Kirsten Thorup

Epoch-making encounters

By Lilian Munk Rösing

Ana is single, a Danish career woman who works in international finance and feels most at home among people in suits in tall glass buildings with lifts. At the start of Kirsten Thorup’s novel we meet her in a luxury hotel in The Gambia; her life coach having prescribed a holiday for symptoms of stress. The glittering illuminated hotel heavily guarded by the army lies like an artificial island surrounded by African darkness, but a voice from this darkness reaches all the way to Ana when she sits insulated by her iPod and sunglasses on the beach: “A supernatural beauty, the fine sound of a silver bell consumed her [...] a trembling child’s voice crept under her skin and touched her. She was completely unprepared.”

The voice belongs to a ragged African girl with a sales tray around her neck who has a cataclysmic effect on Ana. The girl, Mariama, becomes the most important person in Ana’s life and ideas start to form in Ana’s mind which have no place at all in the rational and efficient world of a successful finance manager: the belief that Mariama is her platonic lost half, that the two of them could live together as sisters. It is neither a sense of duty nor compassion that prompts Ana to invest her entire existence in giving the impoverished African girl a rich European life; it is the peculiar hold which the little silver voice has over her.

The novel moves from The Gambia where Ana meets Mariama, to Copenhagen where she misses her, and finally to London where they are reunited and where we hear the story from Mariama’s perspective before the book culminates in a dissolution of the boundaries between fantasy and reality. Ana’s beloved finance company is depicted as a totalitarian organism where hard-nosed discipline is disguised as democracy, coaching and relentless self-improvement. The Africans and their reality are portrayed brutally and without sentiment. Though Thorup is sensitive and sympathetic towards her characters, she never resorts to simplistic plotlines, but delivers both a critical portrayal of society and a moving and thought-provoking account of how an encounter with the alien can turn someone’s life upside down.

Translated by Charlotte Barslund