Suzi Feay

Changing lanes

Her life seems at an impasse, and she’s continually being yelled at by her driving instructor. Can she change gear in time?

It’s fair to say Sonja Hansen’s life has stalled. Forties, tall and ungainly, veteran of failed relationships, she’s an uncomfortable fit for modern life in bustling Copenhagen. Geographical, spiritual and emotional immobility is expressed in her physical lack of ease, including ‘positional vertigo’ which renders the manoeuvre of the title difficult. Not without a certain quiet defiance, she still feels unable to fire her driving instructor, aggressive, non-stop-nattering Jytta, who won’t let her shift the gears herself. In between bouts of gossip and racist abuse of other drivers, Jytta bellows instructions at her cowering pupil: ‘GREEN ARROW, TURN GODDAMMIT, BIKE!’

In this short novel Nors manages to condense the essence of a life. Sonja is stock-taking, wondering how to change; trying to drive in a new direction but continually taking a turning back into the past. Her peaceful childhood in Jutland is evoked whenever she glimpses wild birds, especially the whooper swans that seem to hold a mysterious message. Life is filled with disappointments for Sonja, who seems to ask for so little yet receive even less, but she’s no wet lettuce; her life is filled with small, satisfying rebellions.

There’s a touch of satire in the treatment of Sonja’s career as a translator of fashionable Scandi-noir crime fiction. The misogynist fantasies of bestselling Gösta Svensson are lapped up by legions of female fans, all savouring ‘the angry ejaculations, the mutilated vaginas, the ritual adornment of evil’. Even her remote, unfathomable sister, Kate, is proud of the connection with literary fame, but Sonja can’t see the appeal in books that function only as ‘a crossword puzzle with sperm and maggots’.

Lacking a robust world-view herself, Sonja is oppressed by those of others, and is particularly shaken by a brief encounter with a fortune-teller, who, she believes, effectively robbed her of a future.

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