Thorstein Thomsen’s Sne på hendes ansigt ('Snow on Her Face') is the culmination for the time being of an oeuvre that always goes its own way. The author was for many years a striking figure in reading and entertainment for Danish children and young people. Starting out as a rock musician, he came to dominate Danish children’s libraries as an entertainer providing music shows and readings from picture books and novels and poems for children and young people.

In 2001, he knocked gently on the door of the grown-ups with the novel Bare vi har hinanden ('As Long As We Have Each Other') from 2001, which is a tribute to the artist’s stepfather, and during the ensuing years he followed this up with the very atmospheric and colourful Roser til mor ('Roses for Mother') in 2002 and Han er min bror ('He’s My Brother') in 2004 thereby creating a trilogy based on his own memories.

Perhaps it could be sensed – or was it prejudice – that Thorstein Thomsen was still writing with some hesitation when faced with the more extensive formats demanded by an adult public. However, in 2006 he made his mark as a fully fledged novelist with the moral drama of reconciliation centred on group membership and personal stamina in time of war, Den der hvisker lyver ('He Who Whispers Lies').

Thorstein Thomsen’s new novel has the huge gallery of figures that is so typical of this narrative form, in which various strands are woven together to form complete accounts.

The novel covers the period from 1936 to 2006 and is replete with stories, fates, surroundings, taste and colour. But interestingly enough, there is no focus on the major political events of the time: the occupation, the liberation, the first landing on the moon, the youth rebellion, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the collapse of communism, the abolition of apartheid, the start of Islamic terror are as good as ignored – and quite deliberately so.

Although our main character lives in left-wing environments in West Germany in the 1970s, we hear nothing of the Red Army Faction and political terrorism, and in fact it is only the fall of the Berlin Wall that receives any serious attention and even then merely en passant. Why should this be? It is because 'Snow on Her Face' is not a political novel. Indeed, it is not even a novel about society, but one about people. The description of the surroundings and the portraits of mentality are certainly correct, convincing and in keeping with their time, but fundamentally Thorstein Thomsen is concerned neither with the city nor the world, but with his characters. So the novel makes no attempt to be a chronicle about an epoque, but a chronicle about the people who for better or for worse constitute a family. This is in general very typical of the author’s novels for adults.

The absence of a political interest is quite striking, but this is almost a liberating experience, and if we have read Thorstein Thomsen’s previous novel, 'He Who Whispers Lies', we are fortunate enough to know that he is perfectly capable to putting political questions at centre stage if that is what he wants to do. But with 'Snow on Her Face' his ambition is different: It is not the external events, but the internal ones that make up the essence, drive and drama of the novel about the Kryle family, whom we follow through a period of 70 years.

The novel starts in 2006 when Michala is on her way to her grandmother’s deathbed in the hospital at Esbjerg. Annemarie Kryle is 101 years old and is now to depart the world in which she had her finest hour as a prophet in an obscure Christian sect in the 1930s.

After this, her life became completely ordinary middle class and down to earth, but her fate is still central to the disharmonious and dysfunctional family whose members finally stand facing each other in the hospital ward, searching for words, unfamiliar with each other and filled with doubt. This is a very beautiful final scene in which the family’s desperately dysfunctional character is revealed: They are forced to introduce themselves to each other as strangers do on meeting for the first time.

Michala is the storyteller in the most literal and double sense. She has had a career as a storyteller in the Berlin underground, and on the occasion of her grandmother’s death she decides to gather all the family’s fates together into one single, long, coherent story, and it is not always a particularly attractive one.

“Violence was the glue that held the world together in those days. Violence in the home, violence in school, violence in religion. I grew up in a bed of oppression, inhibition and distortion. Now Grandmother is dead, and we can imagine the violence belongs to a distant past. In a curious way, all the violence surrounding her became my mother and me, my way of life.”
As a professional who transforms events into narratives, she collects the family story in a colourful, merciless and brutal chronicle full of love, force, violence, abuse, harm, rebellion and an everlasting search for independence, confirmation, security and meaningfulness. The members of the family encompass everything from mental confusion to enlightenment, from betrayal to solidarity, from love to hate, and the storyteller owes loyalty to nothing except the story itself, so that nothing is spared when she lets rip. All masks fall with éclat – and apropos falling masks, 'Snow on Her Face' takes its title from a moving passage in which Michaela finds her desperately alcoholic mother in the industrial harbour in Esbjerg early one Christmas morning after a catastrophic Christmas Eve during which the family idyll again shattered beneath a thin layer of varnish.

Many years later, Michala has a conversation with her mother after another Christmas Eve when everything has gone wrong, this time with Michala herself in the role of the drunk. She notes that revenge lives its own life, as though she is passing revenge on like some invisible mark of Cain. We have seen some hints of a larger format on Thorstein Thomsen’s first four novels – not least the powerful 'He Who Whispers Lies' – and 'Snow on Her Face' fulfils our hopes and expectations. The author generously distributes a host of the most peculiar stories. I personally am intrigued by the story of the grotesque Christian sect from Esbjerg, which attributes special powers to a monkey that a sailor has brought to the town from the other side of the world. The sectarians believe the monkey, which boasts the fantastic name of Storgorm, can read, hear and speak, and at all events it can open a page in the Bible. Unfortunately, the Christian monkey never manages to say anything before it is obliged to depart this earthly life in one of the strangest, blackest and most amusing passages in the book.

The story of the lives lived by three generations of the Kryle family is Thorstein Thomsen’s large-scale, generous and successful breakthrough as a storyteller. Stylistically, he is reminiscent of another Danish writer of chronicles in recent years, Morten Ramsland ('Doghead'), and 'Snow on Her Face' has the quality and the potential to become Thorstein Thomsen’s great breakthrough.

EXTRACT

My mother’s mother is lying in a room at Esbjerg Hospital. An attendant has readied her for a visit. He has washed her, laid a comforter over her, smoothed it and folded her hands over it. He has lit some tea candles on the windowsill. Maybe a rose is standing on the bed table in a stainless steel vase.

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