Kirsten Thorup's Baby introduces us to strangers, the outsiders:
misfits, deviants, losers, the powerless, those at the bottom of
the social hierarchy. They are the other side of the coin, the
failures. The novel opens in the Mexicana, a cheap nightclub in the
Vesterbro district of Copenhagen, where several acquaintances are
gathered together in a meaningless, hand-to-mouth companionship.
When the club closes, they go their own ways, never to return to
the club again a dispersion that gives the book its basic pattern
of wandering and aimlessness and no neatly rounded closing of the
circle. Their tracts zigzag through the city. We follow Mark, the
untalented auto salesman with the Orson Welles profile who is
heavily in debt and does not know how to get out, home to his
money-grubbing wife who get household income by selling herself to
the loan shark who has Mark in his clutches. We follow Suzie on a
drunken spree in Sweden with a couple of delinquents. We visit
Leni, who has never written the book she wants to write because she
has had to support herself by translating porno magazines. We go
with her to the home of her former husband, Eddy, who once owned
the run-down apartment where Karla, a single mother with two
children, now lives. Eddy is the central to the story. He is the
spider; his money, and its power, are the poison. Permeating the
everyday lives of these characters is an experience that perhaps a
woman best can formulate: the experience of being a thing, an
object rather than a subject, a receiver, of bribery, of blows and
bruises, of caresses, or persuasive words. And perhaps a woman's
sensitivity is also particularly suited to describing this state
with the unsentimental tenderness that Kirsten Thorup manifests in
Baby. Baby deals with people who have been pushed out into the
darkness. They are the children of darkness and some of them do
dark deeds. But Thorup has said that if she had to choose an
epigraph for the novel, it would be a line from Hugo: ""Not those
who do dark deeds, but those who create the darkness are the truly
guilty ones.
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