There is an interest in Europe for contemporary literature, music andart

Mr. Aleksandar Sajin, whom life has transported from his origins in what is now called ex-Yugoslavia to the northern reaches of Europe, has written a book in Danish which he calls Rosa. The book is a fascinating chronicle of a love affair in which only one party participates. Or does he?

This journey into love is constructed in the form of a journal. A succession of entries. The fiction is that the “editor” has found this journal – unpublished- under a plant on his balcony, which the former occupant has presumably left behind. The entries in the journal are a mirrored chronology, meaning that we read the last entry first and the first entry last. Thus the main text of the book moves from the near present to the past. At the same time, the footnoted remarks of the presumptive editor are numbered chronologically.

Thus we have two parallel movements, that of the journal itself which must be read backwards and that of the comments of the editor which we read in a forward motion.

The diary itself reveals the poetic passions, dreams and insights of the young woman Rosa, whose chaotic life becomes partially revealed through the successive texts we read. She seems to be of Serbian origin, has immigrated to Denmark, has children and is in the midst of recovering from a painful separation from “someone”. As the editor, and we with him, reads her entries he finds himself falling in love with this mysterious woman whom he has never met, until he, at the diary's end is totally obsessed by her. So obsessed (as the epilogue of the editor describes) that when the former occupant returns to collect his fictive manuscript about an “arranged marriage” (in Danish read “forced marriage”) the editor kills the man who would take away his Rosa.

Thus we (and the editor) have to do with a series of fictions. For if the manuscript is actually fictive and the editor has fallen in love with the protagonist (Rosa) whose existence is fictive, then the editor's love is also a fiction.

And even if the manuscript is authentic and there exists a real Rosa, it is a Rosa the editor has never known and is therefore, at the very least, an illusory love, perhaps a fictive love.

Thus the intensity of the love the editor reveals for his Rosa is, in a sense, absurd, in a sense utterly real and ultimately an illusion. Or?

Which is what disappointed love, divorce, estrangement, feels like and is. Was this the woman I loved? What was I in love with? With whom was I in love?

The construction could be contrived were it not for the skillfulwriting of Aleksandar Sajin. For in reading Rosa's passionate texts, one finds oneself underlining one beautiful passage after another. Which brings us to another kind of fiction. The fiction that some of the texts are entries in a journal and not poems.

Some are poems and could be vertically constructed. Others are clearly not poems but more entries in a diary. And yet all the writing is put into diary form. Thus the poems become poetic entries (horizontally constructed as in prose) in a diary, while what one might call the mere entries become, well, merely entries. Thus it is the consciousness of the reader, or rather his disposition, that determines how the entries (either poetic entries or diary entries) are to be read. A poem is read differently if the reader reads the poems as an entry in a diary than if he reads it as a freely standing poem.

So.

Aleksandar Sajin writes convincingly and is a talent to be reckoned with.

"Resurrection"; watercolor by Arne Haugen Sørensen

Den store passion
by Arne Haugen Sørensen
Bibelselskabets Forlag

Arne Haugen Sørensen has produced a lovely book. This maverick of the Danish art world (he often depicts biblical subjects) left the carping world of the Copenhagen art scene for sunnier climes and has now resided in southern Spain for over thirty years. Yet he returns, from time to time, to dip his toe into northern waters, only to return to Spain as soon as he is able.

Mr. Sørensen seldom exhibits. Yet he is unquestionably one of Denmark's great painters, inspired, as he himself maintains, by Picasso (faces perhaps) Nolde (colors perhaps, tones), though he paints like neither, prefers acrylic to oil and has a style that is entirely his own.

The Great Passion (den store Passion) is a coffee-table book and a good one, with a plethora of water-colors which makes the book unique among others the artist has produced. For they are extraordinary water colors.

Mr. Sørensen (born in 1932) has opened himself, in the last twenty or so years, to the possibility of painting certain events as recounted in both the old and new testaments. Sometimes he has painted a single scene many times, in different ways, from different perspectives. The (near) sacrifice of Isaac by the patriarch Abraham is one example. The knife seems to have just begun to cut...but hands appear in the heavens, admonishing, restraining, hands that cry “DON'T DO IT!” or simply “no”. For these hands are elusive, as hands are.

In fact hands are often depicted in Jørgen Haugen Sørensen's paintings. He says “what is more expressive than hands” and adds that the depiction of faces in contemporary art is most suspect today. And so he prefers hands.

In his depiction of the Crucifixion, the crosses (of Christ and the two criminals to either side of Him) are positioned at each its angle, which effectively sets the whole scene into motion. Thus the element of music is present. Colors emerge out of a darkness that is itself color-filled. A brooding darkness, one feels. And because of the absolute stillness, the observer is permitted to meditate the scene and to ask his most intimate self, what is really taking place here?

The book is large and full of paintings and watercolors. There is a Danish text that reproduces relevant biblical quotations. And there is a two-page introduction by Mr. Sørensen himself.

Most of us are used to art books in various unintelligible languages. So it makes no real difference if you know Danish or not. Though it is nice if you do. Yet, in this in this day of technological possibility, there is no real reason the book could not be printed in English as well. It would be easy enough to do.

Starbook
A Magical Tale of Love and Regeneration
by Ben Okri
Rider Books (Random House)

Long ago, in the time when the imagination ruled the world, there was a prince in this kingdom who grew up in the serenity of all things.

Ben Okri is a fabulist whose tales ring true. Thus he distinguishes himself from practitioners of ”magical realism” whose authenticity one has the tendency to doubt. For one feels Mr. Okri has experienced the supersensible African world he describes and that his insights into life and its mysteries are the fruits of a warm and genuine embrace.

He tells us the story of a Prince and a Maiden. Of the White Wind that consumes, of Gaps in the veil of the physical world and of The Tribe of Artists, whose task in this world is the creation of images and whose soul is the maiden, hounded by suitors, some of horrible mien like Chief Okadu (who is called The Crocodile) and the Mamba. And he tells of a gentle prince who is able to find his way through a gap to find this tribe of artists, a tribe otherwise beyond the reach and knowledge of this world...

...and of a riddle the suitors of the maiden must solve if they are to win her hand: the riddle of the shadow.