Capturing what it feels like to be twenty-something and already disappearing, not with a bang, but with a slow exhale, This Should Be Written in the Present Tense reveals the particular paralysis of a young woman who can see her life clearly and still cannot move
Dorte is twenty-something, living in a suburb she didn’t choose, with a man she may not love, doing work that means nothing to her. On the surface, everything is fine. Beneath it, something is slipping away, slowly, quietly, like a life half-lived. She remembers her ex, Per—the first boyfriend she tells us about, and the first she leaves—as she enters a new world of transient relationships, random sexual experiences, and awkward attempts to write.
This Should Be Written in the Present Tense is a novel of extraordinary restraint and startling emotional power. In Helle Helle’s hands, the smallest moments—a cup of coffee, a walk to the shop, a conversation that trails off—carry the weight of a whole reckoning. She dropped out. Moved away. Settled. But settling, it turns out, is its own kind of slow collapse.
For readers of Tove Ditlevsen and Jenny Offill, this is Scandinavian literary fiction at its most quietly devastating, proof that you don’t need drama to break a reader’s heart.
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