Critisism of welfare in literary experimental form
By Mai Misfeldt
Skønvirke (‘Arts and Crafts’) is the third and final part of a trilogy by Lars Frost, a young Danish writer whose first two volumes Smukke biler efter krigen. Knaldroman (‘Beautiful Cars After The War. Pulp Fiction’) and Ubevidst rødgang. Ingeniørroman (‘Jaywalking. An Engineering Novel’) were published in 2004 and 2008. The trilogy takes the shape of a prolonged and from a liter- ary point of view sophisticated criticism of the Danish - and thus by implication – the Scandinavian welfare state. Frost’s starting point is that the welfare state sees itself as the incarnation of goodness and justice - and it is this self-image which the author challenges with melancholy and misanthropy. His criticism escalates during the trilogy and Skønvirke thus becomes the culmination of a major project.
Skønvirke is an unusual literary experiment - the novel imitates the structure of the fifteen stages of the Catholic requiem mass and each section takes its Latin title from it. In the first thirteen sections Frost introduces us to a subtle, ironic version of the femi-crime, as it has become known, a type of Scandinavian crime fiction with a female heroine and some focus on the protagonist’s private and intimate life - the Swedish crime writer Liza Marklund is one such example. Thus the reader is offered a crime story with a frantic and partially unresolved plot; however, Frost goes on to subvert many of the genre’s conventions and makes it clear to the reader that the plot is both a parody and a criticism of femi-crime.
At the end of the novel Frost’s plot and the two final sections conclude in a dramatic dystopia where the semantics go crazy, so that both the language, its meaning and the reader’s expectations of the novel are violated. In this way the dystopia becomes total, nothing escapes the literary, social or political age Frost depicts, not even the language or the form of the novel itself.
Translated by Russell Dees
