Gine Cornelia Pedersen - 'Zero' can be perceived as a deafening, desperate cry for help, even though the narrator proclaims, ‘I don’t want help. I like it at rock bottom. It feels glorious’, and on occasion does soberly examine how society deals with those with mental-health problems

Gine Cornelia Pedersen, Zero, Trans. by Rosie Hedger, Nordisk Books, 2018.




Gine Cornelia Pedersen's dbut novel won the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas First Book Award in its native Norway upon publication. Zero finds its young, female protagonist constantly torn between hope and despair, rage and confusion, as she tries to find her place in and, eventually, far outwith, society.


I tell her I’ve stopped taking my pills
I write that I’m still not well, that it’s making day-to-day life difficult
That I often do things I regret, and that there’s some sort of membrane between what I want to do and whatever I end up doing
That I really want to be an actor, but that it’s a dream that seems all too distant for the time being
I tell her I use and abuse alcohol and drugs, and that I’ve got a death wish that sometimes becomes difficult to ignore
That I don’t know who I am
That I change my mind as frequently as I change my socks
That I’m horrible to the people around me
That my sex life is depraved




Gine Cornelia Pedersen’s explosive debut made a big impact in Norway, drawing stylistic comparisons to ‘a punk-rock single’, and receiving, in 2013, the Tarjei Vesaas prize for the best first literary work in Norwegian. Now it’s available in English and Pedersen is currently putting the finishing touches to her third book and has also starred in the hit TV show Young and Promising.
Brilliant and unsettling, Zero charts the life of a distraught girl living in contemporary Norway, and in doing so takes the reader to hell and back via a route full of agonisingly astute perceptions about mental illness, interspersed with the odd, elusive moment of happiness. As the novel opens, the unnamed narrator, intelligent but still only ten years old, is already painfully aware that something is not quite right. ‘I think about death almost every day. I do the kind of things to my sister that suggest I’ve got hidden sociopath traits.’ She smokes, kisses five boys, worries about her parents and wants to be an actress. She has an ambitious plan: first escape the boredom of ordinary suburban life, then reach the promised land of Oslo and, ‘stand on stage. There’ll be spotlight on me and me alone.’
The move to the bright and happening capital doesn’t fulfil her dreams, however. The rebellion and classic bad behaviour of ‘an average angry, tormented teenager’ only amplify her despair. Dead-end jobs, love / hate relationships, vulnerability, confrontations with everything and everyone, a constant questioning of her own existence and the rejection of her mother’s love, plus a cocktail of sex, drugs, drink and a weird type of rock-and-roll eventually send her into a psychiatric ward, where she’s pumped full of medication.
She is left feeling empty: ‘There are no thoughts in my head at all. Zero’. However, she does hear plenty of voices, fighting for her attention:

‘I have two voices now: My Angry Self doesn’t like anyone […] wants to murder anyone and everyone, to drag the world into misery […] My Inner Self is calm. It has perspective and insight, it’s tolerant and longs for everyone to thrive.’

Striving to live fully in the present but surviving on benefits, while idealising her equally damaged friend and then making an impulsive decision to marry, all prove exhausting. Finally she takes a doomed trip to the dangerous Peruvian jungle, aiming to understand herself at last. But both the reality and hallucinations she experiences there are shocking, and the violence is truly palpable. She has entered the abyss.
Zero can be perceived as a deafening, desperate cry for help, even though the narrator proclaims, ‘I don’t want help. I like it at rock bottom. It feels glorious’, and on occasion does soberly examine how society deals with those with mental-health problems. The first-person, mostly short, staccato sentences build the novel’s intensity and only serve to highlight the book’s content – there are no unnecessary words to distract from the physical pain, the depression and the darkly emotional humour.
Pedersen offers no analysis of or explanation for the emotions and turmoil, for the destructive highs and lows her protagonist undergoes; nor does she explain her desire to be constantly present in ‘Life’. Her pared down prose simply lays it bare for all to see and experience. Translator Rosie Hedger does an excellent job, not shying away from both harsh and lyrical expressions.
Brutal and raw, Zero is not an easy read, but it also has poetic moments. It brings to memory Angels of the Universe by the Icelander, Einar Már Guðmundsson, which is another striking fictionalised account of the conflict between insanity, reality and creativity.
Suffice to say Zero’s gloriously joyful cover will first catch your eye, but the virtuoso language and content will be what leaves the lasting impression. - Ewa Sherman
www.eurolitnetwork.com/rivetingreviews-ewa-sherman-reviews-zero-by-gine-cornelia-pedersen/


This is Pedersen’s first (of two) novels and she has since made a name for herself as a TV star in Norway. This novel tells the story of a Norwegian girl, aged ten at the start of the novel and aged twenty-one by the end, who starts off by being somewhat sociopathic and, passing through teenage bad behaviour, has serious mental problems, spending some time in an institution, before being released and ultimately heading for Peru. Drugs, drink casual sex, violent behaviour, depression are all part of her problem. The novel is told in the first person, often in single, staccato sentences, as we follow her descent into Hell. Pedersen does not analyse or explain but merely shows what the unnamed narrator goes through. - www.themodernnovelblog.com/2018/07/24/gine-cornelia-pedersen-null-zero/
At the start of this novel, our unnamed narrator is ten years old, though she soon grows up. Already, at that age, she is showing sociopathic tendencies, something she readily admits. Pedersen tells her story, writing in mainly short staccato, first-person sentences. At ten, she has smoked, kissed five boys and has so much to offer.
She lives with her mother. Her parents are divorced. She is very fond of her father but despises her mother, her mother’s boyfriend and her own brother and sister. Her sole ambition is to go to Oslo.
As she gets older, she showing signs of teenage bad behaviour: drinking vodka, self-harming, smoking weed. I’m just an average angry, tormented teenager A classic case.
Things start to get worse. When I finally escape this dump, I’ll burn the entire fucking village to the ground. The village and everyone in it. Everyone apart from Grandma and Grandad and my cousins, anyway. I’ll spare most of my family, but everyone else can just die already. - The Modern Novel
read more here


One of the privileges of working for a journal for world literature like Asymptote is that I get to know some of the best translators, as well as getting an early peek at some of the things they are working on. When Rosie Hedger, one of the most promising young translators from Norwegian (she has also translated that wonderfully claustrophobic novel The Bird Tribunal by Agnes Ravatn), mentioned that she was unsure about the reception her most recent translation would have, because it is bold and mad, I was eager to read it. Additionally, it is published by Nordisk Books, whose previous publication Love/War was equally unusual but intriguing. So thank you very much to Rosie for sending me a copy of the book, but you know me well enough by now to realise that this has in no way swayed me to write positive stuff about it if I didn’t like it.
Luckily, I did like it! In fact, I was so captivated by it, that I read it in a couple of breathless hours sitting in my back garden at the weekend. It is very quick to read, written in something resembling a free verse style (short line breaks), but it’s certainly not an easy read. The unnamed narrator, a young girl with mental health problems, does horrible things to others and to herself; meanwhile, horrible things are done to her too. It is the machine-gun approach to storytelling, or one long, angry howl.
There are quite a few accounts of people suffering from mental health problems in literature, some of them very well-known, such as Girl, Interrupted, The Bell Jar, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, others far less so: Down Below by Leonora Carrington or Janet Frame’s An Angel at My Table. What they all have in common is a very unflattering perspective on daily life in a mental asylum, which is certainly present in this book too. However, all of the other books are written retrospectively, while Zero is written in first person, present tense, like a diary. It feels like speleology, like visiting the dark insides of someone’s ‘defective’ head. We witness each thought as it arises, often contradicting the previous sentence, all the jumps and starts and sudden turns. It can feel like trying to navigate a small boat in very rough seas and my advice would be to just give up navigation and allow yourself to be carried away by the monster waves.
The narrator is entirely self-absorbed. Like any child or adolescent she believes the world revolves around her. And she maintains this belief even as she grows up. Everyone else is described in relation to her. Alcohol, drugs, sex, friendships are consumed as casually as the cigarettes she half-smokes. Her self-hatred and doubt are so all-encompassing that they extend to anyone who loves her and believes in her. She pushes away her mother, her boyfriends, her girlfriend. How can they possibly love someone as screwed up and worthless as herself – that must make them either deceitful or worthless.
Her real problem is that she is so thin-skinned that she has no skin left at all, or as she puts it early on: ‘I absorb everything unfiltered’. At times you want to rush in and protect her, but then her self-destructive gene kicks in and you want to slap her and tell her to get a grip on herself.

I’m lucky to be alive, the doctors say
They’re idiots, every last one of them
They don’t realise that I’m actually very unlucky to be alive

There is no sugar-coating, no attempt at self-justification or excuses in this ‘punk rock’ saga. A doctor tells her that she has too much of the victim mentality, that she is feeling too sorry for herself and refusing to accept any responsibility. Part of the narrator understands and agrees with that, but then the rebellious voice starts shouting and she is unable to remonstrate with her.
You might ask yourself how much of this is autobiographical, since the narrator aspires to be an actor, and the author is best known for her acting role in a Norwegian TV series, but it doesn’t really matter. This is the rawest, most believable account of schizophrenia that I have ever come across (at least I assume it is schizophrenia, I’m not a trained doctor, but I’ve had a couple of friends with this affliction). The translation does an excellent job of capturing the fragmented, jolting nature of the work, the repetition, the almost incantatory poetry of it, the breathless present tense. I’m not surprised this won the Tarjei Vesaas First Book Award in 2013 – it is a remarkable and original piece of work.
- findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/witmonth-zero-by-gine-cornelia-pedersen/




Gine Cornelia Pedersen (b. 1986) debuted with this explosive novel, which won the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas First Book Award. Compared, in its home country of Norway, with a ‘punk rock single’, the unique lyrical style and frank description of life with mental health problems have come together to create one of the most exciting works of fiction from Scandinavia in recent years.