and their child along with his older daughter from his first marriage, his slightly senile mother and one of his vain authors who he has just decided is not after all to figure on the front of the catalogue this autumn. A neighbour and an immigrant woman with two children form an outer ring round all this. The family pattern and the ethnic composition can in other words scarcely be more typically Danish. It is presumably also typical, at least in literature written by women, that the husband is at the centre, forming the link between the characters in summer whirlwinds that are as empty and quiet as the centre of any other storm. What is happening takes place around him.

The vain author has embarked on yet another sort of metafictional experiment, whereas the enterprising publisher had hoped for “ something transparent, clear and realistic with an omniscient author”. He ought to have turned to Christina Hesselholdt. For that is exactly what she has achieved in this book. A family portrait with the same mixture of irony and solidarity that Herman Bang left behind him a hundred years ago, but told by an omniscient writer such as has been taboo ever since his time.

Three characters in particular come to life, the girl, the wife and the author. There is the 12-year-old daughter of his first marriage who has a dubious relationship with the father who went off, her younger half-sister and her stepmother. And then there is this woman who is aware of all the tense relationships in the family, for ever analysing, able to think of no fewer than eight different reasons for the strained relationship between herself and her husband’s daughter. All this together with the conviction that if anyone can be lied to and deceived and cheated, it is her herself. That insight is something the eternally self-promoting author with chalicosis and an inflated ego has not caught on to. He is the man who is sure that the most important thing is to be visible, and if you can’t achieve that with your books, you can always attend half a dozen receptions and pack your burgeoning ideas into mystifying assertions concerning “the writing voice” and other relics from the romantic-modernist surplus stock. The portrait of this man is a comic scoop.

“Don’t tell it, show it” has been a motto for good journalism and realistic prose for over a century. Hesselholdt documents that the opposite rule can also apply – if you are good at following it. What she shows is only the sparse and cultivated dialogue. But on the other hand, she tells by delving into her characters one by one, discovering what is going on deep down inside them and showing there is turmoil in the bosom of the family.

Let’s take an example. The publisher and his wife out in the car with the 12-year-old from his previous marriage sitting on the back seat. The couple are fooling around and enjoying themselves, and the woman’s sense of guilt leaves her for a moment. We are inside her. Then come the words: “There were only the two of them in the car.” Although of course, there is a third, the girl on the back seat. “The feeling of not belonging increased,” says the next paragraph. With the omniscient author, we have moved over to the girl. Such is the rhythm in the novel.

If the instruction to show is useful, it is because it makes a pointer superfluous. “See for yourself,” is written in invisible ink over every scene. Hesselholdt’s prose demonstrates that a good author can also tell without a pointer. ‘In the Bosom of the Family’ is told with great human insight – and a grown-up sense of humour.

This article was first published in the daily news paper Politiken, March 16th 2007

Photo: © Annette Kjær

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