Transfer window by Maria Gerhardt
Danish fiction
Original title – Transfervindue
Translator – Lindy Falk Van Rooyen
Source – review copy
Maria Gerhardt was a Lesbian icon, Dj she was known as Djuna Barnes, she was called the Queen of the night. She was a judge for a while on the Danish X factor. She started a Magazine and wrote three novels that all dealt with her Breast Cancer this was her last book and came out a few days before her death to cancer. This is Nordisk latest books. This seems the perfect choice for my last Women in translation book. I have posted my 30 covers and maybe not done as many reviews as I usually do but feel I taken part more than other years.
The further I fell, the cleaner our place had to be; our books were colour-coordinated, our music was sorted, nothing depressing, please, and our beffing from Egypt was always washed and ironed. Where we’d acquired such tast, I really don’t know. The terrace cane chairs were scored on an auction, likewise, the saucers with a label. Stuffed butterflies danced on the display in the corner cabinet There was not a fault to be found in our French mirrored wardrobes, and nothing but my bare toes adorned our white pigment floors. Monday mornings saw me submerged in a tub with marble lion feet, the black moroccan soap within my reach. The only hitch was my psyche, my sickness and a sprinkle of ah from our fireplace.
A utopia but is it or just a waiting area for death ?
This is an unusual book told in very short vignettes some longer passages. We have a female narrator her life story is a mirror of the writer her self. But this is a parallel universe in the future. She lives in a large Hospice this hospice occupies part of what is Copenhagen now and is run by New age Nuns that grow cannabis for the patients. This Hospice come town in itself has no music, but they can relive there lives through VR booths and they have Juice bars and health food shops instead of the coffee and bars they usually have. This other life she lives away from her friends but reliving her past as the present and future have drawn in as time gets short. A world she lives in with her fellow patients seem perfect but there is always that clock ticking in the background.
We are given such healthy food to eat. farmers arrive with their produce from Samso, Hven and Amager. Tuborg Harbour looks like a food market in Bangkok, every day of the week. I decide to go for a vegetable juice, I choose to sit out in the sun. This is what grown-ups do; this is how to take care of yourself. The difference is that I din’t have to wash up, and I don’t have to deal with the oesky pulp.A lady in her sixties with a sullen face and crutches jumps the queue. Aruckus about the lack of fresh beetroot juice ensues. I give her a cold stare. “take it easy, lady,”I say, “I’m just here for the sugar”.
The world is healthy as they try to keep them healthy !
This is a very short book 90 pages but as most of them are small vignettes it is probably only fifty pages I love the idea of the city as a hospice the other space within the city of Copenhagen I had seen this done before in the Danish film Allegro that had a part of its character past trapped in a part of the city called the zone here we have a woman dying in the present reliving her past via VR in a hemmed of community in this city. An autobiographical work of a weird future utopia that is really a dystopia as we see a writer facing death by escaping into this world of community hospice but still in the world she wrote having to face the future which like the book itself is short. It is a heart-wrenching work and a perfect example of my love of what make small publishers so valuable in the world of translated fiction a book like this is such a perfect example!
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