Denise Rose Hansen is a London-based Danish writer, editor, and founder of the independent press Lolli Editions. Her recent novel, Blue Sunset, is forthcoming from the Dorothy Project. The novel gives the reader access to its protagonist Maja’s interior process, laying bare certain aspects of her cogitation all while concealing the details of the central source of grief—the unnamed event, the loss of a child—that forms a sort of void at the center of the novel. I sat down with Denise Rose Hansen to discuss the inspiration for Blue Sunset, the significance of geography, literary history, and materiality to the novel, as well as its status as the final installment in a three-part series. The following is a reconstruction of the lost transcript of this conversation, to the best of our combined memory.
How did you approach Blue Sunset? Did you imagine it as a stand-alone novel or do you see it as an installment in a series?
I’ve come to see it as the ending to a series of three books, the second of which I’m writing at the moment. This happened involuntarily. After Blue Sunset was finished I found myself working on two novels at the same time, which wasn’t ideal. I realised that the three are of the same piece of fabric. Things change all the time while writing, it’s like moving through a landscape and the farther you go, the better you know the map. But if I had a map when setting out I would lose interest.
The novel is titled Blue Sunset. What is the significance of color to the novel or to the series of novels?
The sunsets in a particular village on the Ligurian coast turn blue at the end. I haven’t seen sunsets like that anywhere else. If you go one village up or one village down, the sunsets don’t look like that. Maja was bathed in that light as I wrote her. Eventually it seeped into the title. I thought of her almost like an inversion Juliet in D.H. Lawrence’s Sun, who has a sensual re-revival in Southern Italy sunbathing in the nude, babe on arm. It’s all quite kitsch, but I like how DHL put the perfect name on the tin without labouring it into something else. While Maja does feel sexy at times, mainly she’s heartbroken. She’s blue.
Grief is the unnameable thing that moves just beneath the surface throughout.
Before our conversation, I had a chat with our editor in chief here at minor lit[s] who mentioned in passing that your novel drew from elements of the color trio of films bu Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieślowski. Would you mind elaborating on how you were inspired by cinema and specifically Kieślowski‘s cinema?
Influence is so mysterious, isn’t it, you don’t really know how and why something stays in your consciousness. I watched Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy when I was in my late teens or early twenties and I hadn’t thought about it for a long time. Maybe it’s especially when something is formative that we forget about it, take it for granted. After my title had settled, the blue of it prompted me to rewatch the films, and I saw myself so clearly through them; I felt strangely connected to my younger self. I think rewatching them helped me see that the three books would make a triptych. It also made me want to connect more strongly with this younger self; I wanted to go back to Copenhagen in the writing.
I remember loving Blue and Red, and then feeling a bit like White didn’t quite fit in with the others. Do you have a favorite film in that series?
Blue was my favourite back then, but now it is Red. I think it is one of the most visually stunning films I’ve ever seen.
Returning to Blue Sunset, a good deal of the novel takes place on the Ligurian coast, as you mentioned, with the protagonist traveling around Europe a bit. What is the significance of geography to the series, specifically the setting of most of the novel in Europe, in Italy, on the coast in Livorno?
I think of my writing as European rather than English, or Danish for that matter. The English novel – I don’t have a claim to it. Danish – I don’t write in that language. The people in the books live in the world, they cross boundaries. I wouldn’t know how to write about someone who keeps up an everyday life in Denmark, or about someone who is supposed to be British. There’s always somewhere else, even if it’s out of view.
We live in a natural disaster, so it felt right to include it
Certain events in the novel — force majeure, let’s call them — punctuate the narration and jolt Maja out of her interiority, into the world around her in a grounded and embodied way. Would you mind talking a bit about the significance of natural disaster to the novel?
We live in a natural disaster, so it felt right to include it. I remember watching Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia with my sister and it seemed to send her into a kind of catatonic state afterwards. We couldn’t even speak about it. This was just after the 2010 ash cloud that shut down European air space. Mount Etna is erupting right now, and when I was in Edinburgh on the weekend a bookshop was flooded, destroying stock and knocking out the electrical systems. I hadn’t even noticed it was raining.
The text of the novel deals somewhat obliquely with the loss of Maja’s child, and yet the plot seems to circle around the question of how to handle this deceased child’s ashes. What is the significance of grief to the novel?
Grief is the unnameable thing that moves just beneath the surface throughout.
Ashes fall on Europe in the wake of a natural disaster, Maja’s mind turns relentlessly around the question of her child’s ashes, and meanwhile she contemplates the ashes of Romantic poets in vials in archives and reading rooms across Europe. Can you discuss the significance of materiality to the novel?
It’s a counterpart to visuality. How a surface, how someone feels to touch. Visual artists and designers get to deal with this all the time and I love that a writer can choose to. As a person I think I’m very sensitive to how things feel, or I just particularly like writing about it, also when a texture is uncomfortable. Describing a texture allows you to not mention the thing.
[W]hen you’re walking around where Shelley died with volcanic ash in your hair, you can’t help but read the Romantic poets.
Even though the novel is written in third person, the reader gets a good deal of interiority and a sort of privileged access to Maja’s thought process. For example:
“A sudden wave, and something might protrude from the water, stick out of the morass of her mind, something that was not visible before, something brown and moist and porous, like half-deteriorated wood pilings jutting into view and casting wavy reflections in the water (29).”
How did you approach the narration of Maja’s thoughts?
It’s so interesting to me that you say that. First-person, female interiority has been frequently discussed and often criticised in recent years – by certain people we shouldn’t listen to anyway – as somehow insufficiently novelistic. I wanted to write in the third person to show that interiority is a question of sensibility. Having said that, I’ve had to go back and check several times after writing, as I sometimes seem to remember it being in the first person, perhaps because it’s so close to Maja. The voice is right there on her ear. Someone recently told me about a novel by a Brazilian writer where you think it’s written in the third person quite far into the novel when you realise it’s been in the first person all along. I want to read it.
Narrative perspective is something I’ve thought about a lot for the series, even if it hasn’t been entirely conscious. The next book begins in a plural voice and then gradually scales down into a smaller we and ultimately an I.
Why did you choose to make Maja be a scholar of Keats?
Is she? Haha, I don’t even know. I think you’re referring to that postcard from Keats House, which Maja wrote to her future self. But yes, she’s someone who used to go to the library a lot but doesn’t much anymore. I was living for a few months near where Percy Shelley died off the coast at La Spezia. Byron and co. held his funeral pyre right there on the beach. Again, kitsch. This was a few autumns ago while ashes were flying over Italy, and I think when you’re walking around where Shelley died with volcanic ash in your hair, you can’t help but read the Romantic poets.
I also read Fiona Sampson’s biography about Mary Shelley and came across a letter Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne. She describes trying to locate Percy, who’s gone missing somewhere along the Ligurian coast, lugging herself up and down the coast only weeks after a miscarriage. Eventually she discovers that he drowned. It is the most remarkable piece of writing I’ve read of Mary Shelley’s. She takes Gisborne through it all in meticulous detail, starting by actually drawing the layout of the place they were staying at the time.
Blue Sunset is part response to that letter two hundred years later, part processing a visit to a crematorium as a child in Denmark, and all the echoes and ash clouds that have gathered around both.
Blue Sunset will be available from the Dorothy Project on October 6th.
Denise Rose Hansen is a Danish writer who lives in London. Founder of the award-winning independent press Lolli Editions, she is now an editor at Penguin where she publishes contemporary and classic literature in translation.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
