Book review|Cristina Sandu tells a vivid story about Danish immigrants. The novel began when the author spent half a year in 2020 in his Nicaraguan spouse’s home country.
Novel
Cristina Sandu: Danish expedition. Big Dipper. 363 pp.
Young student Anna visits Nicaragua. He would like to make a film about the Germans who immigrated to the country in the 19th century to cultivate coffee.
“So no big educational story, well, about colonialism and so on, but individual true stories,” Anna says about her plans.
This Cristina Sandun (b. 1989) of the Danish expedition the line at the end could be a summary of the entire novel.
Indeed Danish expedition does not tell about Germans but about Danes who came to the country in the 1920s.
And it doesn’t completely ignore colonialism, which would be difficult. Before its independence, Nicaragua was a Spanish colony, and since its independence, it has been a pawn of US superpower politics many times.
The Danes founded a colony in northern Nicaragua in 1923, when the president Diego Manuel Chamorro Bolaños offered them free land to grow coffee.
Sandu’s novel tells about this rapidly rising and rapidly emptying settlement.
The intention was to build a “little Denmark” in the middle of the jungle, as Vilhelm Grøn, the leader of the colony, expresses it in the novel, but reality showed its superior ability to produce disappointments.
Finnish-Romanian Cristina Sandu got her literary career off to a flying start when her first novel, published in 2017, A whale named Goliath was nominated for the Finlandia Award.
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Reality showed its superior ability to produce disappointments.
Rönsyileva’s lyrical debut novel is the story of the growth of Alba, the daughter of a Finnish mother and a Romanian father, mixed with collisions between two cultures and dark historical echoes.
The debut novel and of the Danish expedition in between, Sandu published a short novel in 2019 Water games.
Danish expedition is Sandu’s heaviest work so far not only in terms of the number of pages but also in terms of literary expressiveness.
Novel started when the author spent half a year in 2020 in the home country of his Nicaraguan spouse. Danish expedition “is based on true events”, but Sandu emphasizes in his accompanying words that the characters are “fictitious versions of their possible role models”.
In addition to source literature, the novel is based on Sandu’s interviews.
You can sense the certainty of the narrative through careful background work. Sandu doesn’t give in to infodumping, but effortlessly links the information material to convey the story.
Structurally Danish expedition is prioritized, as the first part takes up forty percent of the page count. The first part takes place in the years 1923–24, i.e. the birth and decline of the colony.
The foregrounding is justified because the colony forms the spiritual center of the novel, first as present and later as absent. What starts as reality turns into a story and, as a story, affects how reality is shaped from then on.
The chapters after the colony take the novel from the late 1920s to our days.
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As prose, the Danish expedition is restrained and controlled quality work.
The work except for a brief flashback in the last part, the events proceed chronologically. It fits the spirit of the novel, because Sandu’s genre is a broad epic, where an omniscient narrator transports a changing group of novel characters from decade to decade while history roars its own roar in the background.
In prose Danish expedition is restrained and controlled quality work. Although there is a lot going on in the novel, it is slow rather than rushed. Sometimes Sandu writes too reservedly, which made me long for compressions or accelerations, changes in rhythm from time to time.
The novel is at its most vivid in the first part, which describes the life of the colonists in the jungle. Rains, diseases and plagues sow discord among the immigrants, and at the same time, tensions with the natives flare up.
The real ones no main characters In the Danish expedition no, the spotlight goes from character to character. The Grønie and Møller families come to the fore, who do not return to their homeland beyond the seas, but take root in Nicaragua.
Edith Grøn’s life stages form one of the novel’s subplots. He leaves Nicaragua for the big world to learn art from the masters of modernism and becomes the most respected sculptor in his country.
The character is based on a real historical person, but Sandu says in his afterword that he has taken the liberty of changing the dates of Edith Grøn’s birth and death.
The Møllers, on the other hand, are building Danesia, a handsome Nordic house in the middle of palm trees in Nicaragua. Nico, the great-grandson of the settlers, will eventually turn Danesia into a tourist attraction with the advertising slogan “A piece of Denmark in a tropical forest”.
That’s the last fragment of the clearinghouse dream that fits the spirit of the times.
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