Death masks, mother figures and fiction

Into the box of reading – and back

BY KATE MARVIG RAVN

Merete Pryds Helle
Ten Fingers Make No Difference
Rosinante. DK

»…for a split second the crash from the bomb left him with a rather surprised expression«.
These are the final lines of the short story »Lauritz Kollerup Rosenvinge«, and this is how the reader is left – rather surprised – after having read most of the stories in Merete Pryds Helle’s latest collection of short stories Ten Fingers Make No Difference. The purpose of the pointed closing is to surprise the characters in the fiction as well as the reader. This may seem far-fetched, but in general it works quite well.
After having discovered his own mortality, Lauritz Kollerup Rosenvinge decides to carry out an experiment and steal another person’s lifetime. However, fate catches up with him and he suddenly dies – the experiment was in vain. But to Marianne P. Heinrichsen in the short story »A Blue Dolphin« death is a necessity and the only solution to a traumatised life. Still the closing of the story seems highly surprising and cynical because here, too, chance seems to rule as she »a little late…is hit by a passing car«. The protagonist in the short story »Anna Livia gets off the bus« also disappears out of the fiction. One day in Magasin Anna Livia is tempted by a beautiful silken box, which she steals. After having admired the box for some time she crawls into it, and three years later she is burnt together with the box and becomes »a grey cloud in a bright spring sky, and a pattern of thoughts which seems to never end«. The last sentence may refer to the relation between the fiction and the reader, as the fiction seems to continue as a pattern of thoughts inside the reader even after the reading has ended. In any case these pointed closings seem striking because they at the same time thematise the role of writing. In other words, the game with fiction is characteristic of many of the short stories in this collection, and is a common element in Merete Pryds Helle’s body of work.

Mother figures and prisons of fiction
»The Bird Tree« holds a central position in the collection of short stories. As the title indicates, the text’s narrative structure is complicated and complex, and the text is swarming with people like birds in a tree. Cor(nelius) is the protagonist because his mother Anna tells his story: »this is how Cor comes into existence; he grows into her story«. However, Cor wants to find his own story; but his mother’s story about him is stronger and more controlling, and only by choosing death can he escape her story. He attempts suicide but fails, and therefore he remains in the story, which for him becomes never-ending.
Cor’s mother is not the only mother in the collection of short stories who wants to control her children’s stories. In »Alfred G. Petersen« the protagonist wants to get rid of his dominant but paralysed mother, whom he cannot control even though he allies himself with his own split personalities Alfred, G., and Petersen. And in the short story »Rain on Grass« the two »mildly retarded adults« Ada and Theo plan to drive their spider mother Mrs. Hilleborg Hermansen out of the house because they assume that their father will then return to them. They succeed in getting the mother hospitalised, and while they take down the spider web, Ada and the lodger Mona take over the role of the mother. However, the satanic spider mother returns with even greater strength, and Ada and Theo are forced to return to their usual roles.
Contrary to the characters in the fiction who must suffer death or worse, the reader can simply close the book to escape the stories. If the fiction is successful, it will end in the reader’s mind as a pattern of thoughts which seems to never end.
The title of the collection subtly refers to a short story by Pryds Helle from 1994 (»Ten cut-off fingers are no shame«). All things considered, one can say that the texts in this collection are like a pattern of thoughts of Merete Pryds Helle’s body of work, which also includes five novels, one children’s book and another collection of short stories.

Kate Marvig Ravn holds an MA in German and Danish

Translated by Helle Sandmann