I don’t normally love first-person narratives but Helle Helle’s This Should Be Written in The Present Tense was a happy exception. I can’t speak highly enough of this disarming little novel. Set in Copenhagen, our narrator Dorte has enrolled at university and moved into a small unfurnished bungalow on the trainline into the city. For reasons unknown, she is not attending her classes. Instead she kills time wandering the neighborhood, observing other people, buying cakes, and sleeping with her neighbour whose girlfriend she sees shaking out the tea towels every morning (“I thought about what reasons there might be to shake out a tea towel.”)
She also thinks about the past: her abandonment of her loyal but passive boyfriend Per for his cousin Lars, her friendship with her aunt (also named Dorte) and with Per’s parents. There are some odd gaps in this reminiscence; not least her estrangement from her own parents, implied but never explained. Perhaps the most glaring omission is Dorte’s own feelings about any of these episodes, past or present. Her narrative is disturbingly emotionless, even when she describes her own tears – yet it manages to convey a sense of loneliness and boredom more effectively than anything else I’ve read.
The depiction of the frustration and exhaustion of killing time on one’s own is chokingly accurate. Helle does dialogue brilliantly too, dealing with social awkwardness in scenes both painful and hilarious. She has a real knack for observational comedy but with a heavy dose of pathos that keeps you from laughing out loud.
The spartan prose makes it hard for us to judge Dorte, despite her often reprehensible behaviour. She is wholly unapologetic and as readers we feel complicit in her actions. We’re left to flesh out the details, whether that be an abortion (casually implied in just a line) or the beginnings of an affair (a car trip to the nursery where Lars works, and then a few scenes later, “I turned towards him and then we kissed.”) Because the writing is so immediate, Helle doesn’t need to tell us how Dorte is feeling because we feel it with her. We’re repulsed by Per’s neediness as she withdraws her hand in the backseat of the car, we know she’s falling in love with Lars when she writes “his blue eyes gleamed across the table”. Dorte says “I hated the narrative present” but her story always feels like the present tense, or at least the bare bones of it.
The book is steady-paced yet builds an increasing sense of unease as Dorte’s random encounters become stranger and more hysterical, her aunt is admitted to a clinic after a nervous breakdown, and the past catches up to the present. The last pages leave us without any sense of resolution – just the tension of an impending catastrophe.
This is Helle Helle’s first book to be translated into English (by Martin Aitken) and I’m so pleased that Denmark is sharing her with us at last. I can’t wait for the next one!
