Ripple Effects
Henrik Nor-Hansen, trans. Matt Bagguley, Termin
Nordisk Books, 80pp, £7.99, ISBN 978-0995485242
reviewed by Megan Evershed
To me, there are two Norways. There is the peaceful, idyllic Norway that was voted the world’s Happiest Country in 2017. And then there is the darker Norway: the Norway of Scandi noir, the Norway that has known mass-scale violence like the July 2011 terror attacks. Henrik Nor-Hansen’s Termin, translated by Matt Bagguley, is definitely set in this second Norway. Nor-Hansen is concerned thematically with violence, disillusionment, and suburban socioeconomic changes. In particular, he’s interested in how these issues impact an individual life. The story revolves around Kjetil Tuestad, who is ’severely beaten’ on a 1998 summer evening in the Norwegian village of Hommersåk.
Before we learn about the attack in the early paragraphs of the novel, we are given a socioeconomic portrait of Hommersåk. We are told that ‘in the early ‘90s Norway entered a period of long-term economic growth’, and, as a result of this growth, property prices rose and it ‘became increasingly difficult to enter the housing market’. Young people started moving into suburban areas, where it was cheaper to live, and Hommersåk is one of those ‘surrounding villages which experienced an influx’. Immediately after this depiction, the attack on Kjetil is reported; the ‘socioeconomic ripple effects’ of Norway’s economic growth and Kjetil’s personal history are inextricably linked, and remain so throughout the novel.
We learn nothing beyond the bare facts of the attack: we know that Kjetil was found unconscious, that his head injures ‘were said to be serious’, but nothing of how or why. Kjetil himself ‘recalls nothing of midsummer night, and nothing of the violence’. This descriptive lack might seem atypical of novelistic prose, but then Termin isn’t straightforward fiction: its subtitle is An Inquiry into Violence in Norway, and it reads like a report. Nor-Hansen even includes footnotes throughout Termin, aping true inquiries.
Inside and outside the footnotes, Nor-Hansen’s prose is spare and clipped, reflecting the inquiry form’s clinical detachment. Whilst this risks becoming tedious, Nor-Hansen writes passages that shimmer with a bleak beauty: ‘Kjetil remembers tyre tracks in the soft snow. He hardly ever saw anyone. He recalls fully lit houses, yet there were no people’. But, despite the simple, stylistic elegance of Nor-Hansen’s prose, the book has other forms of narrative flatness that don’t come off so effectively. Characters are surface-level; we barely get to know Kjetil’s wife, his son, or his parents beyond generalised descriptions of their concern for him.
There is, however, one character who is fleshed out: Kjetil Tuestad. But, then, even Kjetil’s characterisation is one marked by dramatic depersonalisation. In a footnote, Nor-Hansen reports of a haircut after which Kjetil ‘saw tufts of his own hair on the floor’; ‘snippets of hair had supposedly gathered in his lap and slid down the cape like dark flakes’. It’s a neat image of Kjetil’s detachment from his own body. Elsewhere in the novel, Nor-Hansen does this more explicitly: ‘He has memories which feel alien to him. He believes that he was perhaps an entirely different person’.
Kjetil’s depersonalisation has a concomitant effect on the form: the inquiry is, after all, filtered through his lens, his experience. This is most keenly felt during a scene in which Kjetil goes back to an unnamed woman’s home. They have sex, but ‘Kjetil found the woman to be listless, as in reluctant’. ‘Is this rape?’ I wrote in the margins of my copy. The woman knows, but we never get her perspective; maybe Kjetil knows, but if he doesn’t give the narrator any other details, the narrator can’t know. This scene is representative of Kjetil’s characterisation throughout Termin: his actions and thoughts are documented, rather than explicated, leaving the reader periodically frustrated.
There’s a deadening, a dulling, in scenes like this. Another moment of extreme detachment, involving another female body, comes when Kjetil stays with his grandmother. One evening, she feels poorly after dinner, and he takes her to the hospital. Instead of waiting in the emergency room, however, she wants to go home and rest. That evening, she passes away in her bedroom. ‘It is known that [Kjetil] then became aware of his grandmother’s death’ and, after discovering her corpse, he ‘apparently put his shoes on. The weather was nice and there were lots of people in Stavanger city centre. Kjetil Tuestad went to several bars’.
This scene, in particular, is reminiscent of Camus’s The Stranger. Also like The Stranger’s Meursault, Kjetil commits an act of extreme violence near the end of Termin. While drunk, Kjetil goes back to the apartment of another drunk man he has just met. While they’re sitting on the couch, ‘Kjetil says he stood up and hit the man several times with an empty wine bottle [. . .] Kjetil says it took several hard cracks before the bottle shattered’. After he smashes the bottle over the man’s head, Kjetil urinates in the battered man’s bathroom and goes to a petrol station to buy an ice cream. Camus’s Meursault, in a similar act, shoots a man before ‘fir[ing] four more times at the motionless body’.
In both descriptions, repetition is significant. Repetition communicates intentionality; these aren’t mistakes, there’s a commitment to the violence, a compulsion to execute multiple hits. In Termin, this intensely violent act isn’t unprecedented. Earlier, Kjetil imagines bashing in his friend’s skull with a rock, and gets into an altercation with two colleagues at a Christmas party. These scenes get at a takeaway from the ‘inquiry’: Kjetil’s bouts of violence are a result of his own beating. Violence perpetuates more violence; blood will have more blood.
Accounts of Kjetil’s violence are just a small part of a seemingly national endemic. Throughout the book, Nor-Hansen details other instances of violence in Norway. He writes about a 16-year-old being repeatedly raped by other teenagers, a young boy stoned in a ‘quiet residential area’, and animals being tortured. Nor-Hansen uses Kjetil’s personal history — the violence done to him and the violence he does to others — to bring attention to a larger issue within Norway. He scatters these short descriptions of violence throughout Termin so that, by its end, my darker image of Norway has completely usurped its happier twin.
Importantly, Nor-Hansen also links these instances of violence to politics. He writes about two people who get into a fight at a drug rehabilitation center, one of whom dies from their injuries. It’s then reported that ‘politicians had been cutting back on the psychological help programme currently available for drug rehabilitation’. It mirrors Nor-Hansen’s earlier linkage between Kjetil’s beating and the socioeconomic changes in Hommersåk. Fundamentally, this is Termin’s most salient point: political developments affect people on the micro-level.
While I was reading Termin, a friend asked me if I was enjoying it. It took me a moment to answer. I had the same issue a few years ago, while reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Reading Yanagihara felt more like bearing witness to unendurable, unimaginable trauma than consuming prose fiction – except someone had imagined it, ‘it’ being content that led critics to call the novel ‘torture porn’. I told my friend that Termin was original, and that I was looking forward to finishing it. With Termin, Nor-Hansen has troubled the perimeters of fiction; he forces us to find a new language for discussing the novel and the ideas within it. This in itself is a commendable, if unconventional, accomplishment.
Before we learn about the attack in the early paragraphs of the novel, we are given a socioeconomic portrait of Hommersåk. We are told that ‘in the early ‘90s Norway entered a period of long-term economic growth’, and, as a result of this growth, property prices rose and it ‘became increasingly difficult to enter the housing market’. Young people started moving into suburban areas, where it was cheaper to live, and Hommersåk is one of those ‘surrounding villages which experienced an influx’. Immediately after this depiction, the attack on Kjetil is reported; the ‘socioeconomic ripple effects’ of Norway’s economic growth and Kjetil’s personal history are inextricably linked, and remain so throughout the novel.
We learn nothing beyond the bare facts of the attack: we know that Kjetil was found unconscious, that his head injures ‘were said to be serious’, but nothing of how or why. Kjetil himself ‘recalls nothing of midsummer night, and nothing of the violence’. This descriptive lack might seem atypical of novelistic prose, but then Termin isn’t straightforward fiction: its subtitle is An Inquiry into Violence in Norway, and it reads like a report. Nor-Hansen even includes footnotes throughout Termin, aping true inquiries.
Inside and outside the footnotes, Nor-Hansen’s prose is spare and clipped, reflecting the inquiry form’s clinical detachment. Whilst this risks becoming tedious, Nor-Hansen writes passages that shimmer with a bleak beauty: ‘Kjetil remembers tyre tracks in the soft snow. He hardly ever saw anyone. He recalls fully lit houses, yet there were no people’. But, despite the simple, stylistic elegance of Nor-Hansen’s prose, the book has other forms of narrative flatness that don’t come off so effectively. Characters are surface-level; we barely get to know Kjetil’s wife, his son, or his parents beyond generalised descriptions of their concern for him.
There is, however, one character who is fleshed out: Kjetil Tuestad. But, then, even Kjetil’s characterisation is one marked by dramatic depersonalisation. In a footnote, Nor-Hansen reports of a haircut after which Kjetil ‘saw tufts of his own hair on the floor’; ‘snippets of hair had supposedly gathered in his lap and slid down the cape like dark flakes’. It’s a neat image of Kjetil’s detachment from his own body. Elsewhere in the novel, Nor-Hansen does this more explicitly: ‘He has memories which feel alien to him. He believes that he was perhaps an entirely different person’.
Kjetil’s depersonalisation has a concomitant effect on the form: the inquiry is, after all, filtered through his lens, his experience. This is most keenly felt during a scene in which Kjetil goes back to an unnamed woman’s home. They have sex, but ‘Kjetil found the woman to be listless, as in reluctant’. ‘Is this rape?’ I wrote in the margins of my copy. The woman knows, but we never get her perspective; maybe Kjetil knows, but if he doesn’t give the narrator any other details, the narrator can’t know. This scene is representative of Kjetil’s characterisation throughout Termin: his actions and thoughts are documented, rather than explicated, leaving the reader periodically frustrated.
There’s a deadening, a dulling, in scenes like this. Another moment of extreme detachment, involving another female body, comes when Kjetil stays with his grandmother. One evening, she feels poorly after dinner, and he takes her to the hospital. Instead of waiting in the emergency room, however, she wants to go home and rest. That evening, she passes away in her bedroom. ‘It is known that [Kjetil] then became aware of his grandmother’s death’ and, after discovering her corpse, he ‘apparently put his shoes on. The weather was nice and there were lots of people in Stavanger city centre. Kjetil Tuestad went to several bars’.
This scene, in particular, is reminiscent of Camus’s The Stranger. Also like The Stranger’s Meursault, Kjetil commits an act of extreme violence near the end of Termin. While drunk, Kjetil goes back to the apartment of another drunk man he has just met. While they’re sitting on the couch, ‘Kjetil says he stood up and hit the man several times with an empty wine bottle [. . .] Kjetil says it took several hard cracks before the bottle shattered’. After he smashes the bottle over the man’s head, Kjetil urinates in the battered man’s bathroom and goes to a petrol station to buy an ice cream. Camus’s Meursault, in a similar act, shoots a man before ‘fir[ing] four more times at the motionless body’.
In both descriptions, repetition is significant. Repetition communicates intentionality; these aren’t mistakes, there’s a commitment to the violence, a compulsion to execute multiple hits. In Termin, this intensely violent act isn’t unprecedented. Earlier, Kjetil imagines bashing in his friend’s skull with a rock, and gets into an altercation with two colleagues at a Christmas party. These scenes get at a takeaway from the ‘inquiry’: Kjetil’s bouts of violence are a result of his own beating. Violence perpetuates more violence; blood will have more blood.
Accounts of Kjetil’s violence are just a small part of a seemingly national endemic. Throughout the book, Nor-Hansen details other instances of violence in Norway. He writes about a 16-year-old being repeatedly raped by other teenagers, a young boy stoned in a ‘quiet residential area’, and animals being tortured. Nor-Hansen uses Kjetil’s personal history — the violence done to him and the violence he does to others — to bring attention to a larger issue within Norway. He scatters these short descriptions of violence throughout Termin so that, by its end, my darker image of Norway has completely usurped its happier twin.
Importantly, Nor-Hansen also links these instances of violence to politics. He writes about two people who get into a fight at a drug rehabilitation center, one of whom dies from their injuries. It’s then reported that ‘politicians had been cutting back on the psychological help programme currently available for drug rehabilitation’. It mirrors Nor-Hansen’s earlier linkage between Kjetil’s beating and the socioeconomic changes in Hommersåk. Fundamentally, this is Termin’s most salient point: political developments affect people on the micro-level.
While I was reading Termin, a friend asked me if I was enjoying it. It took me a moment to answer. I had the same issue a few years ago, while reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Reading Yanagihara felt more like bearing witness to unendurable, unimaginable trauma than consuming prose fiction – except someone had imagined it, ‘it’ being content that led critics to call the novel ‘torture porn’. I told my friend that Termin was original, and that I was looking forward to finishing it. With Termin, Nor-Hansen has troubled the perimeters of fiction; he forces us to find a new language for discussing the novel and the ideas within it. This in itself is a commendable, if unconventional, accomplishment.