One day a heavily pregnant woman stands at the door of a family with mother, father and daughter in a small Danish town. She announces that the man in the house is the father of the child, and she can move into her daughter’s room in the house. The child is born. Mora dies the next day. Yes, we are going into the family crises, and the story is told by the daughter as an adult. This is a well-known landscape in contemporary literature and, not least, it is a typical first book theme. So no, this is not where the originality lies, even if the way this family is unhappy is special. Hit-and-miss at sentence level The distinctive feature lies in the language, and here I allowed myself to run a small series of quotations. In childhood, the girl gives practical advice to the tiny half-brother whom no one really wants, and who is nicknamed “The Lizard”: The grown-up girl moves to Copenhagen, and is newly in love with “The Crab”: But soon things get worse between the two: The text is full of such small, meaningless sentences. From here she can move into the poetic, the surreal or into the curiosities of knowledge. And there is more, perhaps mostly made up when the truth is to be told, and I will come back to that towards the end. Words and bacteria The crab is a happy urban salmon in the design industry who believes that you can talk your way through problems. The girl, who works at the bar, is a burnt child. She has experienced that language is something that adults use to define and lock down situations. Reflections and confrontations about language run as one of several threads through the roughly 400-page text web. When the Lizard Brother tries to kill himself, the girl retreats to the small town where he is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Their relationship is almost without language, it is symbiotic and extremely close, without being incestuous. The girl and the lizard share bacteria, they share a childhood, it was the two of them against their mother, who sent them to their father (yes, there is a divorce here) who sent them on to children’s girls in the neighborhood. THE AUTHOR: Signe Holm was born in 1990 in Denmark and lives in Oslo. She is educated at Forfatterstudiet in Bø, Skrivekunstakademiet in Hordaland and Litterär gestaltning in Gothenburg. Photo: Jason Havneraas Again, both childhood, love and the commute between town and country are depicted with great precision and surprising images. Another recurring theme is the body, which neither the Lizard nor the girl are particularly happy about. It is more important that the girl sees the body as an open system. All life is in an interaction. Then we are back to life on a non-linguistic level, which it may seem as if the girl is longing to enter or return to. Hear the book announcement in “Open Book”: On the top shelf There are too many words in life, too many definitions and categories and silly babble. She finds the latter in particular in the creative team at Krabben. The crab, which can twist things like “pain is so powerful”. It is somewhat paradoxical then that the girl with the skepticism of words needs so many pages to tell about her life. I understand that the wall of words should not only provide information, but also in itself illustrate how difficult it can be to maneuver in this life. Nevertheless, it becomes too much, it becomes too many things, and the novel gradually laughs at it. The strongest stand out are the accurate, tight sentences and the extremely poignant relationship with Øglen. At the back of the book there is a long list of books and authors she has taken inspiration from. Here are names such as Marguerite Duras, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, together with the telephone directory (!), the Bible and contemporary authors such as Olga Ravn and Pedro Carmona-Alvarez. Signe Holm is aiming for the top shelf in literature, and she may very well end up there herself. The talent is there. news reviewer Photo: Forlaget Oktober Title: “Godset” Author: Signe Holm Genre: Novel Publisher: Oktober Number of pages: 429 Date: 21.04.2023
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“Godset” by Signe Holm – Reviews and recommendations
