Ida Jessen
Ida Jessen writes about the relationship between people. Where it is most intense is where it hurts the most. In a prose which on the one hand speaks in a subdued voice, on the other hand goes crazy in a comical and anecdotal way with high energy momentum. The short story collection Postkort til Annie is about the relationship between man and woman and the relationship between mother and son. The central focus is often a woman and often inflammatory, flames of desolation, fire of love, the unresolved fire of desire, the fever of motherly love. The sons are often unruly, even violent, and the mothers love them. The men are often weak, and the women fall in love with them anyway.
Jessen excels in short and concentrated formulations that summarise a whole state or situation; a grief, a marriage, a love, a Danish tourist town by the sea. When she writes about two small girls who have just lost their mother: “Their hair plaited by an unsure hand”, and all the mother's absence is found concentrated in the absence of a certain motherly hand in plaiting. When the relationship between a married couple is summarised in this line: “Yes, how do you talk about your spouse? You say we.” When ardent love and what follows afterwards can be told with a single sentence and an echo: “… and they swept straight into an embrace that lasted for many, many years. An embrace.” When the whole desire economy of the little tourist town is concentrated into a picture of “the home baker's dead baked cinnamon buns.” When the woman is anxious about being left by her husband, but also longs to be free “not for him, but for her hope in him.”
Most of the short stories are written in the third person, but with a narrator who blends into the main character's perspective, except for the long crime novel “December er en grusom måned”, where the narrator hovers more over the water, from the one character to the other, in a kaleidoscopic composition that creates a high degree of tension.
Jessen is a master of suspense. Only one of the stories contains an actual murder mystery that the reader to a large extent has to solve himself but they all have a high pulse, a held breath, something mysterious which is not necessarily a solution. Who is this mysterious man that the mother's 20-year-old son moves to out in the country in “Mor og søn”? Why does the son Sofus not want to have anything to do with his parents in the short story “Et skænderi”? Why do Mr and Mrs Saugmann hide the fact, right up to her funeral, that she has a daughter who looks exactly like her? A quivering energy drives us curiously through the stories, but we do not get any clear answers or solutions.
Often the short stories change their focus: Something that looks like the story of the fatal meeting between a crazy woman and a bus turns into the story of the fatal meeting between a young man and a young woman. Something that looks like the story of a couple at odds with their adult son turns into the story of a burning woman's body which is not redeemed. Something that looks like the story of a friendship between women that survives a divorce turns into the story of a dying marriage that survives a woman friend.
In the title story “Postkort til Annie” we are told that the main character as a young person was considered “far too gullible", “sweet and naïve”, but that she felt “forced by a ruthless cynicism that came from her own heart and which caused her to see right through the people she was with, and right through herself. ” This portrait may seem to capture a duality of the short stories narrator perspective in general: A look that on the one side considers the characters friendly and loving, on the other side observes and sees through them soberly.
Postkort til Annie is high intensity psychological reality but has also something of a dream's clear enigma about it. As a powerful and inescapable dream picture it attaches itself to the scene where the older woman (“she has reached the age when women tend to be transparent”) visits her unconscious, adult, criminal son in hospital, and he suddenly opens his eyes: “It was Mogens' eye, dark and searching. It is as if he looks at her with knowledge from another world. He looked at her that way when he was new born, with the pondering of his dark eyes.”
With these short stories Ida Jessen excels in her literary exploration of the strong tie between people, how they are linked and how they are broken. It is existential and psychological wisdom in short story form. But it is also high energy prose with its quivering process in language and composition, at one and the same time subdued and reckless narrator tone, an indulgent humour and dreamy, enigmatic images.
Lilian Munk Rösing, Asger Schnack