Raw and unsentimental

By Lilian Munk Rösing
Morten Ramsland’s Sumobrødre (‘Sumo Brothers’) is about a group of boys in ‘The Garden of Paradise’, a suburban district near a bog somewhere in Denmark, where we follow them in the zone that lies between childhood and puberty. ‘The Garden of Paradise’ turns out to be a somewhat ironic name for this childhood universe, which is presented as anything but the paradise of innocence. It is a world of beatings, excrement, urine, blood, vomit, sperm, animal cruelty and porno magazines. We hear about the boys’ violent and lavatorial activities. Human excrement is thrown into back gardens, baby rabbits are deep-frozen, a boy’s penis, scarcely mature sexually, is thrust into a dog’s salivating mouth, parents’ half-empty wine boxes are watered down with piss, and first and foremost beatings are constantly in the offing. Beatings as a kind of sport, a boys’ game with its own joyful energy, which we hear described when the first person narrator, Lars, feels it diminishing towards the end of the book:

"My heart didn’t hammer anymore at the thought of dishing out blows left and right, my blood didn’t sing the same wild song at the thought of the Grandson who would soon be caught and would burst into tears; I couldn’t feel the fizzing in my stomach."

The novel in no way embellishes this raw and very physical boyish universe, but at the same time its down-to-earth narrative style prevents it from indulgence in nastiness. The first person narrator expressed himself directly in short, simple sentences – and reproduces the dialogue around him, which is just as truncated and colloquial. At the same time he can – to the despair of his teacher – go so far as to use ‘words that don’t exist’ (‘You couldn’t go completely “tolak” in your head. It still sounded so right, it just ran off your tongue’). And he has a habit of seeing ‘visions’, fantasy pictures in his head. Lars lives with his parents and his younger brother, ‘The Rabbit’, and the family’s way of talking to each other is not markedly different from the boys’. They don’t speak nicely to each other, and they certainly don’t say nice things about granny and granddad – nor about their father’s father, who turns up occasionally in his car, only to be greeted by boys’ pranks and curses from his son. What matters is to fall asleep before ‘sounds of fucking’ start up from his parents’ bedroom, and what matters is to eat mayonnaise and butter and other fatty things till you throw up, so dad will have to make do with porridge and lose some of his 130 kilos. This might sound like a ‘bad lad’s’ psychological profile, but the neutral and direct narrative style make the novel a lively and convincing portrayal of a raw and unsentimental universe of boys, which in its underlying tone could be found at any time and in any place on the globe.

Translated by John Mason

Dansk version