Like all other important world cities, the great city of Aarhus, Denmark, has its own chronicler; an eminent writer whose accumulated fiction has become a topography by which readers can navigate the city. Paris has Honoré de Balzac, London has Charles Dickens, Barcelona has Carlos Ruiz Zafón, San Francisco has Armistead Maupin, and Aarhus has Svend Åge Madsen.
His name is so difficult for the foreign tongue to pronounce that it comes out as something like Seven Age Madness. Never one to let a joke pass him by, he gave one of his major novels the Danish title Syv Aldres Galskab, which translates to “Seven Ages’ Madness.” The common corruption of his name is apt because Svend Åge Madsen is now in his seventh decade of mind-boggling fiction-writing. 2023 marked the 60th anniversary of his debut novel, Besøget (lit. The Visit), a book that prompted a reviewer to write: “No more Visits, please.” But the reviewer’s sardonic pun did not deter him in the least, and with an extraordinarily prolific career, Svend Åge Madsen has become one of the most profoundly original Danish authors of all time.
Madsen grew up, as he says himself, between recollection and oblivion, meaning geographically right in between the museum of urban history and culture (called The Old Town) and the Ceres Brewery, producing liquid oblivion. He went on to study mathematics at Aarhus University, but eventually abandoned his studies to pursue a career as a fiction writer. He was still in his twenties when he received a three-year grant from the Danish Arts Foundation, which he and his wife chose to invest in a house in the Aarhus suburb of Risskov. There he still lives, now a widower, between nature and city. With the exception of some stays abroad, Aarhus has been his home since his birth in 1939. The city is much transformed now, and has become too big, too self-confident in his opinion. As he once explained in an interview, he always liked that Aarhus was small enough to command, yet generous enough to sustain his creativity. How generous Aarhus is can be gauged by the fact that the city has served as the stage for the majority of Madsen’s more than thirty novels, plus several short-story collections, plays, and texts in many genres.
At first, Madsen was reluctant to reveal the location where his novels took place, so he used an alias for his hometown. But when a reviewer pointed out that the city could be none other than Aarhus because the characters enter the bus through the back door and exit through the front (a topsy-turvy system that has always been exclusive to that city), Madsen had to accept that there is no way of disguising a city as quirky as Aarhus. And both Aarhus and Svend Åge Madsen are quirky: Just like the back exit of a bus becomes the front entrance in Aarhus, Madsen calls the annex he built in his garden a “book tower” although it is horizontal. Arguably, that makes it more of a book cave, but Madsen invariably calls it a tower (and most journalists who interview him in his lair accept the premise and duly refer to it as such) because it was inspired by the iconic book tower of the Royal Danish Library in Aarhus. But since the municipality is not keen on granting people permission to build high-rising libraries in their private gardens, Madsen was forced to build horizontally rather than vertically.
The anecdote is significant in that it illustrates Madsen’s take on Aarhus in his fiction as well. Although horizontal, he will insist the building in his garden is a tower, and although he turns the whole city upside down, he will insist it is Aarhus. Humorous, philosophical, experimental, and existential are the trademarks of his literature. With his dogma of relativism, he sets out to explore in his books the elasticity of time and reality, and all the possibilities and limitations that come with personal choice as well as modern technology and science. As his stories run along different tracks where the same world is perceived differently, Madsen demonstrates his belief that reality is shaped by every individual’s point of view. For this reason, American writer William Faulkner’s ability to juggle a variety of narratives was something of a revelation to the young Svend Åge Madsen. Faulkner’s novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), cleverly illustrates this relativity by letting four characters tell what is essentially the same story, but each from their own point of view and in their own voice.
Madsen’s background in mathematics benefits him enormously as he pursues different narrative strands that develop as a consequence of his characters’ choices and what possibilities are offered to them. An extreme example of this is his hypertext novel, Days with Diam or Life at Night (1972), which has thirty-two different endings. At the beginning of the book, the writer Alian Sandme (Alias Madsen) debates with himself whether he should go and see his secret lover at the train station during the brief interval between her connections, or if he should stay at home and write all night (for many years, Madsen would write at night while his wife and children were sleeping). The book then splits into two narrative strands where we follow the events that unfold in either case, and from here on, each narrative strand is again split in two every time the characters are faced with a choice. What results is a surprisingly readable yet bold representation of Madsen’s philosophy. In another novel, ambiguously called Genspejlet (1999) in Danish, which translates to “Mirror of Genes” or “Remirrored,” bio-technology gives the main character a chance to have a simultaneous relationship with four copies of his deceased wife, leading to very different results. Madsen makes evident the glorious complexity of humans by showing us how a person, under the exact same circumstances, might go in any direction. This is why there are rambling novels and thick volumes of history books: with human beings, the possibilities are endless and unpredictable.
By now, Madsen’s vast body of work has become a giant mosaic or, if one prefers the prosaic, a macrotext where several of his novels and short stories refer back to each other, and where many of his characters reappear in other stories or are related by either blood or plot. Madsen himself seems to have no difficulty in navigating his own system – he even has an ever-growing treasure trove of well over two thousand ideas, neatly organized and ready to be plucked for a new story – but his readers can easily get tangled up. At that time of the school year when written assignments are due, poor Madsen is inundated with letters from young scholars who have bitten off more than they can chew by choosing his work as subject for their paper. In their dire need of guidance, they can be quite pushy, asking him when between right now and as soon as possible he is available. But accepting responsibility as the creator of the maze the hapless students have gotten themselves trapped in, he readily tries to help if he can. In his book of email correspondence, Når Man Mailer (2009) (lit. When You’re Emailing), he writes to a friend that he’s busy working on five school assignments simultaneously, and wryly adds that he, of course, is receiving some help from the students.
Time and place are often shifted around in Madsen’s stories, which he to some degree attributes to growing up where he did in Aarhus. In an interview in a Danish newspaper, he explains how the route he took to school would lead him along the streets of his working-class neighborhood to the centuries-old houses of The Old Town, and from there through the flora of the entire planet in the Botanical Gardens, and finally crossing the city’s most modern highway. All of those contrasts in a 20-minute walk lit up his imagination, and his readers travel with him through time in unexpected ways, where past, present, and future are often interchanged.
With enough ideas in his database for sixty novels, in Madsen’s own estimate, there is no fear of his creative well drying up anytime soon. For his 70th birthday in 2009, he was in rare form and released an ambitious novel containing as sensational events as those of the astronomer Adam d’Eden being found impaled on the spire of Aarhus Cathedral and the foundations of Christianity shaken in what is essentially a hilarious parody of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003). In this novel, Mange Sære Ting For (lit. Up to Many Strange Things), an astronomer discovers a mirror planet reflecting the light from Earth and is able through special technology to record events that took place two thousand years ago. The tapes show an unflattering truth about the conception and life of Jesus Christ that, if made public, could blow Christianity to pieces. Madsen even takes it to a higher philosophical level by actually letting happen what strong forces are trying to prevent by all means necessary.
In his fabulating 1989 novel, At Fortælle Menneskene (lit. Narrating the People), we see most clearly Madsen’s basic view that the world exists through narrative, not the other way around. Our identity comprises of the stories we have been told and that we have accepted as truth, so we take our place in them and develop them further through our own narrative. Madsen illustrates this point through the character Ikona, a girl who has been isolated from the outside world since her birth because of a severe deformity. A young man who is a naturally gifted storyteller is asked to come and tell Ikona about the world she has never seen. Through the many tales she is told (there are one hundred and twenty six characters in this densely populated novel), Ikona starts to form her own picture of the world and enters the narrative herself by inventing stories from the world that is now hers, too. She acquires a history and thereby her part in humanity.
When walking through the streets of Aarhus, Madsen can’t prevent his fiction from overlapping with his own reality when he comes to a building or a place where one of his characters lived or where some event took place. In the part of town known as Øgadekvarteret (lit. The Island Street Quarter) because different Danish islands give names to the streets there, plaques can be found on some of the houses, each one telling a story about the house itself, or the people who lived in the area. As a contribution to a big-scale project in connection with Aarhus being European Capital of Culture in 2017, Madsen wrote these whimsical fictions based on his own childhood recollections of the quarter and the tall tales he had heard about the people living there. Like Ikona, he passes on the stories he has heard, colored by more than eighty years of living in Aarhus.
Suggested reading: Two of Svend Åge Madsen’s major works are available in an English translation. They are Days with Diam or Life at Night (1972) and Virtue and Vice in the Middle Time (1976).
Jesper Soerensen is from Denmark and now lives in Miami with his husband. He is the author of Charles Dickens – The Stories of His Life (Olympia Publishers, 2023) and his essays and humor writing have appeared in the print anthology We Are the West: Tributaries, Roi Fainéant Press, and others.
Featured Image: Photograph of Svend Åge Madsen by courtesy of Thomas Knoop.
