Baby: A Novel

by Kirsten Thorup, Nadia Christensen (Translator)

Kirsten Thorup's Baby introduces us to strangers, the outsiders: misfits, deviants, losers, the powerless, those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They are the other side of the coin, the failures.



The novel opens in the Mexicana, a cheap nightclub in the Vesterbro district of Copenhagen, where several acquaintances are gathered together in a meaningless, hand-to-mouth companionship. When the club closes, they go their own ways, never to return to the club again a dispersion that gives the book its basic pattern of wandering and aimlessness and no neatly rounded closing of the circle.

Their tracts zigzag through the city. We follow Mark--the untalented auto salesman with the Orson Welles profile who is heavily in debt and does not know how to get out--home to his money-grubbing wife who get household income by selling herself to the loan shark who has Mark in his clutches. We follow Suzie on a drunken spree in Sweden with a couple of delinquents. We visit Leni, who has never written the book she wants to write because she has had to support herself by translating porno magazines. We go with her to the home of her former husband, Eddy, who once owned the run-down apartment where Karla, a single mother with two children, now lives. Eddy is the central to the story. He is the spider; his money--and its power--are the poison.

Permeating the everyday lives of these characters is an experience that perhaps a woman best can formulate: the experience of being a thing, an object rather than a subject, a receiver--of bribery, of blows and bruises, of caresses, or persuasive words. And perhaps a woman's sensitivity is also particularly suited to describing this state with the unsentimental tenderness that Kirsten Thorup manifests in Baby.

Baby deals with people who have been pushed out into the darkness. They are the children of darkness and some of them do dark deeds. But Thorup has said that if she had to choose an epigraph for the novel, it would be a line from Hugo: "Not those who do dark deeds, but those who create the darkness are the truly guilty ones."

Genres: Contemporary

220 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Kirsten Thorup, a Danish author, was born in Funen, Denmark, in 1942 and now lives in Copenhagen. She is the author of three poetry collections, a volume of short stories, and three novels including Baby which has been translated into English. She has also written for films, television, and radio. Her novel, Den lange sommer, was published in Denmark in 1979.

Recognition
1974 - Otto Gelsted Prize
1996 - Tagea Brandts Rejselegat
2000 - Grand Prize of the Danish Academy

Reviews

[Camilla Sonne · Rating 4 out of 5]

At gå fra udelukkende at have læst romance og romantasy i hele januar til denne var specielt, og min hjerne skulle lige omstille sig.

Med det sagt er denne roman vild ift. sin tid. Romanen blev udgivet i 1973 og handler om rastløse unge, der ikke kan finde sig til rette i samfundets normer. Romanen rummer både queer-kærlighed, prostitution og teenagepiger, der ender på en form for bosted. Var der nogen, der sagde 70’er-oprør?

Thorup gør i øvrigt udelukkende brug af sideordnede sætninger, som gør, at alt virker lige gyldigt og ligegyldigt. Nogle passager er som lange tankestrømme, hvor intet synes at have nogen særlig værdi. Det gør det svært at knytte sig til karakterne, men understøtter også deres rastløshed - det er mesterligt!

[Sara Brygger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jeg elsker fletværker og formeksperimenter, men noget i al den sideordenhed i sætningerne og en dialog, som måske gav mening i 70’erne, men ikke i dag, gør at jeg står lidt af. Alligevel har den en helt særlig stemning omkring sine personer, der er meget moderne queer og det overraskede mig ret meget.

[Eric Christiansen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thorup is more interested in style--long run on sentences--than plot or substance. I read this book in Danish, but the translation is quite true to the original. However, even the translator broke up some of the long run ons.

[Hjalte Odin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fortællingen bruges der ofte 'og' i stedet for punktum, hvilket giver romanen et vanvittigt tempo og man kan sidde og føle sig helt forpustet når man læser. pwetty cool