Termush

Contents Landing Page Title Page Contents Foreword 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 About the Authors Also in Faber Editions Copyright Adverts for other Faber Editions 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 TERMUSH
 
 
 
 Sven Holm
 Translated from the Danish
 by Sylvia Clayton
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Contents
 
 
 
 Title Page 
 Foreword 
 1 
 2 
 3 
 4 
 5 
 6 
 7 
 8 
 9 
 10 
 11 
 12 
 13 
 14 
 15 
 16 
 17 
 18 
 19 
 20 
 21 
 22 
 23 
 24 
 25 
 26 
 27 
 28 
 29 
 30 
 31 
 About the Authors 
 Also in Faber Editions 
 Copyright 
 Adverts for other Faber Editions 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 FOREWORD
 by Jeff VanderMeer
 
 Outside, the sea is still; there is no darkness and no light.
 
 
 
 Halfway through Sven Holm’s taut unfolding nightmare, Termush, the unnamed narrator encounters ‘ploughed-up and trampled gardens’, where ‘stone creatures are the sole survivors’. Holm describes these statues as ‘curious forms, the bodies like great ill-defined blocks, designed more to evoke a sense of weight and mass than to suggest power in the muscles and sinews.’ Later, a guest of this gated, walled hotel for the rich relates a dream in which ‘light streamed out of every object; it shone through robes and skin and the flesh on the bones, the leaves on the trees … to reveal the innermost vulnerable marrow of people and plants.’
 The same could describe an enduring quality of Termush itself, which accrues its strange effects via both this stricken, continuous revealing and the ‘curious forms’ of a solid, impervious setting, in which the ordinary elements of our world come to seem alien through the lens of nuclear catastrophe.
 Long before the sanctuary of Termush becomes visibly unsafe, these tears at the fringes of reality signify the truth of the narrator’s situation. The very texture of the world becomes unknowable or, alternatively, imbued with a vipotency, vibration or sheen that alters reality. Holm’s Termush, then, is both a realistic chronicle of a micro-society’s collapse and a surreal journey of a man confronted by crisis, remaking his surroundings as a way of coping.
 Another overlap exists here, too, one not as pronounced as in the 1960s, when Holm published Termush. The detritus and decisions of the past may still affect our future, in that the threat of nuclear holocaust has not left us. But in the interim, other disasters that manifest in largely ‘invisible’ ways have overtaken us – our fear of radiation and immolation has led to climate crisis fear, which has led to pandemic fear. The grappling of minds with these threats leads to derangement and odd visions because the elements of infiltration and contamination baffle the brain. Our hauntings in the modern era so often now are not ghosts but simply the things we cannot see – but that radically affect us.
 Little wonder then that, read now, the lucid logic of Termush feels more like lucid dreaming, imbued with a new relevance in which unseen monsters creep through the same rooms as the narrator, studying his movements. The stark deficiencies of emergency management become hyper-real or ultra-real because of the overlay of self-inflictions in our modern times. For Termush – unlike some vintage classics, cult or otherwise – has waxed not waned in relevance. The accuracy in the calm description of becoming undone by disaster, and the anonymity of place and character, ensures a sense of timelessness.
 It’s a curious book in this regard, with its dispassionate prose that eschews, in large part, the sensory detail of taste, viitouch and smell, yet gets to the heart of living through such a situation. At that heart is the disconnection that occurs, laid bare by a certain level of detail, or lack of detail. Amid the banal recitation of procedure and the understated but sharp satire about privileged people, such a strong sense of feeling about the world rises from these pages.
 Holm cleverly has his narrator both draw attention away from and underscore this impulse from the opening pages, in which he expresses confusion about how ‘painlessly’ catastrophe has come to pass, having ‘unconsciously thought in terms of something more drastic, a radical transformation, with every single object showing traces of what had occurred, the furniture and the walls changing character and the view outside our window revealing a totally different world’. In this way, the physical manifestations of human imagination become characters in the novella, even when unchanged, because they are expected to change.
 One of the best passages in Termush builds on this impulse in an extended disaster reverie, which expresses confusion, relief and a restructuring of the narrator’s surroundings to match the invisible truth: ‘that stone would no longer be stone and air no longer air, so that to find a person turned into a pillar of salt would no longer be a myth but a reality.’
 This transmutation reflects a yearning for comfort, for anchors, for meaning, that the radiation either eludes, or of which it was always preternaturally free. ‘How much better,’ the subtext screams, ‘if it all were made manifest so I could understand it better, grapple with it, wrestle it to the ground.’ But no, it is not even mist: mist to wander through lost, perhaps charting a course offshore in the hotel yacht, viiiwhich at one point is guest engorged and sent out to sea to distract from the calamity.
 Are you in favour of the management’s boat trip? I am in favour of the management’s boat trip. Thus goes a trippy chapter with an existential undertow