Cleverly, P.C. Jersild Lets Fiction Perform Its Miracles

P.C. Jersild’s new novel begins with a death, but it refuses to end there. “Livet som gåva” opens with the funeral of his older brother Hans, who died after a life increasingly deformed by tuberculosis and dependence on painkillers. The funeral takes place in Malmö on a cold, windy day in the 1970s.

The novel’s first section follows the Jersild family in a largely biographically accurate account. Readers familiar with Jersild’s autobiographical novel “Fem hjärtan i en tändsticksask” will recognize the family: the strictly religious father Christian, the intellectually inclined mother Svea, who never had the chance to study, and the children Hans, Else and the youngest, Per Christian.

The tensions remain much the same, although the father appears in a more forgiving light. He shows humor and a degree of childishness. Hans stands at the center of the new novel. He contracted tuberculosis, then a widespread disease, at an early age. The young P.C. also became ill but recovered. In 1946, Hans returns from his job as a railway switchman, lies down on the fine-room sofa and begins to rave with fever. At the hospital, doctors confirm that tuberculosis has taken hold.

Larsmo writes that Jersild, now in his nineties, may have felt a duty to record a life that left few traces. Hans exists in full only in the author’s memory, described in the novel as someone who “drew every losing ticket in life.” But the story does not remain within the limits of remembrance. Jersild, a guardian of the fantastic in literature, uses fiction to create an alternative postwar history and to revive the dead through storytelling.

“

drew every losing ticket in life