Hafni Says

Translated by Martin Aitken

Hafni Says by Helle Helle is a marvellously inventive road-trip novel – an exploration of the desire to be anyone but yourself, as told through one long conversation in the aftermath of a marriage. It is the second book by the award-winning, cult Danish writer published by Giramondo after the acclaimed they, with Hey Hafni released in February 2027. All three novels are all set in the same fictional universe, with recurring characters and settings.

Hafni says: I don’t want to be me.
I want to change who I am.
I don’t know how to change who I am.

Hafni says she’s getting divorced. To celebrate, she sets out across southern Denmark on a smørrebrød tour, to sample classic Danish open-faced sandwiches. A month later, she makes a phone call from a rest stop to the novel’s narrator – a main character from Helle Helle’s previous novel they – to explain how she went wrong, and why a trip that was meant to take a week has ended up consuming an entire month. Her storytelling seems to incarnate how Hafni herself digresses – how her past unfolds as one long series of accidents and mishaps, the accumulation of which somehow became the life she is living. Infused with Helle Helle’s subtlety and dark humour, and brought into English in Martin Aitken’s virtuosic translation, Hafni Says explores the desire to be anyone but yourself – and what it means to try to make yourself anew.

FINALIST: Nordic Council Literature Prize 2024

Hafni Says is a radically experimental and completely unbridled book. It’s a novel about crisis and downfall, about the will to live, alienation, freedom, guilt and shame, and the heavy gaze of expectation. Simply put, it’s a novel about existence… Helle Helle has long proven that her authorship can’t be dismissed in a subordinate clause. Several of her novels already stand as masterpieces in Danish literature. Hafni Says is no exception.
Jury statement, Nordic Council Literature Prize

With this wonderful novel, Helle raises her standard from gold to platinum.
Vart Land

Helle Helle surpasses herself with Hafni’s shame and screw-ups… Like few writers, Helle Helle manages to reproduce herself in such a way that each new novel buds from the one(s) before it, not as a clone or a one-to-one copy, but as one of those small wonders that life (biological and literary) every once in a while bestows upon us. A kind of literary-evolutionary self-propagation, a self-refining process of cell division, the art of writing at its very best.
Berlingske, 6/6 stars

Hafni’s story makes you both laugh and cry. Full of situational comedy and consummate humour keen to the quirks of language. Full of sorrow and anxiety, simultaneously conveyed and assuaged by Helle’s marvellous writing… I envy anyone who is about to read this novel.
Politiken, 6/6 stars

Compact, witty and episodic – written in short sections that mix exquisite attention to detail with impressionistic interludes… You read Hafni Says like the smørrebrød (open sandwiches) it describes: in small delectable portions, nodding along to its observational precision, chewing over its subtle, layered flavours, wistfully yearning for more when it’s all over so suddenly.
Financial Times