A marvelously inventive road-trip novel, told as one long conversation in the aftermath of a capsized marriage

Hafni says: I don’t want to be me. I want to change who I am. I don’t know how to change who I am.

 Hafni has come to the end of her marriage. From a rest stop she phones the novel’s narrator—a main character from Helle Helle’s previous novel they—but it’s she who does all the talking. She’s been celebrating impending divorce with a “smørrebrød tour” of the southern Danish countryside, where she samples Danish classics, chiefly open-faced sandwiches and  afternoon tea. A trip that was meant to take a week digresses once, then twice, until it ends up taking Hafni an entire month. As told in tightly controlled, splintered mini chapters, the book incarnates how Hafni herself digresses, and dwells. She seems to view her past as one long series of accidents and mistakes, the accumulation of which somehow became the life she was living, a life that she now longs to cast off so she can start anew. Nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, Hafni Says is brought into English in a magnificent translation by Martin Aitken. 

About the Author: 

Helle Helle (b. 1965) is one of Denmark’s foremost and best-loved novelists. She has been awarded the Danish Critics’ Prize for Literature, and has received her country’s highest literary accolades, including the Per Olov Enquist Prize, the Golden Laurels of the Danish Booksellers’ Association, the Grand Prize of the Danish Academy, and the Holberg Medal. She has also been nominated four times for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. Her highly acclaimed novel This Should Be Written in the Present Tense is her only other work to have appeared in English (praised by John Self in The Guardian for being “a book with all the bigness hidden away.”)

Martin Aitken has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He won the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love.