Kirsten Hammann Denmark
Danish author, born 1965. In 1991 Hammann had her literary debut with a video of poetry entitled Subtitle followed by the collection of poetry Mellem tænderne (Between the Teeth) in 1992. Hamman's debut as a novelist came with the highly experimental Vera Winkelvir (1993) which was well received by critics and readers alike. The ambitious novel Bannister (1997) was followed by Fra smørhullet (The Dairy of Cozy Corner) in 2003 which was pronounced the new contemporary novel that year which lead to Hamman being shortlisted for the Nordic Literary Prize 2005. She has in addition received a large number of prizes and awards for her work, most notably The Danish Art Fund's Prize 1993, 1996 – 99, 2002 – 03, the Klaus Rifbjerg Prize for Poetry (1994) and Gyldendal's Book Grant 1992 to name but a few.
New novel:
Se på mig
(Look at Me)
Gyldendal, August 2011
A comedy of love about the office assistant Julie and the author Sune who share a flat. One is waiting for a sign of life from her fiancé who has gone to India, the other is waiting for inspiration. As time goes on it turns out that there are several benefits of the flat share: The author needs something to write about, the office assistant needs a man.
Se på mig (Look at Me) is a story of deceit, self-deceit, about the need to be seen and loved, about
surveillance cameras, sex toys, lies and well, love.
Rights sold
Norway: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag
Sweden: Kabusa
Iceland: Draumsyn
Excerpts from reviews:
Six stars out of six possible:
“Kirsten Hammann has written a masterful novel about love, gender and art.
You read it in one, dizzying and excited, breath. …
Straight through the artistic project she unfolds, slam in the middle of the banality of a middleclass everyday life, a fan of endlessly big and endlessly small drama springs up. …
Hammann describes masterfully and – oddly enough – very loyally the tiny, gradual slips of moral where each little slip seems harmless enough, and no one is a sociopath but where suddenly everything is very wrong. Where the Jewish philosophy Hannah Arendt chronicled the banality of evil (the instance Eichmann), it is in a way Hammann’s achievement to map out the banality of good. Or rather, the way in which good so deceptively easy becomes a sort of evil when it does what it does. ....
Hammann writes disgustingly well – not with a boastful virtuosity, but in a way that is right on the money in terms of dialogue and internal monologue. It seems easy; it is insanely difficult.
… This ought to be a sure bestseller.” (Politiken)
“A funny and excruciating comedy of manners from Kirsten Hammann
Kirsten Hamman’s oeuvre number eight is a closet drama (of 459 pages) about two people (who share a flat – and the feeling of want. …
Both Julie and Sune have a sort of hole in their personality. Not only their dreams, but their entire perception of themselves depend on something they are not – at least not yet (or, yikes, might never be?) …
Look at Me is an efficient, occasionally perfidiously precise comedy of manners… The everyday life in the flat and not least the everyday conversations in the flat serve as an opening to a humoristic but also excruciating analysis of modern (gender)identity, sexuality and relationships.
In the narrator-writer’s slightly naïvistic tone of voice sparks fly constantly between what we modern people say and do, and the things we really think and feel.
…
Look at Me may … finally bring Hammann into contact with a wider readership. If it does, it will be very much deserved.” (Jyllands-Posten)
“The semi-ironic, semi-empathic unveiling of what one might call magazine-consciousness has been a theme in Kirsten Hammann's book at least since her novel From the Dairy of Cozy Corner (2004). The depiction of a post-apocalyctic condition has been a theme for even longer: Hammann's central characters find themselves at en existential, post-apocalyptic rock bottom - whether because of illness, or because they have been ditched by a partner or because their planet has exploded.
Both these themes can be found in Hammann's new novel, Look at Me. The heroine, Julie, has been left by her boyfriend, and insult is added to injury when she busts her knee falling down the stairs so that she can be admitted to hospital "with a broken heart in the shape of a knee". Abandoned and bashed up she sits in her flat like the proper Hammann-character she is with her head full of the advice and rules of thumbs she has culled from the pages of her mags and her television shows.
...
But Julie isn't alone in the flat. Her mind isn't the only one we get to enter. Julie has acquired a male tenant, Sune, who is a writer with a steadily growing writer's block. If Julie gives us access to a mind full of mags, Sune lets us into a mind full of FHM : Gadgets, babes and dreams of success is - according to this novel - what fills the head of a man, while masturbation and procrastination is what fills his days.
It is interesting (and new to Kirsten Hammann) to change between a male and a female perspective - between the woman's attempts to really understand what it is to be a man, and the man's attempt to understand a woman - an attempt that is soon abandoned. ... It creates an amusing matryoshka-like series of communicative situations: A female writer who is trying understand what it is like to be a male character who in turn is trying to understand what it is to be a female character, who in her turn is trying to understand the male perspective.
...
Kirsten Hammann's last several novels have gained their particular charm and insight from being a sort of pulp fiction of the second degree: An unveiling of the fragile identity which creates itself for the benefit of "the Others". At the same time they have always retained the meta-dimension that has characterized Hammann's work from the first...” (Information)
Hammann’s world is easily recognisable, and as easily accessible as a rom-com. You walk straight into her honey trap and exit it again somewhat sticky, because while you have been entertained and very much dragged through banalities and endless intercourses, you have also repeatedly had your foibles, your vanity and your self-image thrown back at you.
… From the moment of her debut Kirsten Hammann has been an expert at revealing the only-too-human, all those things we are at great pains to hide every morning when we “de-brutalise” ourselves in front of the mirror. Look at Me is a novel about love, relationships and sex. Or perhaps rather about the human perception of love, relationships and sex.
Disaster has been a theme of Hammann’s from the first, often in the shape of the ultimate let-down … Hidden agendas are also part of human existence! Look at Me is not a novel you read for its linguistic subtleties. It is Hammann letting rip and going overboard in every sense: Too long, too human, too light, too trivial, and too bloody funny. (Berlingske Tidende)
En dråbe i havet
(A Drop in the Ocean)
Gyldendal, Copenhagen, 2008.
Winner of Danske Banks Litteraturpris 2008
Nominated for DR Romanprisen 2008
Mette, Martin and their daughter, Sophie, lead a busy life in Copenhagen. Martin works away from home during the week, while Mette must take care of the more mundane duties such as taking Sophie to kindergarten, shopping and cooking all in an attempt to fulfill the norms of domestic bliss when Martin returns in time for the weekend. In between the household chores, Mette decides to write a book about the third world, but when seeking out further information she suddenly finds herself embroiled in a complicated situation that forces her to choose whether she wishes to participate in making a difference to people in the third world. She travels through mysterious circumstances that not even she understands to faraway countries every day, but Mette soon grows increasingly disillusioned with her role in life as well as with her participation in the lives of other people when faced with the enormity of the problems that extreme poverty generates. Mette, however, battles on and tries to do good by her own standards, but she must soon decide whether to give up in order to save her own existence and family life.
En dråbe i havet is a novel about the rich and the poor, about having and not having and about never being certain of happiness.
Rights sold:
Sweden: Kabusa
Norway: Gyldendal Norsk
Netherlands: Cossée Publishers Ltd.