Review: Korsgaard “One day we will laugh about it”

I’ve really longed to meet young Tue again, after the acquaintance in Thomas Korsgaard’s previous novel “If someone would pass by”. Find out how he continues to maneuver life in his chaotic rag-poor home in the Jutland countryside with a half-crazy, aggressive, erratic father and a mother who has lost her footing. She who sits in front of the computer with the curtains drawn and plays away borrowed money on online poker. “Being depressed was the only thing she knew how to do, I thought. It was a way of existing in the world.”

In Denmark, Thomas Korsgaard’s trilogy (there will be a third part in a Swedish translation this autumn) was a success, racing up the bestseller lists and being awarded prizes. The author was said to be: “One of Denmark’s absolutely most eye-catching and convincing literary talents.” He was only 21 when the first part came out and after the Tue series he has used the prize money to write a collection of short stories. A short story is published in February this year in The New Yorker, “The split of him” – a text mainly in the form of dialogue.

The trilogy takes place in a place that has similarities to Korsgaard’s home district near Skive in Central Jutland. Such great similarities, that he doesn’t feel completely welcome home.

Something remarkable has happened in this second part, “One day we will laugh at it”, as well as the previous one, loosely translated by Helena Hansson. The mother has suddenly received a large lump sum of money for a work injury, so the power in the family has shifted to some extent in her favor. Magnificently, she invites the whole family, including Tue’s girlfriend Iben, on an all-inclusive charter trip to Alanya in Turkey. All in all a successful trip.

However, the mother’s new economic status does not affect the diet or the household to any great extent. There is more beer than food on the table. And cleaning rarely or never seems to occur. As hopeless as she is as she rocks around in her purple velor dress and lets the home fall into disrepair, Tue stands like a knight by her side and defends her through all the gossip. She is sick”.

However, there are limits. When the mother wants to make him her confidante regarding a man on Funen with whom she intensively texts all night, he bites back. He doesn’t want to listen to that ear. There, Tue is coldly disinterested, even though he sincerely detests his father. Despite everything, this with the Funen man enlivens the mother and it rushes with excitement in the novel, when via Tue she gets hold of her car keys, which the wife tyrant to her husband has hidden, and escapes to Funen with her car for a couple of days. Even if the Funen trip is later discovered via a speeding ticket (photo from speed camera), she is quite good at lying. They all are, Tue more, his two younger siblings less.

Like walking around in his underwear in the afternoons, taking the stairs to the bedroom and watching porn.

The father, who uses grotesqueries, degrading talk and brutality to maintain his position as the head of the family, has little to contribute outside the walls of the house. He gets poked here and there, is considered generally incompetent and really only contributes to bad mood, fear and insecurity. And disgusting. Like walking around in his underwear in the afternoons, taking the stairs to the bedroom and watching porn. “Every single afternoon and evening the same beeping sound of girls screaming.”

And on top of this, the father’s mother, grandmother, who lets the nastiness rain. A holiday with her at the table is always a ghost dinner.

As I mentioned in the review of the first novel in the series, Tue shares a certain fate with Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning “Shuggie Bain”, two gay boys trying to cover up for their depraved mothers, whom they nevertheless love. Misery grips them from all sides, but the women themselves manage from time to time to activate energy from dreams that they blow up like pink bubblegum bubbles.

For both boys there is a movement up out of their class, in both cases out of a family that has not managed to stay within the rules and morals of the working class, but has sunk into some sort of despised underclass that fumbles and cheats its way without particular direction. Hate, mockery, quarrels, violence are their everyday life. With some temporary, whimsical warmth between laps. Thomas Korsgaard has an edgier style, a little more brazen, a greater revelry in nastiness and abominations than Douglas Stuart. Stuart writes smoother, prettier. But Korsgaard’s hard-hewn style cannot be escaped, even if it is a little freaky. He creates a terrifying tension that is concentrated on the relationships within the family. Outside of it, it is not as dangerous.

This new underclass without discernible morals and without all loyalties are, moreover, mouthpieces for politician types such as Donald Trump, Jimmie Åkesson and others in the emerging right-wing populism.

Tue is given hope thanks to his more worldly friend Iban. She is free and disrespectful in a different way than he is used to, has changed schools and acquired a student accommodation, to which Tue escapes. There he also has his first sexual experiences with men, some more expensive than others. Every step Tue takes away from his family feels like a relief. As if every mile away he saves himself.

Read more texts by Maria Schottenius and more reviews of current books in DN Kultur.