A fly buzzes by the windowsill. A clock ticks slowly. Coffee gets cold. So it goes in Helle Helle’s they, a testament to the intricate beauty and sparseness of Danish prose. Perfectly describing the moments between life’s changes, Helle renders them with accuracy, focusing on the smallest details while life and loss wash over the reader, the prose atmospheric and nebulous as feeling itself. Through her minimalism, Helle captures the coming-of-age experience more truthfully than any dramatized novel could. In this work, it is the moments of stillness, space, and liminality that count.
They—this mother and daughter—live each day in monotonous routines. They—this mother and daughter—are intertwined. At sixteen, the girl is still a part of her mother. The two are inextricable, not described with names, but in relation to one another, referred to as “she” and “her mother.” They don’t need words to communicate; Helle paints a beautiful, soft portrait of their relationship. The warmth washes over you as you read their shared moments. “They lie down at each end of the settee with the cookie bowl…they laugh about some crumbs on the collar. Her mother prods her stockinged toe into her side, she nearly drops the bowl. They laugh and laugh.” You begin to feel a part of them as you read.
In the text’s quiet intimacy, readers are drawn into this relationship, watching the quiet exchanges and living the dinner conversations. In the small apartment above the A Cut Above hair salon, they—the mother and daughter—on the settee, drinking soup, washing dishes, exist as one. The majority of the work takes place in this realm of softness. In the apartment, everything between mother and daughter remains the same. But life is changeable. The mother begins to feel sick, going in and out of the hospital. Illness and growth rupture their routine. As she, the daughter, processes the possibility of death, she simultaneously experiences life as it expands before her. She comes home less. The more she is away, the more life she experiences. In the smallest moments, the largest reflections of growth occur.
Still, the calm of their life stays the same. The mother’s sickness is discussed little or avoided completely: “October is long because they’re awaiting results from the hospital and because there’s so much homework.” “Illness” is only used once in the entire text, when the daughter receives a call from the hospital: “[the nurse] reads aloud from the patient file. The patient expresses great surprise at the severity of her illness.” Yet the prose does not detach itself from the pain of this illness. In the absence of discussion, small details reflect the changing situation: a scarf on the mother’s head, an absence of the apartment, a lifeless description of the hospital, the cold of winter. While the mother recovers and life returns to normal, the daughter is irrevocably changed by the experiences of her own life: boys, friends, and the minutiae of growing up. Time moves and the characters change; still, they remain a pair. Together, they are the only consistency.
The plot’s minimalism allows for a deeper exploration of their feelings through the quietness of the text. Their intimacy is rendered beautifully, making it all the more heartbreaking when the mother becomes sick. The girl is quiet and contemplative outside of her home. The dialogue becomes even sparser. On the bus, a friend asks her, “‘why are you feeling down?’ She doesn’t know what to say in reply. She can’t remember ever deliberating so long with an expectant person at her side. ‘Because,’ she finally says.” In the shadow of the mother’s illness, she wonders what will happen if she loses the other part of herself. The emotional resonance carried despite the lack of drama. It becomes all the more emotional for this restraint.
The 159 pages of the book tell a story of years. Written in present tense, time moves swiftly without drawing attention to itself. It moves fast in some moments: “She counts how many months have passed since the summer vacation, can’t believe that’s all. Nothing is the way it is.” In others, it crawls: “ If she wakes up too early tomorrow, her Saturday will be far too long, and she won’t know what to do with it.” The present tense of the work allows Helle to reflect on the difficulty of tracking one’s time as it ebbs and flows, mimicking our reality. This changeability contrasts with the work’s static pieces: the apartment, the small island and its customs, and the stasis of their relationship. Still, time is marked. The fashions evolve, the seasons too, elastic and changeable like time. Some stay for long; others move out swiftly. The tension between the march of time forward and the moments of quiet is precisely what this book does so beautifully; it forces you to contemplate the large and the small of life simultaneously. This is Helle’s genius.
No matter how much changes, they will stay the same. The home will too. “She wakes at first light the next morning. She gets dressed as quietly as she can and tiptoes from her room. The apartment door opens and closes with a little click. The sound wakes her mother. She remains in bed for a short while, then gets herself up and into the living room.” We leave them here.
Towards the end of the book, the daughter thinks, “I see, exactly, and exactly then the driver turns on the radio, they’re playing ‘Bright Eyes’. It’s almost too much. The furrows glisten in the fields.” Reading this novel is a similar experience. It makes you see things clearly, namely the preciousness of your own life, in all the glory of its own everyday-ness. Helle uniquely reflects living: it is happening before your eyes, changing so much, yet in the small moments, it can feel as though nothing has changed. If you aren’t paying attention, these moments pass you by. As the fly buzzes, the clock’s hand sweeps, and the coffee cools, life changes. It’s almost too much. Everything has changed, yet home remains, and, together, they are the same.
In its minimalism, each moment has an outsized presence. A beautiful contrast to the ceaseless pace of modern life, this Danish translation feels otherworldly in today’s fiction. A slice of life rendered beautifully, it is at once relatable and reflective, forcing readers to contemplate their own lives and striving to bring more of the quiet Helle renders into their own lives.
FICTION
they
By Helle Helle
Translated by Martin Aitken
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published February 10, 2026
