Agatha’s Time
By Mai Misfeldt
I have said it after the publication of each of the four vol- umes. And now I’m saying it again: the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize ought to go to Vibeke Grønfeldt for the Agatha Quartet. Four volumes, more than 1600 pages, a life and a century portrayed in a both down-to-earth and sensuous, singing prose. The presentation of a 90-year life that at the same time reflects the entire technological development taking place over this period. From a society based on agriculture to one founded on information technology. One small human life, but a whole world revolution: two wars, electricity, sewerage, moon landing, tractors, cars, aeroplanes, telephone, radio, TV, computer and internet. From a life in which you had personally to feed the cows, muck out and milk, to a life in which everything can be bought packaged in a super- market. From a life in which everything depended on the weather and on everyone’s overall contribution to one in which you no longer need to wonder where your heating is coming from and in which everyone minds their own business. From a life with a solid common framework and in which the opening of a library was a milepost to a life offering an infinite number of possibilities and in which everything can be found on the Internet.
This is a history of Denmark on a high literary level though it must in no way be seen as a series of historical novels, as is demonstrated not least by the array of proverbs, manners of speech and the echoes of song titles. Mindet (‘The Memory’) (2005), I min tid (‘In My Time’) (2006), Indretningen (‘The Arrangement’) (2008) and Livliner (‘Lifelines’) (2011) together form the story of a single person. They tell of a hard and vulnerable, awkward and temperamental, linguistically and visually gifted woman’s struggle with the way the world is arranged. Told in a language that can paint the most wonderful, sensual, lyrical pictures and be completely unadorned, bare statements, idiosyncratic and mischievous. We are present at the very moment that is sensed and reflected in Agatha, and without any intention of establishing an overall interpretation, all these moments and these glimpses of real life as it is lived combine to provide a long, progressive account: in whole sentences and half sentences, in contradictions and lies, mistakes, dreams and longings, clear and insightful as is the human mind. No explanations, no judgements, but the world as it exists within a human being here and now: at the ages of 10, 30, 50, 80 and 90.
We meet Agatha for the first time, reluctantly on her way out of her mother’s womb! We are out in the country at some date around 1910, and Agatha is born at home in her mother’s family farm. Here Agatha grows up with her parents and three siblings. She is a strange little girl, temperamental, stubborn and touchy on the outside but soft and apprehensive inside. With a role to play on the farm even as a child. She knows every corner and is better at milking than the girls brought in from the town. Before she is eight years old, she unhesitatingly chops off the head of a hen, and before she has her first sexual experiences she can plunge a knife into the soft skin of a pig and remove a piglet’s testicles. She experiences fear at night, and perhaps the world is merely something she imagines. But come the day, and the work is there again, with all its cohesive force. Laziness is the most serious sin, and as she doesn’t believe in God any longer, she can never be forgiven.
Agatha has her own logic, with which we become closely acquainted as the four volumes progress. “Thinking makes you weak, and thinking makes you strong.” There is no subduing her, and when her parents believe they have found a suitable husband for her (it is not such a long time since we had arranged marriages in Denmark), she refuses. Instead, on account of an unwanted pregnancy, she ends up together with the town’s gentle painter. In the last volume, Agatha has taken over the town pharmacy, in which capacity she develops her own way of providing medical care for the local citizens. A lot of people can be in need of tranquillizers; hypochondriacs are given packets of vitamin C! Agatha is no nostalgic, but a woman who very much lives in her own time. And she is a fabulous travelling companion for the reader.
Translated by Charlotte Barslund
