Life in the Stone Age
By May Schack
Merete Pryds Helle’s novel Hej menneske (‘Hi Man’) about human who lived 7000 years ago is a grandiose and lifelike fantasy based on archaeological finds. It is unique in its presentation and its use of the novel genre, and it is like nothing else in Nordic literature
What did it look like inside the head of Stone Age man? What was these people’s perception of time, power, position in the group, gender? What were the conditions under which they lived, and what led them towards the domestication that has been so decisive in human development?
This big questions lie at the heart of Merete Pryds Helle’s novel. She is particularly well equipped to answer them, having taken part, as part of her degree to qualify as a Near East archaeologist at the Carsten Niebuhr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, in the excavation if the village of Shkârat Msaied in the Jordanian desert. In the novel she allows her alter ego, the young Danish woman, Edith, to be responsible for the excavation of one of the fifteen houses, imagining as she does so how life came to be shaped for the woman who once lived there and to whom, in her thoughts, she gives her own name, Edith. Part of the novel takes us to the cult site of Göbekli Tebe in Turkey. This is where the clans gather every ten years, and this gives the author the chance to create a large-scale fantasy about what might have been played out under gigantic decorated stone beings. In this way the conceptions of the past about death and sexuality are brought to life.
The novel draws its strength from the interaction between a fine literary language and a more scientific discourse. Edith the archaeologist is in the process of writing a dissertation about domestication, which concerns her so deeply because the agricultural revolution is ‘the elastic springboard into the modern world’, as she puts it. The considerations of the dissertation are included as part of the novel. In this way we are allowed to keep a careful check on the novelistic laboratory and we are constantly aware of the scientific basis the novel uses for its imaginings, namely the archaeological finds. At the same time we also hear about the life of the modern Edith, about her problems with her partner and about life at the excavation site, where there are people from many nationalities. There are powerfully sensed depictions of the desert night sky and of the day’s stifling heat.
The novel is accompanied by photos of the excavation sites and of the many finds, and these are given captions which voice comment and curiosity. We also see the author herself with trowel and pick in the desert earth. This concretisation of the author’s research results in a quite different type of novel to what we are used to and one that is refreshingly new in its use of the genre. The novel is borne along by a deep passion for its subject. The will to create a completely foreign imaginary world and to build bridges to a modern world makes this a monumental literary fantasy about the fundamental conditions determining our humanity.
Translated by John Mason |
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Dansk version |
