Ryf!

Rinse, please!
Rifbjerg's short stories may be about the most disgusting subjects, and the air is filled with snot and sperm, tits and farts, crap and puke, but his unusual talent as a stylist is immediately recognisable. For example, to stick to the vomit, in the story Fear?(Angst?) he lets a young man puke "like a bubbling clogged-up drain where the waste, the filth, the world's end of discarded humanity has piled up and is finally becoming unclogged".

New outlook
As a reader one is fascinated, despite the sickening content of the short stories, for there are also truly wonderful passages that give you a whole new outlook on life. Perhaps a cottage in the dunes where the blankets being aired are seen as tongues flopping out of all the windows, or a father and a mother being observed from knee height by their little son. For example the father, very erect on his bicycle, using his legs like pistons and so tall that the leaves of the roadside trees brush against his head. An image that is contrasted with an adolescent boy's difficulties with the bicycle rack at the public baths and an elderly Frenchman whose bicycle, besides being "strangely squat", is also equipped with a saddle, that "had to be cutting its way slowly into the lower edge of his buttocks".

Incidentally, it must have been the first time in Danish history that the expression 'fuck you!' appeared in print in a book. Today it is part of the vocabulary of just about everyone and his dog, but in 1964 it was pretty strong stuff.

Dorthe Sondrup Andersen is a Master of Arts of Comparative Literature and an author and writer on cultural affairs. Her books include "The Golden Age without the Gilt" ("Guldalder uden forgyldning") (People's Press, 2004).