Crimson – Niviaq Korneliussen (2014, trans. Anna Halager, 2018) 175 pages
I think Crimson might be the first ever literature I’ve read by a Greenlandic author, and as such its another stop on my Around the World in 80 Books reading challenge, hosted by Hard Book Habit.
Unfortunately, I think I might be a bit too old for this novella. My twenties were a lot of fun and a lot of stress; I have colleagues in their twenties and I enjoy their company but I’ve absolutely no desire to recapture or relive that time. So Crimson’s tales of five Greenlandic twentysomethings getting drunk, sleeping around, falling in and out of love and desperately trying to work out who they are held my attention, but didn’t really engage me beyond that.
Each section focuses on a different character. Fia is repulsed by her boyfriend’s penis and dumps him, but it is only when she sees Sara that she admits she is attracted to women.
“ ‘It’s over’ were my final words.
Then, just like that, I was free.
But the word ‘free’ didn’t bring with it ‘relief’.”
Instead Fia finds herself in the bewildering situation of living temporarily with her brother’s best friend, and trying to manage her feelings for Sara, who has a partner.
Inuk is Fia’s brother. He feels stifled by his home and flees to Denmark after his affair with a famous married man is exposed:
“Greenland is not my home. I feel sorry for Greenlanders. I’m ashamed of being a Greenlander. But I’m a Greenlander. I can’t laugh with Danes.
[…]
I’m terribly homesick but I don’t know what sort of home I’m longing for.”
Arnaq is Inuk’s best friend and Fia’s flatmate. She’s relentlessly social and struggling:
“My chapped lips are the colour of red wine, My hair is still partying. My makeup is smeared all over my face and I have huge bags under my eyes. My body is trying so hard to stay alive that I can’t concentrate on my polluted mind. I drink what’s left of the Coke, lie down on my bed and take out my mobile to check the time.”
Ivik is Sara’s partner and struggling with gender identity. Their story includes graphics of phone screens, showing how the drama of young lives is often played out by technology. But this prosaic language exists alongside the poetic as Ivik works out what they need:
“The sun brightens my eyes, which have only seen the world in black for a long, long time. I can smell the previously frozen earth melting. The warm breeze sounds like a song.”
Finally Sara, partner of Ivik and lust-object of Fia, tells her tale and brings the stories together. Sections of her narrative end with meaningless hashtags which was really annoying, e.g. #dontgotogether or #1#2. If the hashtags had been witty or expanding the perpsective this could have worked better.
Sara, who until this point has been somewhat idealised through the eyes of others, is shown to have her own problems, with feelings of dirtiness and unworthiness. Her sister has just had a baby and Sara notices the obsession with gender that this involves. It’s also a very modern birth announcement via Facebook, where Sara stalks Fia:
“She finally changed her profile picture. I’m unable to see all her photos because we’re not friends on Facebook, so I gaze at her new profile picture for quite a while. I catch myself smiling. I hover over ‘Add friend’ for a long time. No, if she was really interested, she would have sent a friend request. I log off. Go to Google. Google knows everything.”
I only write about books I recommend and it’s undoubtedly great to hear a young Greenlandic voice. Korneliussen was only 24 when she wrote this and she translated it herself into Danish. The writing sometimes seemed to me naïve and bit clunky, but as I said, I’m probably not the target audience for this novella. I’m grateful to Virago for giving English-speaking readers this opportunity to hear her, even if the subject matter bored me slightly. I’d definitely still be interested to see what Korneliussen writes in future.
To end, the title comes from the Joan Jett classic which means a lot to Fia and Sara:
It’s weird because I regularly think stories like this are for me because, you know, I feel like my twenties were just yesterday. And then I realise that it’s been nearly 30 years since I was in my twenties… and quotes like the ones you’ve included remind me of that. I’ll probably give this a miss although tempted to tick Greenland off the list…
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Ha! Sometimes they do feel so immediate, but then I overhear some twentysomethings talking and I think ‘thank god I’m not there anymore!’ It’s not an easy time, although it can be great too. It would be good if more Greenlandic authors were translated, there’s so few available.
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I’d echo the ‘thank god I’m not there anymore’ but I have less contact with twentysomethings than I did so sometimes welcome encountering them in novels but this one sounds a wee bit irritating. It was already on my list but I think it may come off now.
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I wouldn’t want to put anyone off reading it, but I do think novella length is about right for this one. I wasn’t irritated but I definitely couldn’t have stuck with the characters for a longer book!
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LOL, I know what you mean. Even though I refuse to accept my age, I think I would have struggled big time with this – not so much because of the youth of the characters, more for the idiotic trappings they surround themselves with nowadays!!
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Totally agree, and probably the generation before ours thought the same, and the one before them 😀
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I think I might have found this hard to engage with. Though I am a bit fascinated in Greenland, twenty somethings partying and sleeping around aren’t really for me.
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Yes, they’re not really for me either – this became very apparent 😀
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Pity, since I’d quite like to “visit” Greenland, but this is definitely not one for me. I think I read somewhere that there’s not really a tradition of written literature in Greenland – oral storytelling still being their main tradition at least until quite recently.
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Ah, maybe that’s why there’s so few translations. Sorry to have put you off this one!
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