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Havoc by Tom Kristensen. Madison. 1968. University of Wisconsin Press. Translated from the Danish by Carl Malmberg. Introduction by Borge Gedso Madsen. 427 pages.

 

havocFROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

    That a man should reduce his life to havoc in the hope of finding his soul among the ruins-such seems to be the one course left open to the intellectual Ole Jastrau, living in Denmark in the 1920’s. He experiences the failure of all the nostrums men resorted to in the tormented time between the wars to cure the pervasive malaise of disillusionment. Religion promises him regeneration but offers instead the monotonous logic of a dogmatic theology. The great rebellion of the workers disintegrates into a comic spectacle in the streets of Copenhagen; and tired, disillusioned radicals retreat into their own intellectual circle to talk endlessly around the clichés of a failed ideology. ‘Beware of the soul and cultivate it not,’ runs the motto of this novel, ‘for doing so can be a form of vice.’ For Jastrau only complete chaos, havoc, remains. The progress of his degradation and the sickness of the moral and intellectual milieu that provokes him to such an awesome self-destruction Kristensen records with detail so accurately observed, insight so ironic, and symbolism so powerful as to compel the conclusion that Jastrau’s course through the chaotic 1920’S, if disastrous, was the meaningful response of a sensitive man to a time that was out of joint. Kristensen described in HAVOC a period and a society that he knew intimately. HAVOC is a valuable and significant addition to the literature in English of the period in our history that did much to shape the modern consciousness. But it is more than that. Although the novel is peculiarly a product of Denmark in the twenties, Kristensen’s portrait of the sensitive man’s alienation from his society and hisKristensen Tom compulsion to create his identity out of the anarchy of his own soul-themes that continue to inform contemporary literature-makes Kristensen the spiritual contemporary not only of Eliot, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, but of Camus, Beckett, and Bellow as well.

 

Born in 1893, reared in Copenhagen, and awarded the M.A. degree in Danish, English, and German in 1919, Kristensen established himself firmly in the Danish world of letters in the 1920’s with a remarkably versatile offering of poetry, fiction, a travel book on Spain, and critical essays on literature for the Copenhagen newspaper Politiken. In 1930, at the close of that highly productive decade, he published his finest novel, HAVOC, now available for the first time in English. Readers of HAVOC will not be surprised to learn that Tom Kristensen is considered one of Denmark’s most distinguished living writers.

 


 

 

 


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