It was the 90’s, I would interview Suzanne Brøgger and stood and waited on her at Sortedam Dossering in Copenhagen. Far away on the street was a pink dot, suspended almost two feet above the ground. On a closer look, it proved to be a huge fur hat, to the confusion like a ”shtreiml”, a mill wheel, of the kind one can see in the ultra-orthodox jewish men. But this was a pastel pink, an unthinkable color on the other femtioårig woman, especially in the 90s. But Brøgger has never been like the other.
Her latest book ”Chorale” begins with a visit to Jerusalem, more specifically the neighborhood of Mea Shearim, where she is on the lookout for just a shtreiml, but for once can she not get the hat she wants, no one wants to sell a headdress that is worn by religious married men to a woman, so the price is set at a prohibitive sum. Instead, she goes along the Via Dolorosa to a coptic tattoo artist that gives her the wings on the heel.
Suzanne Brøgger: ”the World is held up by people’s kindness.”
wear a hat, and the inroads she makes in the male worlds marks her with the headdress that she certainly wants to see the reality, but not at the price of her femininity. When needed wings. In the three autobiographical novels ”Crème Fraîche” (1978), ”Yes” (1984) and ”Transparence” (1993), she used their lives and their experiences in the stories that wanted to change the world, and in the same stroke of the searched boundary of the writeable. She affirmed the desire and the erotic, freedom, at the same time as she criticized love’s institutions and power structures. These early stories attracted scandal, the persona she had created a journalist, even by sophisticated readers with her person and she was every man’s niding, with emphasis on man.
Brøgger was not the first to stage their I and their body of stories which combined the erotic expression with political analysis, Kerstin Thorvall and Birgitta Stenberg came earlier, and when Brøgger continued on this path had a river of bekännelselitteratur had time to grow up. Yet there is an important difference: Brøgger came from an intellectual upper class with the world as the residence, while many of the female bekännarna broke out of a puritan work – and medelklassmoral. Brøgger confess, therefore, has not, she experiments, and she referred never to their sisters among 70’s feminists, Henry Miller was closer at hand. So she was able to provoke not only harden, but also to those who chose a different fight than she. She stands out like a single golden thread in a basket with a natural-coloured ball of yarn.
the literary review: Suzanne Brøggers ”Norwegian omelet”
back to the three autobiographical novels and shorten them to one’s self of another, older and more experienced, and even the past has changed. As a young girl, she wanted to abolish the distance between life and the written, she realized that young people coming of age for most people, to learn how to protect their privacy, but she didn’t want to be that kind of adult. Now she has embraced Kierkegaard’s view of life: it is lived forward but understood backwards.
”Koral” she succeeds with the trick to writing until his 30-year-old I once was in a prose that steams of sex. All the cheeky kroppsglädje and bold frispråkighet found in the early books, has been to follow into this. But there is also another voice that remembers and reason, who sees paradoxes and contradictions. Three books which once campaigned for a könspolitisk revolution has turned into a bit disillusioned with education novel.
the Book, the middle part depicts the years when the ego had a relationship with an obstetrician. He is, admittedly, born in Denmark but has lived all his life in Sweden and the portrait of him, bordering on caricature – he is a control freak and continuously occupied by itself, the services he is looking for, the apartment he wants to have but not to share with her. The depiction of the couple’s sailing holiday from Styrsö to Us the waters and the rocks where the kids I played – is terribly funny, even for me who has been the earliest for a man on the same stretch. A part of the Swedish lytena explains Brøgger with ”a specific form of the scottish markfördelning” that prevents the real village community! Rutger Mackleans enskifte has probably never produced so before.
book review: Louise Zeuthens ”Pot. A biography of Suzanne Brøgger”
the man is similar to blind obsession, the narrator goes on to get their wings clipped, and herein lies a paradox. At the same time that Brøgger writes, ”Deliver us from love”, where the marriage is criticised to pieces, she wants to get married and propose to end itself. But the reactions to her book scares away the doctor, if he marries a skandalförfattare maybe he doesn’t get his coveted services. To her surprise instead that ”people are so angered and shocked at what is in the books, when the reality is much worse”.
They separated a couple of months before they fall into each other’s arms again, and so it goes on, year after year. Still she should when she step on board a sailing trip which excluded all headgear except the cap and the southwest have realized that they were not meant for each other.
finally freed her from the love, but the refuse for the sake of interpreting it as a misunderstanding, on the contrary, she seeks it meaningful in the impossible love, as always, by writing it. And in his writing grows wings until she flies out into the darkness with three hats under my belt.
