Mâliâraq Vebæk’s The Story of Katrine (tr. Susan Stanley, from Vebæk’s Danish translation) is a fast-paced, grim, and gripping social novel. the title character is a young Greenlandic woman who, at age 19, moves to Copenhagen to — she thinks — marry the Danish man she was dating while he was working in Greenland on an eight-month contract, once he divorces his wife.
surprisingly, Erik does divorce his wife, but Katrine’s life with him is far from what she dreamed. alienated by the language barrier, struggling to maintain a job, and disillusioned by the reality of Erik’s life in Copenhagen, Katrine drinks heavily, and ultimately not only does Erik divorce her but she loses custody of their daughter. she wanders in and out of friends’ houses and lives for a while, and the novel ends in tragedy. it is a bleak read, and Vebæk’s direct, at times almost journalistic style — it reminded me both of Ma-Nee Chacaby’s A Two-Spirit Journey, for the grim parallels between Katrine’s life and Chacaby’s early adulthood, and, stylistically, of Trifonia Melibea Obono’s La bastarda — is extremely effective, conveying both a sharp critique of institutional neglect and the sexual exploitation of colonized subjects and a heartbreaking emotional portrait of Katrine. Stanley’s translation leaves, unfortunately, something to be desired — often feeling like it’s probably a pretty literal translation from the Danish and ending up unidiomatic as a result — but I still found this an extremely engaging read. I was expecting it to be slow, but instead I raced through the whole book in about two hours.
the novel’s original Greenlandic title was Bussimi naapinneq (A Meeting on the Bus), and this meeting is the framing device for the narrative as a whole: an older, more happily married Greenlandic woman named Louise sees Katrine on the bus, sits down beside her, and, seeing Katrine’s obvious distress, invites her to visit her house any time. two years later, Katrine shows up at her door, but Louise — to her profound embarrassment and shame — slept poorly the night before and ends up falling asleep on the couch during the visit as Katrine tells her life story. she experiences the story of Katrine’s life in Denmark as a kind of vivid, if overwhelming, dream, which upon waking she initially assumes is partly or mostly her subconscious’s invention but whose details she is later able to confirm.
framing the story through Louise is a fascinating choice, but I think this frame — putting just a bit of extra distance between Katrine and the narration — is important for the social intervention the novel is trying to make. particularly striking in this regard is a conversation-argument between Louise and one of her childhood friends, now also married to a Dane and living in Denmark, where her friend rails against the ignorance and irresponsibility of “bad” Greenlandic women who give all Greenlanders a bad name while Louise attempts to argue that these women have to be understood within the larger social context of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism. it seems to me that the point of focalizing the narrative through Louise and of having her experience Katrine’s life in dreams the way she does is precisely to unsettle relatively privileged readers — Greenlanders or Danes — by inserting them into the circumstances that led Katrine to where she ends up. to that end, the novel strikes an interesting balance between explaining Katrine’s choices and behavior, particularly her turn to alcohol, without excusing them. it accepts that she could have chosen otherwise, but it also identifies the both personal and social conditions that made choosing otherwise significantly more difficult.
but I think the most striking moment in the entire novel is near the end, after Katrine’s death. Louise, on her way to Katrine’s funeral, remembers one of her childhood friends, a man named Ado whom she had cut out of her life because she felt he was always drunk. after his death, she planned to leave flowers at his grave:
Just before noon, I went out to the garden to cut flowers. My daughter came home from school and found me in the garden in the process of gathering a beautiful bouquet. I asked her if she could remember that man who once called me many times and wanted to visit us. If she could remember that I didn’t want him to come because he was always drunk when he called. Now he was dead and I would bring these flowers to his grave.
“Why give him flowers now that he’s dead? You wouldn’t see him while he was alive?” was my daughter’s only response.
this is the novel’s Argument: we do not deserve to mourn the dead if we did nothing to help them while they were alive.
(Vebæk, as an aside, led a remarkable life, becoming the first Greenlandic woman to receive a university education and working both in cultural revitalization and as a feminist and social activist for Greenlanders living in Denmark — the ᐃᓄᐃᑦ ᐊᓪᓚᒍᓯᖏᑦ Inuit Literatures Littératures inuites research group at UQAM has a much more detailed bio that’s worth a read.)
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