Blacker than black – In “Jut Hassan”, full-time pop musician Jenny Haval recounts the depths of life’s mysterious plans: Literaturkritik.de

In “Gott Hassen,” full-time pop musician Jenny Haval recounts the depths of a life’s mysterious plans

Written by Sasha Siler

Book review/references

In a review recently published in a German music magazine God hated A book, named as a novel, he said, is a double-edged sword: if you read it at the right moment in your life, it will explain the world to you, if you read it exactly that way, it will be rather confused and directionless. In general, you can subscribe to this sentence, because Jenny Haval’s book, originally published in Norway in 2018, is not really a match. Is it a cultural-historical article? Is it the workshop report? Or is it a novel? Hard to say, especially since the book languishes towards its end like the Alejandro Jodorowsky film whose work reminds us here. It’s cool nonetheless, or maybe because of it.

I hate God It begins by describing a scene that can be found on a DVD by the black metal band Darkthrone: strange figures in the woods, the search for absolute darkness, the existential moment of total destruction and at the same time the building of existing bands, because it is precisely from this term, Bande, that feeds the word band that traditionally describes Musicians Association. Black metal as a lifestyle will play a major role in the episode, as will occultism. How do I give this pack of ideas artistic expression? How does the pagan opposition movement place itself in the context of contemporary Norwegian culture?

The first-person narrator searches for a reason for the hatred she cultivated from a young age. A hatred of everything that, in their eyes, constituted southern Norway: against Christianity, which had continually spread and been brutally supplanted by the original paganism (a staple of black metal). Against the official cultural heritage Knut Hamsun and Edvard Munch. Against school, against parents, against everything. With the advent of the Internet in the late 1990s, she found a way to channel her hatred. Not because, as everyone knows, it’s easy to spread hate online, but because she sees the web as a contemporary interpretation of the occult. The constant dissolution of people and things into pixels creates a space of unreal, mysterious, and illusory world that holds secrets and can be considered as a channel for occult practices. There is always some truth before or after the picture, that is, some truth outside the picture—a bit of new insight—but it is this reality that Haval wants to explore.

you read God hated As a very subjective cultural historical study of the way magic occupies the present, i.e. what black metal actually means as a cultural-historical movement, what modern magic consists of, and why the Internet, as we have seen, can be understood as a mysterious place, but also why film is a phenomenon Haunted by the meaning of Mark Fisher. The book does very well especially when it comes to the documentary and historical recordings. Perhaps a lesser quality novel, but here one has to first discuss what actually makes a novel. As a workshop report on making a movie, even if it is only played out in one’s imagination God hated But again impressive. Because, as mentioned, the final draft of the film is based on Jodorowsky, it is a fascinating quintessence of feminist occultism, which Jenny Haval championed in this book. And of course the title was chosen very well.