By Liselotte Wiemer. Translated by Thomas E. Kennedy.

There has been some of Freud’s influence present in the Danish literature of 2007. It is striking how many writers over the past year have circled in on family life and memoirs in their extremely concrete search for identity and causal context. This is often imagined as life in the country, two or three generations back, with a sliding boundary between fiction and autobiography.

Take, for example, the winner of this year’s First Book Prize, HENRIETTE E. MØLLER (born 1976), and her slender novel Jelne (‘Jelne’). The girl Jelne has just been jilted by her boyfriend and the novel begins in the big moment, where she throws a whole box of papers, letters and photographs out a fifth-story window in Copenhagen. This is a strong, spectacular introduction, and we inhale with her all the pain and loneliness she feels as she slides impotently down against the radiator, staring into space. All nerve endings are on edge. From there, Henriette E. Møller travels back to her childhood. Without revealing who she is, Jelne takes a job as a waitress in the restaurant where her mother worked. Now she intends to find out how her mother died and who her father really was. This results in both a romance and a new, unknown family.

The writer JENS SMÆRUP SØRENSEN (born 1946) has just been awarded the booksellers’ prize -The Golden Laurel - for his novel Mærkedage (‘Red-Letter Days’). The book is a concentrated, beautiful and partially autobiographical account of three red-letter days – a confirmation, a 60th birthday and a silver wedding anniversary – that stretch over four generations during the years 1934-2003. We are in Jutland, far out in the Danish countryside, in a whole other time, a whole other culture and a whole other tempo. Here, too, we are dealing with questions of identity and childhood. But by virtue of the language’s wonderful melodiousness, a wealth of detail and an entirely old-fashioned ease, the novel transcends all banality. Unsentimental as a camera lens, the author describes how the culture of country folks - with all its meaning and context and mutual understanding - disappears before our eyes, never to return again.

But agriculture is one thing, tract houses another. The 60s dream of a carport, dog and garden path has returned with a vengeance! And you’re bored! You’re desperate on your sofa with your TV remote. Maybe you’re also having a midlife crisis, although few do anything about it.

There are two young first novelists who do, however: TORBEN MUNKSGAARD (born 1975) with Retrograd (‘Retrograde’), and ALLAN MILTER JAKOBSEN (born 1970) with Mand i parcelhus (‘Man in Tract House’). Using a humorous and grotesque tone, they describe the conditions for men in mid-life who fear shrinking to nothingness precisely because they have all they need! In ‘Retrograde’ our man, having reached the age of fifty, consistently chooses to grow down instead of up. Out of which comes a bit of incense, ready-made pizzas and youthful parties – as well as brilliant existential considerations about what life is really worth when we don’t have a remote within reach.

Milter Jakobsen lets his main character become a peeping Tom, looking into his neighbor’s bedroom window! And if there are some piquant elements in this –which there are, and his wife also gets some pleasure out of it – it soon turns into a story of pure heroism. The man saves both the neighbor’s wife and marriage. In an almost apocalyptic scene, we see him going around the neighborhood as all the electric eyes activate the lights in the carports!  “I wish the whole world were covered by an endless network of tract houses,” he breathes.

In a more dangerous and linguistically remarkable fashion, JENS BLENDSTRUP (born 1968) takes on the same theme of love and boredom in his powerful collection of stories, Pludselig flæben (‘Suddenly Sniveling’). Take, for example, “Joan’s Exit”, in which the woman in a nuclear family longs so terribly for attention that she arranges her own disappearance. She gets the idea from the TV program, “Without a Trace,” where she watches gripping scenes of loss and reunion. Consequently she moves out into a shed in the garden and from there keeps an eye on the house. But she soon discovers that the family actually gets on quite well without her. The weeks pass and one day a new woman comes to visit! It is a sad, touching and thought-provoking tale about a love that has never been nourished. About confusing fantasy and reality. And about not being able to arrange life as though it was fiction.

The same rebellious energy and linguistic surplus is found in another of the year’s outstanding storytellers. ADDA DJØRUP (born 1972) makes her debut as a prose writer with Hvis man begyndte at spørge sig selv (‘If You Began to Ask Yourself’), although she has previously published a celebrated poetry collection Monsieurs Monologer (‘Monsieur’s Monologues’). She, too, uses indignation and an almost old-fashioned social criticism as her modus operandi. Like Blendstrup, she presents the ancient dream by using a cleaved, grotesque and ambiguous imagery. The expectation of absolute truth becomes a flickering message of what the world is and what it could be. Language, too, is affected: “A disbelief in language that seems to have been given its own will and purpose, disbelief in the metaphors running amok that change sky to sea, and, with the dizzying speed of association, connect everything with everything else,” as Djørup says in the title story. And that’s what we have: an unsteady foundation. But it is also something else:  Everything points to a foundation we simply don’t have words for. Because if you began asking, you’d question yourself down into a black hole. Why do we breathe? Why do we peel potatoes? Nonetheless that is what this story is about: questions. Because questions themselves wake us up, make us uncomfortable and alert. They stop disbelief, ignorance, forgetfulness. Every awakening starts with a question!

One is also awakened by two older writers’ obstinate and completely untamed method of tackling expressions, roots, motherhood, and childhood. Here we have Freud on acid!

BENT HALLER (born 1946) is impossible to place in Danish literature, an unaccountable mixture of melancholy redneck and clenched-fisted dockworker. With his novel Den ottende bonde (‘The Eighth Peasant’) he breaks new records in black soil, evil and bile. Marie is in the middle with her son Anthon and the sow Saerimmer (known from the Nordic mythology). Marie is an indomitable, loathsome, slow-witted woman who, to a mythological degree, thinks only of herself. We begin with the worst, which is when Anthon has made the girl on the farm pregnant and Marie puts the infant in the pigpen. She will tolerate no competition! And what does Anthon do? He lowers his head like a dog and lives on in his private hell, alone on the farm with his mother. Finally everything crashes down around him.

This is also what happens in the slender novel by JESS ØRNSBO (born 1932), Fru P (‘Mrs. P’). The main character is the owner of the boarding house ‘Sollyst’ (Sunlight), where, to be honest, there is not much sun. She has her son Telle, and the dialogue between them goes like this: “You’re a bad mother, I could just as well have been given birth to by a closet,” he says, and she answers: “Find a pile of manure you can rummage around in!” If she feels any love at all for her son, she hides it well. What is it with these mothers? But, as opposed to Haller, in Ørnsbo’s universe one finds raw humor alongside the horror. And in a completely grotesque closing scene Telle is reduced to a rasping cripple while everyone dies around him. Only the woman is left in that Ragnarok or Armageddon. The mother – the great killer!

JYTTE BORBERG died last year at the age of 89. Her last novel, Skråskrift (‘Cursive’), is just as full of festive fireworks as all her writing. Okay, the mother is eccentric beyond all bounds and apparently cannot stand her deathly boring daughter. But so enter a pom-pom cut poodle and a jogger that threaten to transform Freud to fantasy - and a happy ending.

Let me conclude with a little publication that has no conclusion …  practically. In any event, according to author PETER ADOLPHSEN it will take 694 days to read his book, En million historier (‘One Million Stories’). It is only ten pages long, but contains A Million Stories. Adolphsen’s model is the French author Raymond Queneau, but he has transformed into prose the idea about the endless multiplicity of the moment. Upon opening the book, the reader meets a host of tiny strips, each of which contains a two-line portion of a million different stories. One must move downward through the strips, but otherwise there are no rules. One can cast dice or believe in fate or in lottery numbers!  However, each coincidental possibility has a meaning. And every story is an independent, complete prose text.

Roots and identity. Meaning and firm ground beneath your feet. That has been the recurring theme in this year’s harvest of books. An insistent question that some authors formulate seriously, in a humorous, ambiguous and anti-authoritarian manner, while others seem to believe any question can move the questioner away from the answer and that ‘If You Began to Ask Yourself’, it would all end in a black hole. In any event, it is the insistent questioning that awakens you. And isn’t that what all art is about? A wake-up call.