The first Danish book I read on holiday this summer was Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen (translated from Danish by Joan Tate). But it’s taken me time to put together my thoughts about it.

This 1969 sci-fi novel begins in 1973. In this near future, a young man called Bruno is offered a radical new solution to inoperable cancer. He can choose to be cryogenically frozen until medical science is capable of curing him.

Bruno’s life before this point is a lonely one. He’s an editor of a literary magazine. His greatest asset is coming up with ideas for short stories, which he communicates to his roster of regular writers. He doesn’t have close family or friends. But he does have a strange growth on his neck.

Bruno’s last interaction outside of a hospital is a date with a ballet dancer he has a crush on called Jenny. They share a few beautiful hours together, then he returns to see Dr Ackermann to give his decision. He has two scary options: radiation therapy and chemotherapy to perhaps give him a few more weeks of life; or “freezing down” in the hope that when he is wakened in a couple of decades it will be to a cure.

“From his window, the city was more beautiful than he remembered ever seeing it. The sunlight was pouring into his room and it fell on his shelves of books and records, and on Famous Mad Scenes, still on the phonograph. The last time he had played it, things had been ordinary and he had been healthy…The sun had gone around the corner, and…the room suddenly seemed strangely menacing. He realized there was not a single person whom he wished to tell about his disease.”

When Bruno is woken, it is 1995 and the world is drastically changed. But it takes a while for these changes to become evident as he is kept locked in a room with no view of the outside world and minimal contact with people. He’s kept tranquillized and his questions go unanswered.

There is a certain 1960s/1970s flavour of paranoia about institutions that this whole novel evoked, but particularly this section. It reminded me of Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy and The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen. (But I will admit there was a definite male edge to Freezing Point. Neither Piercy nor Ditlevsen had their main character engage in sex with the medical staff.)

The details of the future are revealed slowly and it’s a fascinating vision, somehow both idealistic and dystopian. Huge leaps forward have been made in science and technology but this is not a cosy happy place. I won’t say more, as it would be too spoilery.

Apparently, Bodelsen mostly wrote crime fiction, but I can only find one more of his books translated into English. That’s a shame as I enjoyed this. That book, Think of a Number (1968), was turned into the film The Silent Partner (1978) starring Elliott Gould, Christopher Plummer and Susannah York. Which is an impressive line-up. We’ve tracked it down on Blu-ray but it’s the wrong region so we haven’t been able to watch it yet.

Frysepunktet published 1969 by Gyldendal.

This translation first published 1971 by Michael Joseph.

Source: Politikens Boghal, Copenhagen.