(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
'He's a killer. His views on abortion, AIDS – he should be hanged ».
Claus is one of the neo-modernist critics of religion, and is not a little reminiscent of the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard in his fierce temper and rage, both in the current public and in his books. It's the hypocrisy Claus can not stand, a hypocrisy he encountered early in life while growing up in a convent – run by nuns.
In Norwegian there is now a new collection of texts by the intense author titled "Temptation", "Gilles and the night", "The last bed" and "A sleep walk". The designation of short stories is imprecise, because the first two texts of a total of four are written for the stage, but still the short story design can stand; the mood is densified, the main characters are few and the themes are concentrated. Nevertheless, one no longer comes from the American short story tradition with the Hemingway style in the pencil tip. In all the stories, Hugo Claus has chosen to reproduce the main characters' confusing and monstrous inner thoughts and movements. In linguistic pace and thought, Claus is reminiscent of a little boy who has just returned from summer camp and is going to pass on his experiences to his parents; The half-finished sentence is followed up by jars of more or less meaningful statements. "Some of my books are unreadable, not because they are bad, but because they should be like that, without any clear meaning," as Claus says in the same interview (Thomas Thurah: "The story is not over. Conversations with 36 European writers, Danish Gyldendal, 2000).
The book opens with "Temptation," a vicious monologue from the hundred-year-old blind nun Mechtild, who in his old days struggles to relate seriously to the younger sisters' Puritanism. However, her prophetic abilities take them seriously, despite her refusal to wash and spoil the monastery during formal events. The day we meet her is a day like other days; a bloody battle between mad and right faith, past and present, God and own free will. Like Hugo Claus, Sister Mechtild abhors the religious and hypocritical side of religion. She is highlighted by her surroundings because of her "exemplary fear of God," but the truth is that she is trying to challenge God to the fight of life and death. "I am despair and evil. They are evil without despair. " The courage she finds in the past, in the time before she came to a monastery and lived happily with a man, who bears the name Joseph and with whom she had a stillborn child. She is convinced that child death was a punishment because she turned away from heaven and toward a concrete and carnal Joseph. In Mechtild's world, it is the "new" Joseph who stands up again and emerges as the true father of her religion. Nevertheless; She turns away from God and discovers that he, too, stands in the way of what she is seeking: "Reconciliation between the spiritual and the world, between the rational and the faith. Faith should not be kept behind glass as a beautiful sirat ”.
In "Gilles and the Night", Claus explores something of the same theme, where we meet Marshal, nobleman and child mass murderer Gilles de Rais who is put on trial for his misdeeds in the 1400th century in France. At first, Gilles denies that the accusations have any substance, but eventually admits 140 inhuman fatal abuses against young children. "I murdered in the war and murdered in the war called a temporary peace." Gilles started his war against the authorities and God after they took the life of his spiritual sister, Jeanne D'Arc. Again, it is about an attempt to challenge God to speak, that he should say his opinion about the substitutes on earth. "I would bring him to justice, my right, the Lord in heaven who left her in the lurch!" For did not God ask Abraham to lift up his sword and cut off the throat of his son Isaac?
In the story "The Last Bed" we meet a concrete reality most people can identify with; a daughter who rebels against her formerly dominant but now terminally ill mother. In letter or diary form, she talks about the paths she had to take to free herself from her mother's and society's suffocating grip, including the bizarre, physical love of another woman and the experimentation with narcotics. Considering that Emily was a prodigy and is still world famous for her piano playing, it is clear that the devastating relationship is gradually attracting attention in press circles. Here, too, the narrative crashed towards a dramatic end; Emily kills her beloved Anna in a hotel with a nail file through her throat – before she later in the evening probably takes her own life. Youth uprisings will never be the same again.
While "The Temptation" uses an old woman's psychic abilities to justify the ecstatic writing style, Claus uses the fringe madness in "Gilles and the Night". In "The Last Bed" we also meet a woman on the edge, both of society and drug addiction. In the last story, we are in dreamland, as the title also suggests: "A sleepwalk". A man returns home to his unfaithful and childless wife after a chance encounter with an old friend in town. He lies down on the bed and takes a valium tablet – the memories press on, about the woman he never got, about friends who failed and fateful choices without apparent meaning. "We are handed over to language and chance, and that acknowledging this is the only thing left for us."
The framework around the four stories is very different, but they are all about sins in the past and the hour of reckoning. All of them are strictly focused on sexuality and evil, and it is not a given to know if they are part of the same thing or pole on a planet in the author's universe. It is certain that the author and his protagonists have little sense of a lukewarm attitude to the mysteries of life; life requires action and courage, and then one must challenge the greatest authorities with his own steadfast will to sacrifice: God, authorities, parents, memories – and his own bottomless grumbling.
Or as he says in the interview:
“I respect the religious feeling. The one who comes to you, if you wake up at four in the morning, full of anxiety, and start to wonder who you are, where you come from, what it's all about. It is a respectable way of observing the world. But to see the venerable attitude being abused by the church because it wants power, money and influence, it arouses my strongest hatred. That's how I feel hatred. "
This is also how the four fresh short stories by Hugo Claus could be described.
