Valley of Flowers by Niviaq Korneliussen is undoubtedly the novel I loved the most last year, a book capable of getting under your skin, uncomfortable and powerful just like its author. A writer who had already established herself in Greenland in 2014, when with her debut she had spoken, for the first time in her country, of queer issues. Issues so current that they return in this novel too.
The story is that of an anonymous Greenlandic girl who, having moved from Nuuk to Denmark to study, finds herself dealing with a sense of estrangement that corrodes her from the inside. The geographical and ideological distance between the two countries translates, in fact, into an emotional distance: her body, defined as awkward and cumbersome compared to the lightness and “perfection” of her Danish peers, becomes the symbol of a shattered identity. The days are long and lonely, the friendships non-existent or wrong, the girlfriend distant, the culture profoundly different.
The entire narrative is marked by a countdown: there are 45 chapters numbered in decreasing order as if to prepare the reader for the inevitable epilogue. Each of them, moreover, opens with the description of a suicide, a direct reference to the collective drama of Greenland, where the suicide rate among young people is the highest in the world. On the other side there seems to be an immobile, blocked society, where pain is not spoken of and memories are not cried over. A country that, like the protagonist of this novel, struggles to find its identity (Greenland still depends politically on Denmark).
And in the indifference that surrounds her, the nameless protagonist stands out for her sensitivity and humanity. Her fragility and her pain emerge in the daily details, in the silences, in the avoided glances, between the lines of the text messages sent to the girlfriend who remained in Greenland. The desire to be seen and accepted clashes with the sense of inadequacy that she carries around like a second skin. Only “aanaa”, her dead grandmother, seemed able to understand her.
In the end, it is in the darkness that the protagonist takes refuge, while the light becomes the reminder of everything she cannot face. Too much exposure could be deadly. Everything hurts too much. And so the protagonist’s loneliness becomes the reflection of a generational condition.
The crow watched over me until the light of day came. He did not know that it was not from the darkness that he was supposed to protect me, but from the light. Korneliussen confirms herself in my eyes as a courageous and necessary author. Every word of hers is essential, every period creates pauses full of meaning. There is no pity in her writing and it is precisely in this crudeness that the strength of the novel lies: Korneliussen does not try to console, but to shake, to force us to face the tragedy that is still affecting the young people of her country. It is to all of them (but also to all of us) that she seems to write, with a prose that manages to be sharp and romantic at the same time.
The scream of the writer of The Valley of Flowers is a strong and poetic scream, which seems to recall the scream of the father in Teorema (to quote Pasolini): a scream in the desert, in the indifference and torpor that form the background. And what comes out of this scream is beautiful: the reader as a spectator of the pain of a young woman who becomes a mirror of the social trauma of an entire nation, which in its own way desperately tries to save itself from the abyss.
27
Written by Maria De Gennaro
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Niviaq Korneliussen, La valle dei fiori, Iperborea, Milano, 2023
Original edition: Naasuliardarpi, 2020