Humorous narrative about the female gender in modern society
By Lilian Munk Rösing
Kirsten Hammann writes a type of reflective chick lit using a mixture of irony and empathy to expose what could be labelled as the consciousness of women’s magazines. Her characters always exist at a post catastrophe point in their lives and so it is in Hammann’s new novel, Se på mig (‘Look at me’). The book’s 35-year-old female main character, Julie, is not only dumped by her boyfriend, she also falls down the stairs and smashes her knee. Abandoned and injured she sits in her flat, her head spinning with all the advice and golden rules she has picked up from women’s magazines and lifestyle TV channels. One of those rules is that a single woman should try to masturbate daily in order to maintain her sexual allure.
Julie, however, is not alone in her flat. She takes on a male tenant, Sune, a writer with rapidly developing writer’s block. Where Julie gives us access to a mindset heavily influenced by women’s magazines, Sune takes us to the world of the lads’ mag: gadgets, babes and dreams of success are - according to this novel - the stuff the male mind is made of, while masturbation and displacement activities take up all of Sune’s time.
It is interesting (and for Hammann a new development) to alternate between a female and male perspective. To shift between the woman’s attempts to understand a man and the man’s abortive attempts to understand what it is like to be a woman. The issue of how to gain access to someone else’s inner core is the driving force of the novel’s plot. When Julie buys sex aids online, Sune buys a small surveillance camera disguised as a teddy which he places in Julie’s bedroom.
This set-up creates the novel’s suspense: how long will it be before Julie and Sune have sex? Hammann draws out the characters’ unresolved sexual tension for as long as she can before finally satisfying her readers’ desire with protracted sex scenes. Hammann’s writing is entertaining and witty while still dealing with the big questions: how do you move on when you find yourself at rock bottom? Can you ever access the mind of the opposite sex? And to what extent are our lives today shaped by recipes, women’s magazines and lifestyle gurus?
Translated by Charlotte Barslund
