Axel Jensen
Axel Burchardt Jensen was a Norwegian author born on February 12, 1932, in Trondheim, Norway. His early life was marked by his parents' separation and a sense of alienation, which led him to develop an interest in fantasy fiction and philosophy. Jensen traveled extensively in his youth, and his experiences influenced his literary works, which often explore themes of mysticism and personal enlightenment. His notable novels include "Dyretemmerens kors," which reflects his fascination with alchemy and esotericism, and "Ikaros: Ung mann i Sahara," a semi-autobiographical account of his journeys in the Sahara Desert.
Jensen's writing sometimes garnered comparisons to contemporaries like Jack Kerouac and J.D. Salinger, though he also faced criticism for explicit content. In addition to fiction, he engaged with diverse artistic mediums, including comic strips and poetry. He converted to Hinduism in 1973 and continued to write prolifically, producing works that addressed contemporary issues, including a defense of free speech in response to the Salman Rushdie fatwa. Diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1993, he remained active in writing and criticism until his death on February 13, 2003, leaving behind a rich legacy of literature and autobiography.
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Axel Jensen
Writer
- Born: February 12, 1932
- Birthplace: Trondheim, Norway
- Died: February 13, 2003
Biography
Axel Burchardt Jensen was born on February 12, 1932, in Trondheim, Norway. His parents, Finn Reidar Jensen and Dagny Burchardt Jensen, separated when he was eight, and Jensen moved with his father to Oslo. He was drawn to fantasy fiction at an early age, partly as an escape from the alienation he felt at school and home, and he began reading philosophy in high school. When he was nineteen, Jensen traveled to England, Italy, and the Middle East. Upon his return, he found he was unsuited to take over the management of the family meat canning business that his father had been preparing him for and he left home again, this time intending to join a Tibetan monastery, although he wound up traveling through the Sahara Desert instead. His travels opened him to new experiences and encouraged him to explore the intersection of philosophy and mysticism, especially through the writing of Carl Gustav Jung, Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff, and Pjotr Demianovitch Ouspensky.
His first novel, Dyretemmerens kors (1955), reflects the influence of these writers, as well as Jensen’s interest in alchemy, tarot, and other esoteric occult subjects, in its abstract retelling of the myth of Eden and the fall of man as a coming-of-age fable. His next novel, Ikaros: Ung mann i Sahara (1957; Icarus: A Young Man in the Sahara (1959), was semiautobiographical, based on his travels in the Sahara and his intellectual enlightenment about different systems of belief. The novel Line (1959; A Girl I Knew, 1963), which told of an idealistic young man’s disillusionment after falling in with a group of snobbish pseudointellectuals, earned him comparisons to Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, and other literary rebels in some critical circles, but was also criticized for its graphic sex and violence.
Jensen had been living on the Greek island of Hydra when his marriage to his first wife dissolved. He returned to Oslo, where he was briefly married to Louise Miller, an American, before he moved to London. His first novel written there, Epp (1965; Epp, 1967), was a futuristic story of a stultifying mechanistic society on another planet. A patent allegory of world concerns at the time, it spawned two sequels, Lul (1992) and Og resten star skrivd I stjerne (1995).
Jensen was awarded the Abraham Woursell Prize for his writing in 1966. At the same time, under the hospital supervision of a disciple of the controversial psychiatrist R. D. Laing, Jensen began experimenting with LSD, partly in response to depression stemming from his troubled relationship with Lena Folke Olsson, the mother of two of his children. Doktor Fantastik, a comic strip he helped produce upon his return to Norway in the late 1960’s, was modeled in part on these experiences.
In 1973, Jensen converted to Hinduism in order to marry the daughter of an Indian diplomat whom he had met in Stockholm. His experiences in New Delhi, where he traveled for his wedding, inspired two books published in 1974, the travelogue Mor India, and the poetry volume Onalila: En liten østvestpoesi. Increasingly, Jensen began to expand creatively into extraliterary media, including the illustrated text of Tago (1979), based on a movie of the same name. Jensen and his wife spent most of the next decade renovating a schooner they planned to use for travel to sites of western civilization. In 1989, outraged at the Islamic fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, he wrote Gud lesser ike romancer, a passionate defense of Rushdie that would earn him the Norwegian PEN Club’s Ossietzky Prise for the promotion and protection of free speech.
Jensen was diagnosed with amytrophic lateral sclerosis, a debilitating neurological disease, in 1993. He continued to write prodigiously and participate in literary conferences until he became completely bedridden in 2002, even turning out a series of articles criticizing the Norwegian Health Care system for the periodical Dagbladet. He produced one more book, Guru, before he died on February 13, 2003. Before his death he completed three volumes of autobiography, Junior (1978), Senior (1979), and Jumbo (1998), and participated in a film about his life, Livett set fra Nimbus.