Cool and loving & raw and sensitive debut
By Mai Misfeldt
First novels often feature a young person on a journey of self-discovery and so it is with Hanne Højgaard Viemose’s debut, Hannah, (‘Hannah’), but this time the story is told with a rare energy and unpredictability. The novel is set Down Under, in the one horse town of Tully in Northern Queensland - refreshing in itself considering how much of Danish fiction is local - where the young female first person narrator, Anne, on a confused and extended backpacker trip spends her days working hard at a gloomy rain-soaked banana plantation and her nights at the local pub.
Anne has many features in common with her author, a relationship that is further emphasised by the inclusion of photos of the author as a backpacker. The biographical element is a recurrent feature in young fiction, but it is primarily the depiction of life at the banana plantation which makes Viemose’s book stand out. There are toads that can spit one metre, snakes everywhere, rats’ nests among the bananas and crocodiles lurking in the water. It is a raw environment made up of Aborigines and Aussies who don’t fit in anywhere else. F*****g, f**k and bloody this and bloody that feature regularly in the dialogue. Everything is viewed through a restrained and fairly unsentimental perspective.
The reader never learns much about who Anne really is, but a picture emerges of a vulnerable, introverted and sexually confused 19-year-old on the run from both Denmark’s norms and her own sexuality. A girl who called herself Hans when she was a child and who fell apart when she grew breasts and turned into Anne. It is a book about the right to choose who you want to be, including your sexuality, and the novel ends on a fine flickering openness and a kind of symbolic healing where Hans and Anne fuse together as the palindrome, Hannah. The novel is aimed at adult readers, but is equally relevant to a younger audience.
Translated by Charlotte Barslund
