Zero by Gine Cornelia Pedersen, translated from Norwegian by Rosie Hedges, was a speedy read performing the internal experience of mental illness. It takes place in Oslo, Norway, but there aren’t many regional markers that tie it firmly to place or context. I struggled to find a good pairing for it. I previewed some Rouvy rides in the area and became smitten with the proximity of expansive nature to the city, especially along the west coast and in the national parks. I also went Nordic skiing, and along the theme of “Zero” tried to reach Inbox Zero. But nothing really seemed to fit here. The book seems to stand alone and outside of genre, nationality, even influence, but ultimately I found that this was not actually the case – stay tuned here.
Zero is a stream-of-consciousness narrative tracing a progression through chapters 1-10 only to end with chapter 0, taking place inside and outside of institutions, with very little – as mental health professionals might call it – object constancy. Neither is there consistent style, though the text moves nimbly. There are boyfriends, a girlfriend, shifting moods, desperation, emptiness, the angries, a voracious quest for an elusive self, inner voice, gut feeling either vis a vis others or through experience. Feelings which each on their own are recognizably familiar to all, but in this short book all bunched uncomfortably and uncontrollably together.
It’s hard to get distance on the work. While a reader might, based on the description, feel sympathy for the anguish of the narrator, it doesn’t seem quite possible to step far enough away for this – the reading is itself performatively experiential and the reader is implicated as a collaborative, commiserative witness, in the struggle with the narrator. Yet I didn’t feel trapped by the narrative. Stream of consciousness is not a new trope, but here it’s pathologized and amplified via the style. The content reminded me slightly of reading Lisa, Bright and Dark while in middle school, but not of many other reading experiences. I didn’t really think the description of it as a “punk rock single” book it’s advertised as fits well; not many in my book group’s breakout room I discussed it with believed it did either. There are shades of all kinds of things in the book – partial rhymes, a psychiatrist named Eva who smokes cigars who might or might not be a Freudian representative of something else. The translator herself emphasized the difficulties of translating some of the ambiguities like these in the Norwegian version, some of which involved plays on words, into English.
The final sequences – involving a journey to South America – leave one disoriented. Whether those sequences “actually” happened or represent a complete break from reality becomes to me less important than whether the reader is willing to accompany the narrator into her state of being and the ecstatic possibilities it seems at the end to open into.
For this pairing, after learning it had made an impact on the author, I ended up reading The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (translated from Portuguese by Giovanni Pontriero), which I happened to have lying around in my “to read” pile anyways. Lispector’s book is less breakneck than Zero but still fairly speedy. On the surface, there is very little drawing these two into easy or consistent conversation. But am I ever glad I made the time to explore here. The Hour of the Star, I found, serves as a major touchstone for Zero, though the articulation of its influence is subtle, rewarding the effort made to read them in concert.
Lispector’s book, which I feel is worth rereading a few times over, has an additional layer of an invented narrator, who tries in various ways to penetrate the, in his telling, pitiful being of the abused Macebea, almost imposing onto her an object constancy in a stationary state of unhappiness, ignorance and degradation. He holds her at a distance, unwilling to let her out of the imprisonment of his view of her as an unfortunate, pitiable person, barely even woman or human. The invented middle-man narrator seems wholly unsuccessful in understanding his subject as she is or desires to be, and becomes instead a reflection of his own consciousness and those of western thought, philosophy and value system. He tries to embody her, but the triumph of the book is that in embodying herself, she resists his efforts entirely.
Pedersen’s book, on the other hand, is so embodied in its immediacy and lack of constancy that it seems ultra-real. But the commonalities sneak up on one. Each subject eats paper at one point. Each longs for love and searches for a self. Each book contemplates the emptiness of being, lack of purpose, and neuroticism. In The Hour of the Star the layer of the male narrator shows how much of the importance society may place on these things is in the eye of the beholder. Zero‘s narrator seems to have internalized – even while shedding – these values a little more, and the book is a little more ambiguous about whether the sections about finding ‘one’s true self’ enact an episode of narrative snark or not.
One could go all kinds of places with discussions of the monstrous, the savage or return to the primitive in both books.
What I find most compelling, however, is how both subjects have scintillating experiences of ecstasy, short-lived as these may be. These seem to tap into a deeper sensuality and attunement that exist completely independently of the intellect or rational comprehension, of context and surroundings, both within and without body, simply the ecstasy of being. Neither is an explicitly orgasmic or otherwise sexual depiction of ecstasy, nor explicitly spiritual. These happen in a few different places in each short novel – often a surprise of sudden happiness – but for both especially at the knife-edge of risk or of death. There is an outpouring:
Macebea, on the brink of death,
felt like vomiting something that was not matter but luminous. Star with a thousand pointed rays.”
The narrator of Zero, at the end, possibly dead, becomes a star “beautiful, gifted, an all-around talent” on the stage, playing violin
notes the likes of which no man has ever heard before // Warped and weird and beautiful notes that make no sense at all // People ask where I discovered the notes // I tell them I found them in the jungle.”
There’s one additional line in Lispector I want to bring in here (which I’d want to check the translation of to be clear). I don’t want to give away too much of the ending of the book but:
It is essential to arrive at an absolute zero so that we indifferently come to love or not to love the criminal who kills us.”
As Pedersen’s work ends with chapter Zero, the narrator seems to come into a love of being.
Zero: https://www.nordiskbooks.com/books/zero
I think there’s a new translation of The Hour of the Star out by Benjamin Moser that might also be worth exploring, but for now I will only touch it with my toe given reports of Moser’s heinous behavior.