Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen

She sings. Our song. Which is precisely when my heart begins again. Beats once more. It was meant to be. It was meant to be you. It was meant to be me and you. She walks over to me, and my world is totally silent. I only look at her, and the sensation within me is infinite. She takes hold of me and escorts me out of the door, and I don't resist. The spring night is invigorating. Nature has quietly come to life again, and that's all I hear. There's something beautiful in front of me. From Greenland to infinity, and back again... What a day to be alive. She reads the note I have been carrying around for two weeks. The spring night gives me life, and Sara kisses me. What a day to realise I'm not dead. Love has rescued me. And I realise that this is my coming-out story.

'Crimson and Clover,' she says.
'Over and over,' I reply.

Last Night in Nuuk follows a set of loosely associated living in Greenland's capital city: Fia, Inuk, Arnaq, Ivik, and Sara. Their lives, like the lives of people their age all over the world, are taken up with dating, sex, and partying, to different degrees. Fia is left by her boyfriend and, hooking up with Arnaq after a night of partying, discovers she's gay. Inuk knows he's gay, but Arnaq--the hard-drinking whirlwind at the novel's center--recklessly lets slip that he's been carrying on an affair with a well-known right-wing politician. Ivik is dumped by Sara, and discovers that she--he--is trans. There's a lot of self-discovery going on, this one night in Nuuk.

What is most surprising about Last Night in Nuuk, I suppose, is how familiar the lives of the protagonists is. A reader from outside Greenland who turns to the novel to get a glimpse of the unique features of life in the remote island's largest city will no doubt be, as I was, disappointed. Though it must be said that for Korneliussen, to the extent the novel is written for a world audience at all, this must be the point: look, we're not so out of the ordinary up here.

But even as a novel about hard-partying young people, Last Night in Nuuk really falls flat. Mostly, the prose lies at a level of abstraction that veers into cliche. ("She walks over to me, and my world is totally silent... the sensation within me is infinite...") The specific feelings and sensations of self-discovery are in short supply, and without them, the resonance between Fia's discovery of her sexuality and Ivik's discovery of his gender feels manipulative and cheap. Sara's choice to end every section of her chapter with a hashtag is near unforgiveable. Oh well.