This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

November 16, 2015
In her first novel to be translated into English, Danish novelist Helle introduces new readers to her strikingly spare and introspective style. Twenty-one-year-old Dorte has just settled into a small bungalow near a railway station in the small town of Glumsø outside Copenhagen. There she struggles to find purpose (and a good night’s sleep) while simultaneously reminiscing about her first failed love affair and connecting with those who wander into her new life. Dorte pretends to be a student at Copenhagen University to appease her family, but her aspirations are centered on a vague impression that she should be writing something, even if she’s unsure what form it should take. Helle effectively captures the inner life of a lonely and newly independent young woman whose inner aimlessness may be at odds with the ambition of those around her, and who is just beginning to understand the nature of regret. Little actually happens in this slim novel, but the reader comes away with the impression that the short time Dorte spends in her bungalow will nevertheless serve as the foundation for much of her adult life.

October 15, 2015
The English-language debut of one of Denmark's most esteemed--and most popular--authors. A slender book composed of short bursts of what seems to be guileless prose, this is a surprisingly difficult read. It begins where it ends, and in between these two iterations of the same moment, the narrative is made up of disjointed scenes from a young woman's mostly very uneventful life. The story, such as it is, doesn't flow; it accumulates. Dorte Hansen is 20, ostensibly a student of literature at Copenhagen University, and living on her own by the train station in Glums. Any plot synopsis would be both misleadingly dull and antithetical to what the author is doing in this novel. The narration is a particularly austere version of first-person, shorn of the devices--dialogue rich in back story, for example, or detailed internal monologue--that writers generally use to guide readers through their invented worlds. As Dorte's recollections move around in time and space, the reader is left to stumble along behind her, sifting through the minutiae of her life. Dorte explains from the outset that she has thrown most of her work in the garbage, and there's a sly humor in this. Late in the novel, another writer explains how she strips her own texts of anything that seems to lack a purpose. Dorte disagrees. "Sometimes things happen," she argues. The other writer is unpersuaded: "But that's only in reality. And here we're talking about fiction." This particular work of fiction seems to contain nothing but the bits that another writer might have left out. It's the reader's task to find meaning--if there is such a thing--in what Dorte doesn't say, in the pages that she destroyed. A sort of realism that is at once technically stringent and mordantly amusing.

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December 1, 2015
In best-selling and award-winning Danish novelist Helle's first novel to be translated into English, university student Dorte dates, falls in love, packs up and moves a few times, tries to sleep, watches trains pass her bungalow, and doesn't attend a single class. Independent and fairly clueless Dorte's most-respected counsel is the entertaining, serially dating, intense, and very loving aunt with whom she shares her name. After a boyfriend's mother publishes a short piece by Dorte in a literary journal, Dorte cuts her teeth writing commissioned songs for teachers to sing in class or for kids' birthday parties. By the brief, atmospheric novel's end, Dorte directs her talents to more fulfilling forms of creativity. Readers will feel the haze Dorte exists in as she experiences the restlessness and pushing of boundaries necessary in new adulthood without intellectualizing them and enjoy her endless observations, rendered in Helle's deceptively plain sentences. The quiet and immersive Scandinavian setting, a back-and-forth pace, and the charming, interruptible monotony of companionable narrator Dorte's day-to-day life make Helle's tale a natural choice for those who favor frame over traditional plot.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)