The forces, the dark and the women

By Liselotte Wiemer
Since his debut novel Kalak (‘Kalak’) in 2007 and its successor Valdemarsdag (‘Valdemar’s Day’) (2008), Kim Leine has developed into one of the major new Danish writers. He lives in his language, in his history, in his reliance on the credibility of the human portrait, as long as the camera is adjusted equally to zoom and distance, to equal parts of subdued soft lighting and apocalyptic revelation, raw realism and seductive sensuality. In Kalak the starting point was the author’s own scarred childhood story taken from his upbringing on Greenland, while in Valdemar’s Day it was the tribal mark of Cain. In his third novel in three years fiction has been allowed to take over, even though the starting point continues to lie in deep personal experiences.

Tunu is a kind of novel of communal life that plays itself out in a little settlement of that name on the east coast of Greenland. The word means back or underside. And that is what we get. The underside. Of Greenland, of life, of the soul and not least of the year, when the 24-hour lens of midsummer’s permanent light closes, leaving a society in a darkness in which only television grinds out its flickering pictures of action film and porn.

The same flickering introduces the novel and runs like a strings of pearls through it. We are given torn off fragments of life. A series of illusionless, painfully loyal close-ups of people in the settlement. All of them are so curiously laid bare, naked before our eyes, so fearful of the dark. But we never get to know them. No entry, is written over the door. But still we sense everything. Just as you can sense houses in the darkness, even though you can’t see them.

A proper story only emerges once we are well into the novel. From one autumn to the next we follow the Danish nurse, Jesper, who has been posted to the nursing centre in the settlement, to which the residents wend their way with everything from wounds and mental distress to toothache. Jesper becomes the well-meaning pivotal point both for the settlement and for the reader – a role he fills like a suit that is far too large. For at root he is simply a rather undefined, white Dane on a mission and is unfamiliar with the underside of life. Soon, however, all the forces of the dark and the light have free play in him.

And these are powerful forces. Death wish and the will to survive. Sex, violence and alcohol. Entrancing descriptions of nature and of a people who, despite being in a cultural vacuum, know that such forces are greater than man. So we hear about the man who capsizes just as he has caught a seal. With his dying strength he claws himself to safety on the ice, only to be frozen solid there. And with his eyes fixed on death and the stars in the night sky, the last thing he thinks of is the seal. Such a pity it will go to waste!

And not least we meet the women of Greenland. Raw and demanding, they go the men in the darkness with their strong, robust and battered bodies. They possess the men with a foreign power – a storm of life. But in their wake follows destruction. And Jesper is the site where it all takes place.

We can allow ourselves to be provoked by this picture of women. By these dark forces. By this lack of initiative and hope. But in his novel Kim Leine manages to reveal the darkness with his camera lens – without taking sides and without invalidating it. It just is. Just like the women in the night. And life. And the seal.

This is what true strength really is.

Translated by John Mason

Dansk version