Danish bestselling author Jens Christian Grøndahl will answer your questions in our literary chatsession. Join us at 12 o'clock!
Hello everyone, this is Jens Christian Grøndahl writing from chilly Copenhagen. Is anybody out there? I am ready, in any event, to answer your questions. I am normally an offline sort of person so this is a completely new experience, a bit like instant bottle mail. To think that my bottle might be returned in seconds ...
To begin with, we all feared that the terrorist threat would now be part of every day life in terms of fear and suspicion but it didn't happen. Somehow I feel that the murders made people come together, Moslems or not, in a discreet but powerful manner. We are just ordinary people, all of us, regardless of religion, and we cherish the kind of society which after all has proven to be open enough to embrace our differencies. Violence is for outcasts and no ordinary person can identify with that.
Sorry, I try again - yes, failure is a part of one's life as an author, even if it looks succesful on the surface. Even when others think that you succeed you may know yourself that you failed, not achieving what you wanted, not finding the words. Wasn't it Beckett who said something like, "Fail again, fail better!" I think I develop as a writer in terms of facing the threat of failure as part of the business of putting words together on a daily basis. And then there is social failure. You never know if readers will turn away from you and prefer younger and sexier voices.
Film was an important experience and also the stepping stone between writing poetry - which I did to begin with - and writing novels which I had never done before. I am constantly using the experience of having had to decide where to put the camera and what to leave out of the frame. Crucial decisions which have to do with point of view - the birth of a narrative, really. Also, the visual was always important for me. To contemplate the way the world appears.
Yes, fiction writers could just stay out of politics. Sartre once said, that an intellectual is someone who engages with matters he knows nothing about. But sometimes writers can talk differently because we only represent ourselves, our personal experience and sensitivity and, perhaps, intelligence, and the humanism inherent in literature. And then, doing so means taking the risk that you could be wrong. So I felt that having lent my voice to the madness of going to war I should write my way out of the mess.
I can best refer you to the essay already published by De Standaard. What appeals is the way Hertmans writes a great European novel with a very heavy European theme and yet remains the writer, the poet, someone with an eye for the intimate small things in life by way of which he makes a whole epoch come alive again. Truly a marvellous writer, he is.
Yes, he is impatient like Zweig's protagonist, at the beginning. Does he learn patience with age? I am not sure. In certain ways, for instance as a teacher, I think he does, but in other ways he may just have resigned himself to the idea that not all dreams come true. Age is no guarantee, and forgetting the knowledge of youth is part of the price you pay for so-called experience and wisdom. I am suspicious of that and I have tried, in the book, to find a language for what we know when we are young and what we know when we get older.
I didn't know it was ... For me, it is believing in the moral and human value of education.
I think he believes that something else is more important than just being happy. He talks about finding the challenge that will make you come out of your shell, out in the open, to meet the others and the world. In any event, happiness is a boring topic for novelists, we prefer the drama of frustrated emotions and failure and despair ...
As a young writer I would have said No, I am not a Danish author. I don't like the idea, never did, of representing a specific national tradition. A Danish artist said: all good art is national and all national art is bad. I agree with him but even so, I must admit, growing older, how much I am part of an approach to language and to seeing life through words which you may also find in Hans Christian Andersen and others and which have to do with intimacy, details, the interior drama of the soul.
I have recently met and read Stefan Hertmans whom I admire greatly. But the irony and sadness of this united Europe of ours is that we know so little - too little - about the other literatures on the continent. But I will catch up!
They do not have sex. They could, meaning that she seems open to the idea but he decides against it, surprising himself. Nothing outside him forbids it, no constraints, no morality, but he realizes the existential fact of having grown older and something inside him tells him that they will be just friends. The ending of the book gives new meaning, I think, to the notion of "sublimation". In the age of Freudianism, it was all negative, but being a Romantic, if you like, my protagonist experiences how much closer they can get, not touching.
No, it is not possible to know yourself or others completely, and yes, that is why there is love. True love, for me, is to do with that which you cannot know or reduce or define by means of your own concepts or ideas or experiences. It is accepting the nakedness of encountering the unknown.
I have been wanting to become a writer since I was ten so I really don't know.
In ways I would not even be able to fathom myself. To that extent are we the products of our histories - and yet we have the power to break away and change our lives completely. But my own childhood taught me about the impermanence of it all and I think that experience went into my desire to write.
Yes, meaning that love itself can be quite unstable but even so, the power of one's imagination and desires and the need to empathize with others remain driving forces, I believe.
I never ask myself whether what I write about is good or bad. It is there, life is there with all its ups and downs and I try to describe it as honestly as I can. Writing is a way to counter the impermanence, not that I hope for eternity, but it is a way to make moments and the way you perceived them stay just a little longer than they would otherwise.
When I was 17: Senecas essay on anger, Camus' The Sisyphos Myth; in my thirties: the novels of Claude Simon; later on it was Proust and Flaubert and Duras, French stuff most of it. And then there are all the books I forget right now.
That's a big one and you won't get the final answer here. But: earlier I was more pessimistic feeling that literature is being marginalized by mass culture but if we compare with the two previous centuries, novels were mostly for the bourgeosie whereas they are now accessible for all. So even if we live in times when high culture has an almost subcultural status in the media landscape I am confident that people will still need to slow down, turn their eyes inward, sit alone in a corner and just contemplate and wonder at the strangeness of being human.
The one I haven't written yet and which will make the others look like the attempts they always were.
Yes, four hours every day from 11 am to 3 pm. I need the fixes schedules, everything else being so wobbly.
No advise other than just write! Don't hesitate, don't be too harsh on yourself, go along with it, get some words down on the screen and then look at it carefully. You need to write a lot and for a long time to become a writer.