Henriette E. Møller
Childhood's inn
Henriette E. Møller’s debut novel Jelne tells a relatively everyday story in an unusual way.
By Jens Andersen. Translated by Thomas E. Kennedy
Literature often begins with a visual impression – which is the case with Jelne. A young woman stands at a window high up over Nørrebrogade, a street in northern Copenhagen, in the beginning of January, and spills out a box of pictures which slowly float down toward the street to settle on the snow. The photos stem from the relationship of a couple which has just broken up; they flutter past in review over the heads of the pedestrians below. The young woman at the window is named Jelne and has been abandoned by Kasper, who has found another. And quick as lightning from the clear blue sky, Jelne is again – as so often before in her young life – pushed out of a familiar, secure place. Cut off from care, tenderness, and love. Alone with all her loss.
But Jelne gathers herself in the midst of her defeat, has reached a point in her life – at the age of 27 – where some form of understanding and explanation for her entire existence is absolutely necessary. She also knows where the key to the secret can be found: In the country town on the island of Møn where she lived with her alcoholic, unmarried mother who worked in an Inn but killed herself in a car wreck one New Year’s Eve, after which the abandoned sever-year-old Jelne moved in with her old grandfather in Jutland.
Henriette E. Møller’s novel thematically is a relatively traditional account of yet another lonesome person’s attempt to find the words that will redeem. But the way in which Jelne’s story is told by Henriette E. Møller is, on the other hand, quite original.. And delivered with courage and consistency.
The narrator’s viewpoint is constantly splitting. We see Jelne from outside, from within. Just as we suddenly might find ourselves for an instant inside of other characters. Time-wise the narrative shifts somewhat disorientingly and surprisingly between the present and the past. Garnished with tiny detours to a future where only the narrator exists. A delightful pinch that brings a broadening gleam of mystery.
All in all Henriette F. Møller has an unusually strong grip on her filmicly unsettling tale. At times one finds too much childhood nostalgia in the fiction, where we are forced to hear about playthings and comic books from the 1980s. But in this fragmentary account of Jelne’s gradual elucidation and solution concerning the traumatic loss in the present and the future, the reader is held fast. What it all ends with – whether Jelne remains with her new family in the inn of her childhood on Møn or returns to the Copenhagen singles and café life with renewed strength – one will of course have to read for oneself in Henriette F. Møller’s novel. It can be warmly recommended.
This review was first published in the daily news paper Berlingske Tidende, January 27th 2007.
Photo: © Robin Skjoldborg
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