The Cutout Collectors

By Annelise Marstrand-Jørgensen
Jóanes Nielsen (born in 1953) is a Faroe Islander deep within his soul. He went to sea as a 14-year-old and supported himself for many years as a fisherman and unskilled laborer while he honed his writing skills. The jagged landscape, the sea, the people, and the hard physical labor of the Faroe Islands have been a recurring source of inspiration for his work.

Glansbilledsamlerne ('The Cutout Collectors') is about six boys in the same class at a Catholic school in Torshavn. It is the 1950s, and violence is viewed as a natural pedagogical tool. In good weather, the children play with scrapbook pictures. The glittering pictures add a bit of naïve beauty and reverie otherwise lacking in their games and everyday existence. The first of the boys dies of meningitis at the age of 11 and, before the novel ends in the crisis-ridden 1990s, another four are dead. One drowns, one dies of drugs, and one dies of AIDS – “a disease it was forbidden to die of in the Faroe Islands.”   

Death is more than a dramatic framework around the novel. Loss is an unavoidable condition of life for all the Faroese boys. People commit suicide around them, drink themselves half to death, drown, go mad, are sent away never to return again. In a society so small that everyone knows everyone, people guard their secrets without being able to keep them. It is a brutal society in which the will to live is hamstrung by impossible conditions. But it is also a society of proud and defiant wills, of people who try to get around the norms in order, in spite of it all, to care for each other.

Jóanes Nielsen’s novel of his native land is stripped of any sweet romanticism. He rebukes his countrymen for double standards and the stiff-necked shaming of those who are different. At the same time, he gives the reader a superb insight into the complexity and modern history of this little community. He takes shots at religious fanaticism and writes his way into the heart of a society in which alcoholism eats away dignity, and hard physical labor sends people to an early grave. Glansbilledsamlerne is a novel that rises far above the provincial and becomes a keen and particularly well-written description of general human relations – of the despair of childhood, the longing of youth, and dreams that are all-too-often burst. The language is just as colorful as the gallery of characters, and humor runs like a soothing stream throughout the tale. This is exquisite narrative art, reminiscent of William Heinesen; it is a complex, imaginative, and enchanting embroidery of human destinies.

Translated by Russell Dees

Dansk version