Ósøgur um djevulskap ("Stories about Devilry")

Carl Johan Jensen's ambitious new book

By Malan Marnersdóttir

Ósøgur um djevulskap ("Stories about Devilry") is an unusual book in many ways. Not since the broadly comprehensive novels of Jens Pauli Heinesen has Faroese literature seen such a good-humoured and enormously ambitious literary project.

Carl Johan Jensen made his debut in 1979 as a poet, and has since published several highly intellectual collections of poems exploring language and the mind. In retrospect, his entire literary production to date, including the two collected poetry volumes which were nominated for the Nordic Council's Literature Award, together with his 1995 prose-work, Rúm, may be regarded as preliminary exercises leading up to this powerful achievement, which, as the same time, marks a new direction in his authorship from the introverted lyrical form to a more extrovert, densely structured epic form.  

Ósøgur um djevulskap ("Stories about Devilry") is an almost eight-hundred-page-long account of a businessman, and a lay preacher who does not believe in God, who, at the start of the story, find themselves in the settlement of Gásadalur, which only just recently has been connected to the mainland by a tunnel. The author has said that he chose this fictitious setting because he had no detailed knowledge of it!

Exciting narrative
Ósøgur um djevulskap ("Stories about Devilry") has a number of long and detailed, but absolutely thrilling, stories about the people who live in this settlement, and elsewhere on the Faroes. It all starts on one particular day in 1969, jumps back to events in 1923 and in the 1860s, changes its scene to Iceland, and then finally southward to Central Europe. The narrative penetrates the inmost closets of the characters' minds and covers quite a lot of ground: cannibalism, vampyrism, sex and violence are just some of the ingredients, but others are more mundane, like flatulence and visits to the loo, familiar to us from James Joyce's Ulysses. In addition there are allusions to I.P. Jacobsen and Hans Christian Andersen, as well as to the Faust motif in European literature.

Most of the characters in the novel are foreigners. The population of the Faroe Islands in this writer's universe is strongly dependent on immigration. The book, then, includes topical commentary, but also entirely private affairs: the author's own wedding day is referred to as the day when a lighthouse-keeper disappears, is cut up into pieces, and bottled!

The narrative alternates between the documentary and the absurd, between straigtforward accounts, psychological accounts and dream-like surrealistic sequences. There is not much dialogue in this book, but, on the contrary, what is left unsaid is frequently its strongest characteristic.

Ósøgur um djevulskap ("Stories about Devilry") is written in a very particular Faroese idiom, even though it is not nearly as difficult as the language to be found in Carl Johan Jensen's other books. Typical of the language in this work is the fact that clichés and ordinary phrases are generally banned. Which makes the text different - but only occasionally difficult. In Carl Johan Jensen's authorship there is an explicit aim "to write away from the linguistically obvious, to add to and broaden my own consciousness - and that of the reader who has the courage to venture into it" (Brá no.13/14). Even though there is not much dialogue in the book, there is, in the recording of the characters' thoughts, a repetitive style which is familiar to us from oral communication: "Eg spurdi, hvagar skipið fór, spurdi eg á týskum" - "I asked where the ship was going, I asked in German". True to form, there are also Icelandic idioms in the book, for example when telling the time: "klokkan var langt gingin í trý" - "It was a long way towards three" (ie. it was almost three!).

Time, and references to time, are aspects central to the book. Not only does it set off different historical epochs against each other, but the actual chronological universe of the book is condensed and sharpened - in the course of the first almost 100 introductory pages, only eighteen minutes are described.

Two in one
In Carl Johan Jensen's preceeding work of prose, Rúm, from 1995, there are many Classical and Romantic quotations. In the new book there are no quotations, but many footnotes; which Carl Johan Jensen is not the only fiction writer to indulge in, of course - both Jan Kjærstad and Paul Auster, for instance, have recourse to footnotes in their books. But, in Ósøgur um djevulskap ("Stories about Devilry"), the footnotes introduce the reader to an alternative narrator and to alternative stories. Characters are presented with precision, their backgrounds, appearances and jobs are described, but often we are told in the footnotes that the narrator is a liar, and that a given character really has quite a different background, which we are then told about at length. Frequently, the footnotes document their information with academic references to actually available reference books, like Lærarafólk i Føroyum ("The Faroese Teaching Profession") - but the character concerned just happens not to be in the book! Nor is the information in the notes always false. Playing off the two narrators against each other, one in the text and one in the footnotes, is a humorous idea which in itself functions as a sharply ironical comment on pseudo-scientific local historical literature. The discrepancies between the apparently correct information and its refutation in the notes make us wonder about the book's fictional status by consciously exploring the way in which fiction borders on fact. And the reader is given the added value of an abundance of stories - while, in terms of genre, the entire book is actually "only" a novel, although every effort is made to conceal this fact!

Ósøgur um djevulskap ("Stories about Devilry") is a challenge to the reader in the most positive sense - but to what extent it is the most important work of Faroese literature ever, as the media and the author himself have proclaimed it to be, is impossible to judge at the present time. The book certainly cannot be "translated" into a single unambiguous message - so much the less so as, after all those hundreds of pages, it ends up with the laconic information: "Og her byrja søgurnar fyribils" ("And here the stories start for the time being"). Which, if we are to take the author's own word for it, means that at least one more volume is on its way.

Malan Marnersdóttir is professor at the University of the Faroe Islands

Translated by Philip Edmonds