“The Days Are Like Grass”: An Elegiac Exploration of the Novella Genre by Jens Christian Grøndahl

CThese stories, the Anglo-Saxons call them “novellas”. Too long to be short stories, too short for a novel. And yet, a genre in itself, not a substitute. From now on, we must count among its representatives the texts that make up “The days are like the grass”the new book of the immense author…

CThese stories, the Anglo-Saxons call them “novellas”. Too long to be short stories, too short for a novel. And yet, a genre in itself, not a substitute. From now on, we must count among its representatives the texts that make up “The days are like the grass”, the new book by the great Danish author Jens Christian Grøndahl. In terms of twilights, poignant melancholy, vanished days and various fugues, it is difficult in the contemporary literary landscape to do more accomplished (except perhaps Modiano, whose influence Grøndahl has often recognized that he had on him).

Elegies of lost time

Six novellas on the menu of the same book, so many anguished and elegiac searches for lost time. In the first of them, which gives its title to the volume and which is reminiscent of the admirable “Virginia”, published twenty years ago, the author evokes the Denmark of the Occupation and especially of the Liberation, through the almost silent story of friendship between a teenager from Skagen and a young German prisoner not much older than him. In “Villa Ada”, nowadays in Rome, a couple of Italian-Danish dual nationals, in the process of separation, are worried about their runaway son who has become the muse of a movement in support of migrants from the Mediterranean.

“Edith Wengler”, Chekhov’s masterpiece of conciseness, justice and sadness

“Edith Wengler” (Chekhovian masterpiece of conciseness, accuracy and sadness mixed) narrates the life on the boards and on the screen of a great actress recently deceased and already almost forgotten, a woman of withdrawal and sorrow tus, between Delphine Seyrig and Romy Schneider. In the equally beautiful “I am the sea”, a policeman tracks down to the Spanish beaches a rich businessman whose announced death seems to him rather to hide a voluntary disappearance. “Wintering in Summer” paints the portrait of a woman, an inconsolable widow, a civil judge, who will have to indict the father of her son-in-law. Finally, the aptly named “Goodbye” accompanies the destiny of a young pastor, in love with a sculptor from the Faroe Islands, who will bond with a pietist woman whose officer husband was killed in Afghanistan.

Bergmanian Sonatas

Disappearances, persistence of memory, crossroads, painful and yet necessary choices, that’s the whole thing. It is all the poetic art, romantic and as if innervated by a deep melancholy specific to Grøndahl, which is condensed here in as many precipitates of lives which all lean towards the abyss. Yet, no morose complacency in these pages. If these Bergmanian “autumn sonatas” are so beautiful, it is because they are written with a vigorous pen by the one who confirms here that he is indeed one of the very great voices of this time. Spread the word.

The days are like grass”, by Jens Christian Grøndahl, ed. Gallimard, 352 pages, €24.