Nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Award 2003

Motor cycle trips and neglected children

BY ANN-CHRISTINE SNICKARS

Liv Køltzow
The Interrupted Picture
Aschehoug. NO

Jørgen Norheim
No one feels so safe in danger
Samlaget. NO

Children who are let down or neglected by adults are turning up in many Nordic novels these days. In Lang by Kjell Westö, the protagonist seems to finally realize that one of his biggest acts of betrayal is the one he has committed against his own child. He makes a clumsy attempt to comfort his new girlfriend’s little boy. In Jouluvaimo (The Christmas wife), the latest novel by Pirjo Hassinen, the child is not just a witness to the vagaries of grown-ups, but a co-conspirator and confidante. A mother takes her daughter with her on trips back and forth across Finland, and the girl is kept locked up in a hotel room while the mother lives a debauched life with men she meets through personal ads. During one of these trips, the mother disappears altogether, and even as an adult, the daughter cannot remember what happened.
These children, exposed as they are to the whims of adults, are nowhere near the predicament of the boy Kain in the novel Ingen är så trygg i fare (No one feels so safe in danger) by Jørgen Norheim. He is a street child or child soldier, living underground in the Oslo metro system. He has a birthmark which resembles a Nazi emblem, the ‘mark of Cain’ of our times.
Needless to say, he is a victim and in order to avoid disaster – one can imagine what Kain might do – somebody has to save him. The one who saves him is called Kapo, and the novel opens with the Christmas they spend together far away in the wilderness after Kapo has taken the child away for a kind of debriefing, so that he can become human.
The background is present-day Norway – and also the end of the German occupation. The populist politicians who appear under thinly camouflaged names and their financiers (who do not believe in politics, only in money) appear to be the main culprits in creating a situation where a changeling such as Kain can even exist. Salvation lies in reinstating a kind of ‘genealogy of honesty’. Kapo ‘adopts’ the wild child, but he is also searching for his own father, who proves to be the very officer that the seventeen-year-old partisan girl (who became Kapo’s mother) meets when the Nazis are forced out of northern Norway. It all seems incredibly honest and straightforward; the novel is a tale of heroism until you begin to ask yourself whose errands Kapo is running, and which fundamental values are ultimately benefiting from his amazing competence and survival skills. Kapo is equally at home on the Arctic wastes and on the information superhighway; he is, after all, the perfect soldier.
At first glance, Liv Køltzow’s novel Det avbrutte bildet (The Interrupted Picture) does not seem to have much in common with Norheim’s novel, except that both have been nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. The nomination of these two novels seems deliberately based on complementary characteristics: Norheim has written three novels while Køltzow has a past career of thirty years as a writer. Køltzow is an important name in contemporary women’s literature, while Norheim follows the (masculine) tradition which has won Norway the prize for two years running. Køltzow has been nominated once before, Norheim is a first-timer. Det avbrutte bildet is a novel about art and artists. Hanna, a writer, has reached a critical stage of her life and career. After the end of a relationship she is now renting a studio in order to get away and paint a picture she has been thinking about for a long time. A significant part is also played by a letter to Norwegian 19th century writer Amalie Skram, whom Køltzow has also written a biography of. But there are also associations to Virginia Woolf – not least thanks to Liv Køltzow’s subtly modulated treatment of language. But where Lili Briscoe in To the Lighthouse completes her painting, Hanna’s painting is not just unfinished but interrupted. And the same applies to her relationships and her life: nothing is completed.
Although Norheim’s and Køltzow’s novels are very different, they have a lowest common denominator. In both books, there is a grand tour of Europe on a motorcycle. In Køltzow’s novel, it symbolizes masculine escape, as one of Hanna’s fellow artists runs away from his responsibilities. In Norheim’s book, the trip has been carefully planned, and a red Ural with a sidecar dating from 1952 (also the year of the writer’s birth) is the only appropriate vehicle for a quest for one’s father.
In Køltzow’s novel, neglected children are an important theme. Hanna’s unbalanced niece is a passenger on the motorcycle trip, and she has left without telling anyone. There is also another, permanently lost, child who adds to the anxiety of the novel; Hanna’s ex-husband’s son has disappeared without a trace.

Ann-Christine Snickars is a literary critic and cultural journalist

Translated by The English Centre/Monica Sonck and Nicholas Mayow