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by Ole Sarvig

A woman awakens in a strange room with the sea roaring below. She is permitted to leave the house and enters a strange city filled with even stranger characters. But she has no memory. Where is she, and why is she being followed? Or is she? Is the eerie quality of everything about her only an illusion? Danish writer Ole Sarvig combines the detective story genre with mystery and romance to ask moral questions about the nature of the self, memory, and meaning in a world that appears utterly estranged and alienated.

Ole Sarvig, the noted Danish novelist, was the author of several works of fiction and poetry.

208 pages

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Dansk forfatter og journalist

Danish writer and journalist

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite having received many literary accolades in his native Denmark prior to his suicide in 1981, Ole Sarvig now looks qualified to be a buried writer. Although he wrote in numerous genres, he made his mark primarily in poetry (which may have helped bury him). The Sea Below My Window, his third novel, was originally published in 1960 and appeared in English translation in 2003, courtesy of Green Integer (Douglas Messerli's post-Sun & Moon imprint), and is the only of Sarvig's works to be translated into English thus far. The three novels and two poetry collections that have made their way into the GR database have garnered a grand total of 23 ratings and four reviews. Pretty abysmal for a writer who the back cover reports has been described by Danish poet and literary critic Poul Borum as 'one of Denmark's most important contemporary writers and the only possible Danish contender for the Nobel Prize.'

On its surface The Sea Below My Window recalls a suspenseful blend of early Alain Robbe-Grillet (though more poetic) and early Marguerite Duras (though warmer in tone). A young woman wakes up in a nondescript room in a house perched on the coast of a small island. She has no idea who or where she is. The mystery quickly takes a back seat to the woman's experience navigating a foreign milieu in which everyone seems to know more about her than she knows about herself. An air of indeterminate menace clings to some of the ex-pats surrounding her, but whether this menace is genuine cannot be discerned while she lives this bizarre existence completely devoid of context. The situation engenders an extreme form of nascent self-consciousness that at times makes one squirm. And yet the confusion is also eased on occasion by the narrator's moments of rediscovery of wonder at the world. Sarvig excels in his description of place: the town's seaside architecture and labyrinthine network of narrow streets grow vivid as seen through the eyes of a first-person narrator struggling to piece together possible recollections of her environment.

Throughout the book, in addition to the mesmerizing investigations into self and identity, there is also some post-WWII philosophizing from various characters on the state of morality in the world and the future of humanity. With regard to the greater mystery at hand, I would have preferred a little less disambiguation at the end, but unresolved mysteries are not everyone's cup of tea, so others might not take issue here. I still found it a solid read, and certainly deserving of more attention than it's received.

[Coco Picard · Rating 3 out of 5]

The back of the book compares SBMW to a Graham Greene novel--certainly I can see that. Part mystery/pyschological thriller, with a dash of The Prisoner (that 70s serial show about a spy who tried to quit and woke up an island) this book is rife with metaphorical allusions to death/rebirth/identity and, perhaps especially, how to deal with the trauma of WWII. The protagonist wakes up on island of expat disolutes. She doesn't know where she is or how she came to be there. She has no memory of her former life. There is even an interesting moment in the very beginning of the book when she passes her hands over her body, as though discovering for the first time that she is a woman. "...and now it's my hands that begin to act mechanically. They find their way down over my hips, which are narrow like a boy's. One hand touches the public hairs of my pelvic area and then grabs hold as if it were looking for something, while another comes to rest on my knee." It's as though the author Sarvig has woken up inside a woman's body and searches this new anatomy, expecting to find a penis. So weird, right? It's awesome. Throughout most of the book, our heroin is traumatized with amnesia and spends the duration in a panic, looking for her identity. She doesn't trust anyone, though everyone seems social and welcoming (and often drunk) enough. My favorite moment in the book is likely the only break from that panic--oddly it appears early on, when she stumbles into a garden. "Suddenly I'm a happy, little girl again as I scratch the bites from the flea it left behind. I stand there without fear, conscious of the silent, diamond-shaped flight of bats around me; I stand there, watching a swarm of ants in the moonbeam at my foot, far away like the traffic on a distant road that I've forgotten as well. I suddenly have all the time in the world. I've been walking for hours, and I can keep on walking for hours. The world is good, the dogs friendly, the bats exciting and soft like soot. The cats stir around me, and the ants make a wide arc around my foot, distant like the lanterns on the vehicles way out there on the road. It doesn't matter when I find my way to the garden. As soon as I'm outside and back in town, something will be waiting for me, something that I simply have to do and that cannot wait: I must find out everything. But until then..." In this moment the necessity of her memory-identity is surpassed by her experience of the present as a benevolent place. That part just tripped me up, because I wanted to think about what that would mean as an enduring state.

Anyway, long story short--good book. Fast read. An idiosyncratic meta-story about identity, the author, and what one is supposed to do with history--whether global, or personal (which in this case is conflated).

[Caed · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be honest... I didn't finish this. I got more than halfway through and it took me a couple of months to do that. The reason for this was because the book was moving at such a pace that it made it difficult for me to find the motivation to finish it. I tried over and over and OVER again, promising myself that I would get through, and I just couldn't. I came to the point where I didn't even care what was going to happen, what the mystery was for the main character. Maybe another day I will try. Perhaps during the Spring break I will, but for now it's at the bottom of my list of interesting novels.

[Louvaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the simple language. Somewhat uneven tale of an amnesiac who wakes up to find herself in a lighthouse. Slowly resolves itself, but with a disappointing ending.