Helle Helle

Sometimes things just happen

By May Schack

Helle Helle is a writer who deliberately avoids abstract expressions, but creates intimacy and existential depth through very concrete depictions of her characters’ behaviour. Everything is thus seen and heard in Helle Helle’s novel about a young woman, the first person narrator Dorte, who rents a house in a small provincial town. From here she commutes to the capital where she spends more time dawdling in a shopping centre than at the university where she is a student. She dreams about becoming a writer, but never gets started. She never gets started on anything.

Her house is next door to the railway and the constantly passing trains are a metaphor of her stagnant existence. She jumps on a train only to wonder aimlessly around the capital before catching the train back. How does a young person find a foothold in the world? This is the novel's underlying question which translates into a blow-by-blow account of how Dorte fills up her days. “Sometimes things just happen,” she says at one point and this apparently innocent statement demonstrates both her lack of a sense of direction in her life and the will or ability to take conscious action. Helle Helle’s first person narrator surely isn't the first person to experience such a fumbling youth.

Dorte’s recent past is accounted for in flash backs; she has moved many times - living first with her aunt, then with various boyfriends. Relationships begin and end in the same haphazard fashion. There is drama underneath the stagnant surface: the aunt who hides her unhappiness and pain behind a mask of jollity suddenly breaks down and is admitted to hospital. Dorte’s coping strategies are more passive and rebuffing. “I'm fine,” she always says when anyone asks. Subconsciously she makes an effort not to feel too much. Every description conceals a profound experience of loss and emptiness from which she cannot extricate herself.

So simple, so beautiful and so truthfully depicted by Helle Helle. Not a single line rings false in this little gem of a novel whose realism is in a class of its own.

Translated by Charlotte Barslund