“. . . everything is saturated with meaning, friendships, love affairs, the view of the world, the language.”
Reading Christina Hesselholdt’s Companions is to inhabit a constant rise and fall, immersion into conflicting currents and patterns that appear and disappear in the form of interior monologues of a group of the companions that give the book its title.
These companions are intertwined around Camilla, whose literary passion is one of the many pleasing aspects of this novel, as she contemplates, amongst many others, writers as diverse as Thomas Bernhard and Lawrence Durrell.
Saturation is the word that Virginia Woolf used to describe the effect she desired in The Waves, ‘a saturated unchopped completenesss’. Hesselholdt’s book stylistically nods in the direction of The Waves but has a different intensity. I found it absorbing and satisfying to follow each individual’s disillusionments and their sense of life and human separateness.
Love it: ‘a saturated unchopped completenesss’…
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Whenever I read Woolf writing of her work, I am drawn back to the diaries.
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Yes, I love her diaries. There’s everything in them.
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I am about 100 pages into this and enjoying it so far. I am impressed that she is able to alter her narrative to suit her different characters. That is not an easy thing to do. I wonder if Camilla, being the most literary, is a bit autobiographical?
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It feels that way, though hard to say from a single work. I’d like very much to read more Hesselholdt.
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I haven’t seen any of her other books that have been translated into English. Have you encountered any others?
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This is the first to be translated.
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