This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

by Helle Helle, Martin Aitken (Translator)

Overview

Dorte is twenty and adrift, pretending to study literature at Copenhagen University. In reality she is riding the trains and clocking up random encounters in her new home by the railway tracks. She remembers her ex, Per – the first boyfriend she tells us about, and the first she leaves – as she enters a new world of transient relationships, random sexual experiences and awkward attempts to write.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619027626
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	01/01/2016
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	949 KB

About the Author

*Nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2015*

‘Why does one always read Helle Helle’s books about the seemingly humdrum lives of lonely, sleepless women in the back of beyond with the kind of obsession normally reserved for well-turned thrillers?’ Politiken

Helle Helle is arguably Denmark's foremost contemporary novelist and its most popular. She has been awarded many prizes, including the Danish Critics’ Prize, the Danish Academy’s Beatrice Prize, and the P.O. Enquist Award. She was recently given the Lifetime Award of the Danish Arts Council.

Her work has been translated into thirteen languages. This is her first novel to be translated into English.

Martin Aitken is the acclaimed translator of numerous novels from Danish, including works by Peter Høeg, Jussi Adler-Olsen and Pia Juul, and his translations of short stories and poetry have appeared in many literary journals and magazines. In 2012 he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize.

Editorial Reviews

…[Helle] has enchanting gifts as a storyteller…Something wonderfully unexpected happens as the pages turn. Despite the repetitive rhythms of Dorte's language, its flatness and its tendency to summarize, the cumulative effect is not boring but in fact quite hypnotic. It's such a quiet novel, the words so light they nearly float off the page; this, coupled with the brief chapters and the nonlinear structure, leaves the reader unanchored to the earth, drifting instead through the vast space of a mind. Some of the novel's efficacy has to do with occasional passages of soft but stunning power, but its real success lies wholly in the strange alchemy of Helle's storytelling. Although a majority of the book consists of nondramatic events described nondramatically, and although (as the title suggests) the past tense Dorte employs may as well be the present…This Should Be Written in the Present Tense possesses an immediacy that tenderly and consistently compels.

The New York Times Book Review - Jonathan Russell Clark

11/16/2015
In her first novel to be translated into English, Danish novelist Helle introduces new readers to her strikingly spare and introspective style. Twenty-one-year-old Dorte has just settled into a small bungalow near a railway station in the small town of Glumsø outside Copenhagen. There she struggles to find purpose (and a good night’s sleep) while simultaneously reminiscing about her first failed love affair and connecting with those who wander into her new life. Dorte pretends to be a student at Copenhagen University to appease her family, but her aspirations are centered on a vague impression that she should be writing something, even if she’s unsure what form it should take. Helle effectively captures the inner life of a lonely and newly independent young woman whose inner aimlessness may be at odds with the ambition of those around her, and who is just beginning to understand the nature of regret. Little actually happens in this slim novel, but the reader comes away with the impression that the short time Dorte spends in her bungalow will nevertheless serve as the foundation for much of her adult life. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"The quiet and immersive Scandinavian setting, a back-and-forth pace, and the charming, interruptible monotony of companionable narrator Dorte’s day-to-day life make Helle’s tale a natural choice for those who favor frame over traditional plot." —Booklist

"Helle Helle’s simple, to-the-point prose cuts to the quick…it’s refreshing to find such an intimate book that leaves something for the reader to writer in their own mind…This Should be Written in the Present Tense is a contemporary classic in the making' —Emma Nicklin, Stylist

"A book with all the bigness hidden away." —John Self, The Guardian

"Compelling." —Emerald Street

"There is so much in this book, so much hinted at and alluded to. So much going on off-screen. [...] One of the literary finds of the year." —Bookmunch

"A beautiful evocation of the reckless naïveté of the early years of adulthood. [Helle Helle's] pared back style gives the novel a haunting quality, exquisitely reflecting the detachment and doubts of the protagonist's life. […] This is a highly recommended introduction to the work of a talented new name on the European literary scene." —Book Trust

"Some pieces of literature, no matter how great an effort you make as a critic, cannot be opened or captured in a way that does justice to the work. That’s how I feel about Helle Helle’s new and unusually precious novel... Most of the sentences are small works of art, containing a whole story in themselves." —Weekendavisen

From the Publisher

2015-10-07
The English-language debut of one of Denmark's most esteemed—and most popular—authors. A slender book composed of short bursts of what seems to be guileless prose, this is a surprisingly difficult read. It begins where it ends, and in between these two iterations of the same moment, the narrative is made up of disjointed scenes from a young woman's mostly very uneventful life. The story, such as it is, doesn't flow; it accumulates. Dorte Hansen is 20, ostensibly a student of literature at Copenhagen University, and living on her own by the train station in Glumsø. Any plot synopsis would be both misleadingly dull and antithetical to what the author is doing in this novel. The narration is a particularly austere version of first-person, shorn of the devices—dialogue rich in back story, for example, or detailed internal monologue—that writers generally use to guide readers through their invented worlds. As Dorte's recollections move around in time and space, the reader is left to stumble along behind her, sifting through the minutiae of her life. Dorte explains from the outset that she has thrown most of her work in the garbage, and there's a sly humor in this. Late in the novel, another writer explains how she strips her own texts of anything that seems to lack a purpose. Dorte disagrees. "Sometimes things happen," she argues. The other writer is unpersuaded: "But that's only in reality. And here we're talking about fiction." This particular work of fiction seems to contain nothing but the bits that another writer might have left out. It's the reader's task to find meaning—if there is such a thing—in what Dorte doesn't say, in the pages that she destroyed. A sort of realism that is at once technically stringent and mordantly amusing.

Kirkus Reviews