There are those novels that shred the heart and repair it at the same time thanks to their beautiful intensity. From these books on the razor’s edge, stories as brutal as they are magnetic carried by tightrope narrators. Look for Sam, by Sophie Bienvenu, A brief moment of splendor, by the American novelist of Vietnamese origin Ocean Vuong, and more recently The valley of flowers, by Greenlandic Niviaq Korneliussen.
A young Inuit leaves her home port, Nuuk, capital of Greenland, her family and her friend Maliina to study at a Danish university. Very quickly we get attached to this sensitive and offbeat character, to his caustic humor. A friendly constellation of humans gravitates around her: pineapple and aaaa (her mother and her grandmother, we are entitled to small touches of Greenlandic), the students with whom she becomes friends when she arrives in Aarhus, people she meets here and there, in bars or on the plane. His lover misses him sorely; they stay in touch through social media and virtual calls.
But a shadow draws near. In the first third of the novel, it remains in the titles of the chapters, which have the effect of a punch in the stomach: “Young man. 19 years old. Gunshot. Each heading records a suicide. This clever narrative device does not leave the reader unscathed. If the evil of living first stands on the periphery of the story, it will quickly become its beating heart. As soon as the young woman arrives in Denmark, something breaks inside her, a crack appears.
Niviaq Korneliussen is fearless. In his previous and first novel (Homo sapienne, one of the first international Inuit hits), the author queer addressed with sensitivity the quest for identity of five young Greenlanders. In The valley of flowers, she bluntly tackles the painful subject of the epidemic of suicides that is eating away at her native land.
And the dead come closer, place history under tension, grip it in a vice. Great crows spread their wings in the patchy northern light, stubborn and blinding in summer, almost absent in winter.
Back in Greenland, the arrival in the valley of flowers and the encounter with the sublime mountains of Tisiilaq bring about a radical break in the protagonist. “I almost dare not look at them, as if I had no right to, as if I were not worthy. Thereafter, the initial crack becomes a gap and the protagonist is swallowed up in the abyss, until a finale that makes you shudder.
Korneliussen received the Nordic Council Grand Prize for Literature in 2021 for this novel which she first wrote in Danish (unlike the first), then translated herself into Greenlandic. It arrives in our hands in the fine and fluid translation of Inès Jorgensen. A dazzling book, from which one does not quite recover, as after having gazed too long at the sun – that of midnight.