“Alvin”
by Jonas Eika
translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg
from the April 19, 2021 issue of The New Yorker
Jonas Eika is a young Danish writer who make his literary debut in 2015 when he was only 24. His second book, a collection of short stories translated into English as After the Sun, came out in 2018 and was awarded the 2019 Nordic Council Literature Prize. It will come out in the United States, translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, from Riverhead Books in August. “Alvin” is from this collection.
I am very interested. This first paragraph is filled with the kind of rambling energy that I like:
I arrived in Copenhagen sweaty and halfway out of myself after an extremely fictional flight. Frankly, I would use that word for any air travel, but on this trip I had, shortly after takeoff, fallen into a light feverish daze in which I relived a series of flights I had taken earlier in my life. First, there was the flight home from Nepal with my ex?wife, then girlfriend, our first trip together, when we, maybe out of boredom, curled up in our seats and took turns miming various sexual scenarios that the other person had to guess and sketch on a piece of paper, which we tore into pieces and reassembled into new situations to mime again, so that the game could continue for eternities. In my daze there was also my departure from Copenhagen six years later, after she became pregnant around the same time that she had been cheating on me with a colleague, and I was so panicked and grieved by my jealousy—which seemed just as impossible to live with if the baby was mine as if it wasn’t—that I packed my things, went to the airport, and said “Málaga” to the man behind the counter, for some reason I said “Málaga.” Additionally, I relived a flight home to Málaga from a work trip a few years later, during which I was unable to work, to say a word to anyone, because I was completely paralyzed by what I had seen from my window during takeoff: Past the gates, overlooking the runway, there was an observation deck where kids of all ages stood with their parents watching the planes take off. At one end, a woman leaned against the railing—long, dark hair in the frozen sun—looking at a man running toward her, across the deck, and as we flew past he fell to the ground as if shot by a gun. I couldn’t hear the gunshot, if one had even been fired, and the plane continued into the clouds with me sitting stiff in my seat for the rest of the flight, doubting what I had seen.
I have this on the table to read later this week and will share additional thoughts below. In the meantime, please feel free to share your own!
No comments?!? No!
I wasn’t able to finish this one (couldn’t force myself) and was hoping someone would tell me different.
I thought this was quite good. It’s pretty complex in styles and seems theoretically attuned to concepts of today’s stateless and digital world of abstract commodities and flows, but I found it a nice example of surrealist writing. The protagonist sort of dreams his life and the final incident is classic deadpan surrealism.
I have no idea what to make of it, but it kept my interest to the end. There seemed to be a kind of sneaky magic realism going on in parts of it, and that was intriguing.
The three previous comments are all appropriate, there is rambling energy, and both kind of magic realism and surrealistic writing.
Johan Eika Rasmussen’s debut novel “Lageret Huset Marie” was published in 2015. Realistic depiction of a young warehouse worker´s life, which was broadly defined as a critique of capitalism.
“Efter Solen” was published in 2018 and received three Danish prizes. I read the Swedish translation last year. Eika´s persons in “After the Sun” are often marginalized and nomadic.
This time he writes experimental prose, the best definition I have read has been ‘kind of sci-fi depicting not future but a dystopic present’
Eika´s sci-fi is socially critical, he is a writer with a mission.
“Alvin” depicts the woes of a deceived middle-age man. The prolonged chewing of his grief results in indifference and leads to thoughtlessness and a strange relation when Alvin approaches him after the narrator has found the ruins of the bank where he was supposed to do his software implementation work.
The young speculator seems to be as ghostly as his financial dealings and the reader soon thinks that something does not match.
Eika´s mission is to influence society through literature, as he put it in the interviews after receiving a Danish Literary award for “After the Sun” (before the Nordic Prize).
Quite a portion of “Alvin” is used to describe how derivatives are handled. The narrator gets excited as the intense activities draw him along.
He is enhanced by Alvin and tries to convince himself that there is nothing sexual about it. Later he tries to tune the debate about the moral side of his host’s pursuit of profession, but Alvin shakes the burden lightly from his shoulders.
They both are living in their own empty bubble, if not void, which is nicely delineated by the author in the very descriptive Cressida Leyshon interview. Eika is eager and fluent in disclosing what he tries to do in the story.
During their escapade in Bucharest, local workers get tired of Alvin showing off with his food and cut short their meal. They have to mount Alvin´s scooters and return to city center and reality. En route they join vocally a performance repeating the lines in a language they do not understand. The translation – my brother,you may never leave me again – makes them escape the situation and in the still of the night Alvin leaves.
Back in Copenhagen everything seems to be business as usual. Back to city center, Kongens Nytorv, where the ruined bank is situated, still in ruins, but when he manages to get inside, operations seem to run smoothly and the staff seem considers the situation (a new) normal.
Youngest ever to receive the Nordic Literary Prize in 2019, Eika did not just thank for the honor and money. He took the opportunity to attack the Danish Social Democratic government for reactionary immigration policy which he called ‘state racism’, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen listening in the audience.
But did Alvin abscond with his money?