Jens Blendstrup

Backstroke through Tears

Jens Blendstrup’s newest book, a collection of short stories entitled Pludselig flæben (Suddenly Snivelling) has been well received by the critics. He is one of Danish literature’s most original and humorous young voices.

By Lars Bukdahl. Translated by Thomas E. Kennedy
 

As the title indicates, Jens Blendstrup's talent for humor in 'Suddenly Snivelling' confronts the lamentableness of the world head-on.  And to a considerable degree its existential lamentableness.  In one story after another, the characters experience an emptiness in their lives or a crook in their characters which Blendstrup, with his indomitable imagination at once makes concrete:  a hole in the wall behind the washing machine that sucks everything up. Or he lets his characters concretize or contra-concretize:  when a man experiences a darkness between himself and his wife, he sets up light cabinets under the bed.  And when a serious intellectual concludes that his lover has light morals, he weights her down with “lead pontoons”.  Blendstrup doesn't laugh his way out of sorrow – with direct force,  he laughs it into movement.

Jens Blendstrup (born, 1968) is already something of a living legend on the literary scene in Denmark, and scene here is meant quite literally because even more than his excellent books,  his appearances around the country as a virtuoso, howlingly funny, shamelessly shouting "poet of inconvenience" have made his name.

The performer had by far overshadowed the author, but that situation changed abruptly with the publication of his memoir, Gud taler ud  (God Speaks, 2001), which with its special mix of fine sadness and baroque humor portrays the author's eccentric, psychologist father who throughout the book bears the immodest code name, God.

Because it is practiced with such almost primal energy, Blendstrup's inventiveness is never forced or artificial.  And his imagination functions full force on all levels:  no end of beautiful, crazy linguistic details deep in the text and then a single big primary invention of the sort that texts with death-defying consequences stretch across.  As here, for example, the story "Cancer Cathedral" about a dying man who considers his cancer a positive factor, like the construction of a cathedral inside him!  A story like that shouldn't even be written, but Blendstrup pays no heed, and the reader fortunately doesn't know whether to weep or laugh so does both at the same time.

EXTRACT 

The Now Deceased Member of the Mikkelsen Family