There are books that are borne along by a human voice, rather than an exciting plot or some spectacular conflict. Books that speak directly to the emotions and continue to resonate in the mind long after one’s reading has ended. Books that demonstrate how narrative art can constitute a necessary inner capacity to endure.

One of these essentially rare works is The Journey’s End, Bent Vinn Nielsen’s intense depiction of Hanne, a 32-year-old hairdresser from Northern Jutland, who after twelve years of sad and childless marriage, sets off on a journey without destination or goal. The biggest event in her life thus far was when she won the title of Miss Lustrup and stood frozen in her bathing suit and paper crown. Her wildest act of rebellion was when, during a trip to the Harz, she was unfaithful to her husband with a charming ski instructor.

When her telling begins, she’s married to Benny Pollen, a bank employee. He loves saving and she enjoys spending. For him, the recipe for a happy life is good food and hygge at home, but she harbours a vague desire for something else, something bigger. When she leaves, it’s precisely because she is fundamentally not indifferent and ordinary enough for the utterly mundane life that the village of Lustrup offers. She refuses to adapt to the norms of small-town life, yet on the other hand she lacks the inner resources that will let her dare to believe in herself. To resort to a couple of shop-soiled clichés from pop psychology, Hanne suffers from low selfesteem and lacks the ability to set boundaries.

That becomes evident in her journey through Denmark in the couple’s Ford Escort. During her life in Lustrup, Hanne was rendered invisible by her husband and constantly let down by Rikke, her girlhood friend and competitor. Now she’s betrayed by the men she encounters along her route – the ski instructor, whom she seeks out but who in the interim has become a grotesque parody of a New
Age apostle; her older brother Freddy, who’s stalled in his effort to write the Great Danish Novel; and the virile Lennart, who only uses her for sex.

The novel is plotted like a road movie that brings Hanne around the country, with a side trip to Sweden before she returns home to Lustrup. After discovering that Rikke has of course moved into their double bed long before, she divorces Benny at last and embarks upon a new life on her own premises. The book’s ending more than suggests that she’s recovered her vitality with her sense of humour intact.

Narratively, the book is a consistently oral telling directed at an anonymous listener who is an intimate stand-in for the reader. It reads as a blend of a deeply personal diary and a long confidential letter. As an author, Nielsen evinces thorough with his narrator in this unusual spoken book, whose secret sauce might be its blend of discreetly deployed adverbs, well-balanced cadences, the authenticity of its voice and a tone that may well be the book’s symbol of freedom.

The Journey’s End testifies to the enduring strength of realism – the fact that, in the hands of a brilliant narrator, the ordinary can be made extraordinary and unique. In the context of Nielsen’s own oeuvre, the book serves as a farewell to a distorting distance and an arrival in everyday life, which upon closer examination contains a human drama of immense proportions.

Erik Skyum-Nielsen