{"id":952,"date":"2019-07-02T12:00:06","date_gmt":"2019-07-02T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/?p=952"},"modified":"2019-07-02T12:00:06","modified_gmt":"2019-07-02T11:00:06","slug":"zero-and-transfer-window","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/2019\/07\/02\/zero-and-transfer-window\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring mental and physical illness: Gine Cornelia Pedersen, Zero, and Maria Gerhardt, Transfer Window"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nordisk Books<\/a> is an independent publishing house founded in the UK in 2016, with a focus on modern and contemporary Scandinavian literature. I was fortunate to read two of their recent releases, and am bringing them to you today in a special double-bill review.\"\"<\/p>\n

Gine Cornelia Pedersen, Zero<\/em>, translated from Norwegian by Rosie Hedger (Nordisk Books, 2018)<\/h2>\n

Zero <\/em>is the stream-of-consciousness narrative of author Gine Cornelia Pedersen\u2019s deteriorating mental health, transitioning from a childhood in which she \u201cabsorb[s] everything unfiltered\u201d to an adult life in which:<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want help
\nI like it at rock bottom
\nI\u2019m drowning in my own ego
\nIt feels glorious\u201d<\/p>\n

Described on the cover as a \u201cpunk rock single of a novel\u201d, Zero <\/em>certainly bears characteristics of punk rock: fast-paced, hard-edged and stripped bare, this is a painful book, but also an immensely lyrical one: it pulses with obsessive intensity, bursts with life and sound and vivid descriptions. The layout of the text looks something like poetry; thoughts (and pages) are incomplete, and yet the narrative always seems carefully structured, even when sentences are cut adrift and grammar goes out of the window. There are no full stops \u2013 or, rather, there are a couple when doctors speak, but none in the monologue \u2013 indicating the outpouring and intensity and the lack of definitive \u201cendings\u201d (indeed, the ending itself was the only part I struggled to understand, as it seemed almost hallucinatory \u2013 whether from the effects of medication or imagination I don\u2019t know). The story is deeply personal, and the subject pronoun \u201cI\u201d is used repeatedly throughout Zero<\/em>, yet\u00a0although such liberal repetition of \u201cI\u201d has the potential to become rather self-indulgent, and indeed such an intense book could easily be quite bleak or emotionally draining, neither of these is the case. On the contrary, this is an absorbing, throbbing narrative, a compelling and compulsive read.<\/p>\n

Rosie Hedger\u2019s translation is faultless: she has captured the voice of a tormented millennial perfectly, and every word of this spare, gut-punching book is perfection. One of the questions I found most interesting was about where the real \u201csickness\u201d lies \u2013 is it with a woman struggling with her mental health, or with the way in which society deals with her? Forced into a psychiatric hospital, the narrator is injected with tranquillisers, given pills that make her a stranger to herself, and repeatedly told that this is essential (not even watered down with a platitude of it being \u201cfor her own good\u201d \u2013 indeed, we rather suspect that the confinement is not for her own good at all). She begins her own internal revolution:<\/p>\n

\u201cI realise these people are sicker than I ever expected
\nThat I\u2019m going to have to inwardly oppose them\u201d<\/p>\n

This “inward opposition” is carried out by controlling her behaviour in order to assure her release (\u201cI open my mouth to say something but I realise that it\u2019s better to keep my thoughts to myself here\u201d). She clings to these thoughts, to the hope that they will return, to a time when she will feel as though she inhabits her own body again. And when this begins to happen, it also symbolises a return to life:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe feeling has started to return to my body
\nI\u2019ve started thinking again
\nConstantly thinking
\nThoughts sweep through me
\nIt\u2019s as if I\u2019m getting high
\nGetting high off the sun, off the night, off people on the street\u201d<\/p>\n

It is not the medical staff with their needles and prescriptions and neat labels of psychosis who save the narrator in the end, but \u2013 if indeed she is \u201csaved\u201d at all, for we leave her only part-way towards a recovery that might only ever be temporary \u2013 it is by her own determination and her awareness of her mother\u2019s love pulling her back towards life:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd that\u2019s when it hits me
\nThe love in Mum\u2019s voice
\nThe tenderness
\nAs if she were talking to something that might break if she were to say the wrong thing
\nHer absolute, total, unconditional acceptance of me\u201d<\/p>\n

This tribute to the mother is not at all clich\u00e9d \u2013 it is not that \u201clove conquers all\u201d, but rather a moving eulogy to an unconditional love that creates a lifeline where modern medicine does not. In Zero<\/em>, Pedersen gives voice to all that is suppressed, to emotions dismissed as self-indulgence and treated as psychosis, and to the need to be part of the world, not isolated from it. This urgent, rebellious short text is a countdown to zero, a ticking clock, a timebomb, and a gem waiting to be discovered; I highly recommend it.<\/p>\n

Maria Gerhardt, Transfer Window<\/em>, translated from Danish by Lindy Falk van Rooyen (Nordisk Books, 2019)<\/h2>\n

In the latest release from Nordisk Books we move from mental illness to physical illness, as Transfer Window <\/em>is inspired by author and musician Maria Gerhardt\u2019s terminal cancer diagnosis. Gerhardt died in 2017 at the age of 39, and in this book she relates the difficulties of knowing that life will be cut short, and the impossibility of an old age that she can only imagine. Transfer Window <\/em>is also an indictment of the failure of \u201chealthy\u201d friends and members of society to provide adequate palliative support: Gerhardt\u2019s friends want her to cheer up, remind her that she \u201cseemed so much better\u201d last time they saw her, and would prefer that she constructed a fa\u00e7ade of coping with her diagnosis. The book’s subtitle (\u201cTales of the Mistakes of the Healthy\u201d) indicates the detrimental effect that lack of understanding and compassion can have on an ill person and, as in Zero<\/em>, calls into question where the real sickness lies.<\/p>\n

Though there is much realism in Transfer Window<\/em>, the setting is a futuristic representation of end-of-life care. The majority of the narrative takes place in a vast hospital compound, a section of the city that has been blocked off and dedicated to the dying. They leave their loved ones (\u201cWe have already said goodbye to our families in a beautiful ceremony\u201d) and enter a white-walled hospital where \u201cbar a miraculous recovery, once you check in, you can never leave.\u201d This hospital for the dying also seems like a voluntary prison (\u201cI\u2019ve been here three hundred and eighty days\u201d; \u201cI etch lines in the wall, to the lift of my mattress, in order to keep track of how long I have been here\u201d), and eventually the narrator acknowledges that \u201cthis really is a ghastly place to be.\u201d The dystopia of a seemingly perfect \u201cdeath hotel\u201d reminded me of Ninni Holmqvist\u2019s marvellous The Unit <\/em>(translated by Marlaine Delargy for Oneworld and reviewed here<\/a>) \u2013 the residents seem to have all they could want, including access to marijuana oil and to virtual reality experiences that allow them to relive their most cherished memories \u2013 but what they do not have is a future.<\/p>\n

The inconsistency of the translation was the one thing that let this book down for me: though much of the translation conveys a stark beauty and musicality, in places some literal or calqued phrases creep in. There are also some editing errors, including a number of rather oddly placed commas – this shouldn’t spoil your appreciation of the book, but it’s a shame as this is otherwise a powerful and moving text. Where Falk van Rooyen has excelled in the translation, however, is in its lyricism: there are a number of sections which are almost unbearable in the rawness of their pain. In particular, references to the narrator\u2019s (healthy) partner are immensely moving: \u201cMy sweetheart, you are not to see me lying here sobbing. You are not to see me hunched over the toilet bowl, howling for help down the drain.\u201d It is not only life that is cut short, but also love (\u201cThe only thing I find frustrating about the next dimension is that you are not coming along\u201d), and yet this is never saccharine. Rather, we are made aware that the partner gets to carry on where the narrator is cut off: when the partner shouts at their son that she doesn\u2019t have time for his reluctance to get dressed for kindergarten, the narrator comments that \u201cI hated that you said you didn\u2019t have time. You have so much time. You have nothing but time.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was a painful book to read, particularly with the knowledge that the author had died. Such confrontation with mortality is rarely comfortable, but I rather think that\u2019s Gerhardt\u2019s point: she doesn\u2019t want to make things comfortable for her reader, she wants to share her pain. Gerhardt\u2019s descriptions of her ravaged body (\u201cMy body knew pain which the body can\u2019t bear\u201d, \u201cmy body seized in the agony that only a body in absence of motion feels\u201d, \u201ca body forever in a state of emergency\u201d) are just as important as her reflections on health and illness, and the most human thing we can do is to read this book without trying to find a \u201csilver lining\u201d, but rather learn from it to make fewer \u201cMistakes of the Healthy\u201d.<\/p>\n

Review copies of Zero <\/em>and Transfer Window <\/em>provided by Nordisk Books (via Inpress Books)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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