The trend spotter’s keen and faintly ironic eye
By Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg
With Byen og øen (‘The City and the Island’) Benn Q. Holm has delivered a sophisticated account of the last thirty years of world history as seen through the lens of five young Danes and in constant oscillation between the local and global. Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen, is where the five friends, the actress and sensualist Molly, the wannabe film director Espen, stockbroker Anders who is the son of a judge, Camilla the wife of an ambassador and the budding Icelandic author Pétur meet at the start of the 1980s. From here on in three major sections where each character tells their own story, Holm describes how their ways part and briefly cross before they meet up again against the thundering backdrop of countless minor and major violent events around the world.
The story is framed by a prologue and epilogue when one of the characters buys a Danish island where the friends are eventually reunited. Holm has the trend- spotter’s keen and faintly ironic eye for the touches that evoke each period: the music, the clothes, the slang and mores of each social class and decade. But Holm also assumes an almost Olympian position in his portrayal of the ups and downs of the many human destinies in a fast-moving world which is rarely fair and always cruel.
Byen og øen is an example of globalisation, a literary representation of how the local and global are inseparable entities just as the evolution of the individual and the species are closely interlinked though the threads may not always be visible to the naked eye. But it is also a tale of destiny and a generational novel. With equal amounts of melancholy and sympathy the novel follows five friends who are all of the same age as the author and like him shaped by Copenhagen. The novel ends in medias res, in the midst of life and in the midst of things, after the last glocalised snapshot has been successfully delivered to the reader.
Translated by Charlotte Barslund
