Danish Literary Magazine AUTUMN
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Contents Debutant 03 Signe Schlichtkrull Novels 04 Benn Q. Holm 05 Erling Jepsen 06 Efie Beydin 07 Ida Jessen 08 Jakob Ejersbo 09 Pia Juul 10 Simon Fruelund History 11 Julia Butschkow 12 Keld Conradsen 13 Peter Tudvad Biography 14 Karin Lützen 15 Adda Hilden Children’s Books 16 Something very precious, something completely universal Crime 18 Mikkel Birkegaard 19 Recently sold
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Evicted Literature has always been used – and should still be used – to show us ways to acquire insight into the lives of others and be given greater understanding and, not least, tolerance for so-called ‘others’, who may one day be ourselves. By Mai Misfeldt, translated by John Mason
Schlichtkrull is a mature beginner, and this makes itself felt in this very calm and coolly assured book, which unlike that of many younger first-time writers, has no affinity with the author’s own personal life. ‘The Bailiff’ is about those people who have no home and about those who do not feel at home anywhere. In other words it is about both actual and psychological homelessness. The novel is a portrait of people in today’s Denmark who for various reasons have got to the point where they have no chance of making ends meet. And it is a portrait of one person, the bailiff herself, Merete Andersen, who in her daily life has to represent law, propriety and order but who behind that façade has at least as much chaos – not in her finances but in her life – as the people she evicts onto the street. Merete Andersen herself does have a home in the physical sense, but homeliness is in short supply. Her husband lies with his back to her on the sofa, and one day he is gone. It transpires that he feels more at home with another woman!
We follow three eviction cases in parallel and the fates of the individuals linked to them. Throughout the novel they come to form a kind of pattern or network. We meet the simple soak, Susanne, and her inconstant lover, we meet the young mother with her child, and finally we meet an elderly man, evicted by mistake. Merete Andersen is not a particularly emotional or sharing person, but she has always conducted herself correctly and with propriety towards the people she has had to evict. Now, however, she has done an injustice towards someone and it is vital that she corrects her error. She finds, though, that it is not as easy to deal with people as it is with rules and the law. Signe Schlichtkrull portrays these people with both their strengths and their weaknesses. She does so both with a breadth and with a quiet matterof-factness – which is further stressed by her very short sentences. The psychology lies between the lines. Schlichtkrull is never sentimental, just as her characters are not victims but just people like anyone else – only not in the same circumstances. Each of them has their cross to bear, their own path to follow and from time to time these paths meet. ‘The Bailiff’ points up the fact that literature has always been used – and still should be used – to show us those aspects of reality that we do not ourselves see from our own limited perspective. It points to ways in which we can get an insight into the lives of others and acquire greater understanding and, not least, tolerance for those so-called ‘others’, who may one day be ourselves.
| DEBUTANT |
Since olden times we have used the term ‘the King’s bailiff’ in Denmark to describe the legally authorized official whose job is to pay people a visit and to seize their property or throw them out on the street if they owe the state money. Being a bailiff must in the nature of things involve encounters with many unfortunate human destinies. Signe Schlichtkrull, who is both a qualified journalist and a product of Denmark’s Writers’ School, made a radio programme in 2005 in which she followed the work of a bailiff. This experience has remained with her and has now been given artistic form in her novel Fogeden (‘The Bailiff’), which marks Schlichtkrull’s literary debut.
Signe Schlichtkrull Fogeden / The Bailiff Samleren 2009, 229 pp. Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Karen Vad Bruun Phone: +45 33 75 55 55 karen_bruun@gyldendal groupagency.dk
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Strangers in the night Europeans and Americans clash fatally in this novel about love and culture in the age of globalization. By Lise Garsdal, translated by John Mason
On the individual level what we have is a young woman waiting for ‘life to begin’, who, in her attempts to lay her impatience to rest, embarks on the Grand Tour to a Europe in which her family has its roots and from which her grandfather has brought home a number of soldier’s tales. As a child of her time, Ashlyn jumps into her trainers each time existential unrest or the pain of an aborted love affair make themselves felt – as a kind of compensation for the lack of inner progress. From her single room in anonymous hotels across Europe she clings initially to the picture of her own flat and the safe legal career waiting for her back in Pittsfield. But loneliness also has a liberating effect – Ashlyn becomes increasingly ready for life to start in earnest. Parallel to this, from a less than classy hotel room in the German provinces, we get an insight into a particular variant of the American dream that has been lived out from a starting point in the British working class. For Dean the glam rock band, Spell, provided
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a route to fame and fortune in a powerful but shortlived roll at the absolute top of the hit list. Now he tours the European suburbs, lonely, his hair dyed and his hits as tired as the body he has put through so much. As he recognises himself, he is desperately in need of ‘plan B’. Fate brings these two torn souls together, from which point the physical and linguistic landscape tears itself away from tristesse, acquires colour and complexion. America and Europe fall in love with each other yet again, and yet again it has dramatic consequences. When Ashlyn finally sets off for home, she is carrying, literally, something of Europe back with her – a little life that at last puts her own into relief.
| NOVELS |
In his new novel, Den Gamle Verden (‘The Old World’), Benn Q. Holm is entirely in line with one of the tendencies of Danish literature in directing his gaze outwards rather than inwards. The home stage is abandoned in favour of the larger international scene. In fact, the novel follows the restless movement of the road movie – here across a European landscape. In the same way as it traces elsewhere the typical cast of character of the genre. In focus are two lonely souls, in the background the painfully rattling ghosts of the past and in the foreground the picturesque extras they meet on their journey’s winding path. The story adopts the alternating perspectives of the failed British rock star, Dean, and the somewhat younger American law student, Ashlyn.
Seen in a wider perspective, the encounter between the British Dean and the American Ashlyn represents a classic conflict – or continuing dialogue – between the sense of self harboured by Americans and Europeans respectively. Together Miss America and Mr. Europe travel back through their forefathers’ war-torn Europe, sensing the past with the speed and intensity of the tourist and adjusting along their way their fixed ideas about then and now – and all with Benn Q. Holm’s agreeably ambling prose.
Benn Q. Holm Den gamle verden / The Old World Lindhardt og Ringhof 2009 278 pp. Foreign Rights Susanne Gribfeldt
‘The Old World’ is, then, partly an intimate story about love against the odds, partly a larger and more open narrative about the meeting of cultures, which is inevitable given modern existence – a narrative that itself weaves the family histories of European and American together into that famous and beautifully varied patchwork.
Phone: +45 33 69 50 00 susanne.gribfeldt@lindhardt ogringhof.dk Previous titles translated into German and Russian
Bit Parts Until now Erling Jepsen’s literary landscape has been Southern Jutland, his childhood homeland. Erling Jepsen’s four novels – including the two books that have very successfully been made into films, Kunsten at græde i kor (‘The Art of Crying in Chorus’) and Frygtelig lykkelig (‘Fearfully Happy’) – and innumerable plays take place in that region of Denmark and work with entirely personal experiences. By Ulrich Sonnenberg, translated by John Mason
Helene, a young drama student with eating disorders, dreams about having a career as an actor. She loves the world of the theatre and has talent, though no more so than many others. By chance she gets to know the director of a minor theatre, but he is less interested in her than in her little dog, which is perfectly suited to the play he is in the process of putting on. In fact, the dog proves to be exceptionally talented – which is a fact Helene has considerable difficulty taking on board: ‘It can’t be that easy either, when everything you have dreamed of goes pear-shaped, and then a dog goes and succeeds.’ Helene knows that the path to success in the theatre often demands rather unusual initiatives. ‘There are some of us who go the whole way.’ One morning the dog is found dead and, to save the production, Helene takes on the role of the dog. However, she is not entirely happy with this bit part with no lines either. Helene has still not reached her goal, for she believes that she is a considerably better actor than Beate, who has taken the main part in the play. After a se-
ries of clashes and bitching typical of the stage, Beate suddenly disappears and is found dead in Copenhagen harbour a couple of days later. Helene appears to have nothing to do with it. For ‘she was no murderer – how could anyone believe that? She was just an actor hunting for a role.’ In ‘Bit Parts’ Erling Jepsen takes a look behind the props of stage work and plays elegantly with the daydreams and fantasies of omnipotence that fill the mind of a young woman who consciously or unconsciously – and Erling Jepsen shrewdly allows the answer to the question to hang in the air until the very end – increasingly makes herself into a work of art. ‘In her attempt to find out what is expected of her, what draws attention to her and makes her interesting, everything become a stage. Even her personal life.’ This is how the author himself sums up his main character. Helene is prepared to go a long way to win the favour of the public, for she is convinced that ‘if you’re good enough and successful enough, other rules apply. Then you can do what you like – and then everyone will forgive you, even for the most unbelievable things.’
| NOVELS |
In his new novel Biroller (‘Bit Parts’) Erling Jepsen has shifted his plot to Copenhagen, where he has himself now lived for over thirty years. Fortunately, however, he has not given up his role as ‘his life’s detective’ entirely, for the action in ‘Bit Parts’ is played out in a theatrical environment – and there he lives and works at home as a successful dramatist.
Erling Jepsen Biroller / Bit Parts People’s Press 2009, 244 pp. Foreign Rights Leonhardt & Høier Anneli Høier Phone +45 33 13 25 23 anneli@leonhardt-hoier.dk
Erling Jepsen may have left ‘darkest Jutland’ behind him in ‘Bit Parts’, but he retains his own particular brand of artfulness, with which he uses a crow-black humour and nothing far short of the comedy of the absurd to tell us about the deepest abysses of human experience. And the deeper you delve into Erling Jepsen’s cosmos, the more often you find the laughter seems to stick in your throat.
Previous titles translated into Dutch German Norwegian Spanish Swedish
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’In art we are all foreigners’ Efie Beydin’s latest book, Kantate til Emilia (‘Cantata to Emilia’) consists of four long stories from four very different realms of consciousness, although passing links are made between their characters. By Lilian Munk Rösing, translated by John Mason
The story keeps to the language of the characters. The young Ukrainian Lola in the first story chatters on about clothes and friends and sweet puppies. But her banal teenage chatter is interspersed with precise poetic metaphors and provides unsentimental evidence for the homesickness of an exile and the longings of women. From the Ukrainian Lola we jump to a completely different language in the second story. In the disconnected and cynical mumblings of an old man (‘Aye. Well. Yes. Dry in the gullet’) sprinkled with quotations from the Odyssey and poetry cool and marbled as water, the portrait of the life of a less than sympathetic gravedigger in the churchyard is painted, with his one-eyed cat, Polyphemus, and the memories of his wife Emilia. This Odysseus, at once parodic and stately, ends up as a Poseidon foaming with sea-drift,
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when the story culminates at the end by going into antique metre, giving us an account of the gravedigger’s sea-baptism with a Ukrainian nymph in imposing epic hexameters. The third story, told by the newly graduated artist Walat, includes a bewitching portrait of a vile maternal figure – the narrator’s oily-skinned, food-besmeared and thoroughly disgusting Turkish grandmother, who has to be transported from Turkey to Copenhagen in the family car. The elaborate portrait of the foul grandmother acts as a spot in the vision of the young man, whose desire has yet to find its direction.
Efie Beydin Kantate til Emilia
The final story about the middle-aged Gerd, who has two grown-up children with another woman, revolves around Gerd’s fascination for her young Pakistani student, Saida, who disappears from her course, and is a story about a sedentary stay-at-home who suddenly experiences her home territory as something foreign. Using a prose that is as poetic as it is unsentimental, Beydin’s writing allows us access to foreign consciousnesses – and in her consciousnesses to project what we might call a universal foreignness. As Walat replies to a happy American who thinks that no one is foreign in art, ‘In art we are all foreigners’. Beydon’s stories make up a rare cosmopolitan addition to the Danish literary landscape.
| NOVELS |
In the first story we are inside the head of a very young Ukrainian woman who is seeking her fortune in Rome. In the second story we are still in Rome but inside the head of an old gravedigger, who reads the Odyssey and cools his head in the marble-green water trough in the churchyard. In the third story the scene changes to Copenhagen and to the mind of a young man of Turkish origins who has just completed his course at the Academy of Arts. The fourth story is the only one narrated in the third person but it continues along the line of the narrated consciousness, this time that of a middle-aged woman in a quiet mid-life crisis, who has a suburban terraced house in Rødovre and a job as language teacher for immigrants settling in Denmark.
Lindhardt og Ringhof
Efie Beydin Kantata til Emilia / Cantata to Emilia Lindhardt og Ringhof 2009 245 pp. Foreign Rights Phone: +45 33 69 50 00 susanne.gribfeldt@lindhardt ogringhof.dk
Sex as self-medication The question of when a mother abandons her child is linked to a presentation of the role of lover. This is seen in a completely fresh light by Ida Jessen, who has made a name for herself as one of the great realist writer in the Nordic countries. By May Schack, translated by John Mason
Solvej’s infidelity started as a game. She could not say no to the older married man who was so crazy about her. The affair ended up tearing her entire life apart. Now she is stuck in this isolated house in the woods, alone and without work and with the prospect of seeing her daughter every other weekend. One sentence rings in her ears. ‘She was a mother who abandoned her child.’ Her own mother says: ‘Being a mother means seeing your child first.’ Solvej is in the process of burning up inside. She ‘shines with a nervous light’ and in her restless condition she allows the practical, helpful and married neighbour, Søren, to enter far too far into her life. The way in which a mixture of loss, desire and disgust leads her into the arms of the primitive Søren is convincingly presented, while she also adds new facets to the portrayal of the lover role. For what we have here is sex used as a drug, a form of self-medication, which is intended to calm her highly strung condition. The theme finds a variation in the portrait of the
young woman, Manne, who in her state of infatuation wants more and more from her married lover. This intensity, which is driven by sex being used as a kind of speed, ends in fatal consequences. Sensual abandonment is whipped up even while driving a car, and they end up running over a child.
| NOVELS |
Solvej, the health visitor – ‘32-year-old and ruined by love’, as she says of herself – travels from the Copenhagen area to a small, remote village in the furthest reaches of the country. Here she installs herself in a deserted house in the woods not far from the nearby town of Hvium. She has no work, knows no one – but she wants to be near her 5-year-old daughter, whom she has surrendered to the child’s father after their divorce. He has settled in Hvium with a new partner. And he is not cooperative.
Sex is dangerous when it is used as a drug. These are entirely new aspects of female desire that Ida Jessen is showing us. What it is perhaps least about is sexual desire. We can, interestingly, deduce from the novel that it is more in line with other forms of self-destructive behaviour such as self-mutilation or anorexia. Solvej ends up settling down in her life with a new place to live, a new man and her daughter comes to live with her. She prefers not to think of her past. This she is, however, forced to do when her daughter confronts her with her maternal neglect fifteen years later. The child holds the trump card. ‘I was so small. I didn’t understand. I thought you would look after me.’
Ida Jessen Børnene / The Children Gyldendal 2009, 320 pp. Foreign Rights Leonhardt & Høier Anneli Høier
The clash between children and a generation of parents who followed their own ends is becoming a familiar theme in modern Danish literature. In Ida Jessen’s version we understand both sides. Her realism is not only psychologically refined but also always has existential undertones. In a couple of earlier novels, which are also played out in Hvium – Ida Jessen’s Danish equivalent to William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County – the story has centred around guilt, grief and forgiveness. This time it is abandonment that is the existential category.
Phone: +45 33 13 25 23 anneli@leonardt-hoier.dk Previous titles translated into Dutch German Norwegian Spanish Swedish
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| NOVELS |
The spiral of catastrophe By Klaus Rothstein, translated by John Mason Jakob Ejersbo is one of those figures in Danish literature who died young. He was only 40. His breakthrough came in 2003 with his novel Nordkraft (‘Nordkraft’). After this he did not live to publish anything else, but his large-scale three-volume prose work has now appeared, which takes the reader to Tanzania in particular, where Jakob Ejersbo himself lived for several years prior to the novel’s timeframe, which extends from 1982 to 1986. And seldom has anyone written anything so insistent and impassioned, so glowing hot and ice-cold, so heartfelt and so cynical. The trilogy consists of three elements – novel, Eksil (‘Exile’), followed by stories, Revolution (‘Revolution’), followed by novel, Liberty (‘Liberty’). And do notice the titles! They have a raw power and in-built drama that are perfectly justified by the destinies and events contained in the books. Yet the titles are not bound by time or place, by language or nation or skin colour. They express a set of fundamental conditions and longings of human existence. In ‘Exile‘, Samantha is daughter of an alcoholic mother and an emotional redneck, a unfaithful and violent father, whose idea of child-rearing involves hitting his daughters without cause or warning. The family is English, resident in Tanzania, where they run a hotel, which in reality is just a cover for the father’s murky jobs as mercenary and arms smuggler across the continent. While the 15-year-old daughter is at boarding school several hundreds of kilometres from home, the mother spends her time downing Sundowners one after the other and at all times of the day, while the father has it off with anything that has a pulse (to use Samantha’s expression). The parent’s marriage falls apart, and the mother travels back to England. But mother and daughter do not have the same
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homeland, for Samantha has grown up in Africa and feels more black than white. ‘I am grey inside,’ she reveals. Wherever she is, she does not quite belong. She neglects her schooling, lies and cheats, drinks and experiments with drugs. In the first line of the novel Samatha looks up at the light on the water’s surface as she swims over the sandy seabed. In the final line her grave is filled in in one of the most brutally felt climaxes I can remember reading. As is shown by the cyclical construction from first to last line – from water and life to earth and death – Jakob Ejersbo was a deliberate and original writer, who was not only able to maintain an artistic overview of the antipoetry of existence but was also capable of describing it in finely narrated and captivating language. ‘Exile’ is an electrifying novel, and its final chapter – which gives the novel its name – shocks the reader as a shattering highpoint of modern Danish literature. Jakob Ejersbo
The stories in ‘Revolution’ are a direct extension of ‘Exile’, and Samantha continues to leaves her mark. Once again we are in Tanzania (though not only there), and it is still extremely ugly and violent though at the same time full of dreams and longing.
Exil / Exile Gyldendal 2009, 283 pp. Jakob Ejersbo Revolution / Revolution Gyldendal 2009, 304 pp.
‘Revolution’ presents Jakob Ejersbo as a writer of prose who is at once unromantic and full of tenderness, in love with and obsessed by Africa, sensitive to the continent’s narratives of destiny, humanist and critical towards the racist deposits inside our heads, and this makes him stand out as a unique white black in Danish literature, related to the mixed people of the stories who appear as a patchwork of religions and cultures, habits, languages and colours, some Greenland, some Denmark, some Africa, some black, some white, a host of foreign and forever exiled…
Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Phone: +45 33 75 55 55 sofie_voller@gyldendal groupagency.dk Previous titles translated into Dutch, German, Estonian Finnish, German, Swedish
The Killing of Halland By Lasse Horne Kjældgaard, translated by John Mason
Already in the first scene of the novel, the main character, Bess, tells her partner, Halland, that she would like to look like the main character in the detective series they are watching on TV. Later, however, she remarks upon the discrepancy between detective fiction, in which everything is solved at the end, and the completely normal, unpredictable and disorganised mishmash of real life. As a writer Bess is able to deliver a succinct description of the means whereby the detective genre enthralls us: ‘A murder, not too bestial. After that, a detective, maybe a couple of the detective’s personal problems, but otherwise details of the victim, clues, inconsistencies, jobs to do, traces, blind alleys, explanation, solution.’ She knows only too well that this is not how it goes in real life. Only three pages into the novel she wakes up to a killing – of Halland. He lies dead, having been shot down by a hunting rifle on the square outside their home in a small town in the provinces, without her having the faintest idea why or by whom. It is that kind of secret that traditionally gets the plot of a detective story under way. There is a mystery – something that is concealed – and before we turn the last page we want to have an exposure and a solution. That is not, however, how things work in ‘The Killing
of Halland’. The crime – if indeed it was a crime – remains unsolved. Instead, the novel centres upon Bess, the first person narrator, and we are allowed to get under her skin. Not too far under, however, for she is shy and pretty impossible. She is in shock and in mourning, but a host of other thoughts and conflicting feelings make themselves felt after the murder. The life she had lived before she moved in with Halland ten years earlier, becomes a reality again. Her ex-husband and her daughter, whom she left, turn up. As does a mysterious young pregnant woman with doe-like eyes, who insists that she is Halland’s niece. Her neighbour, however, disappears. And weird text messages keep coming in from Halland’s mobile telephone. Many odd but not necessarily significant events follow in the wake of Halland’s death. The distraught and distanced Bess tells the story of her relationship with Halland in fragments, almost as though to herself – and she becomes aware how little they actually knew about each other and how transient and illusory the intimacy between them was. Secrets belong, therefore, to the order of the day – and they do not break that order as it might seem in the world of detective fiction. And where there is always a motive behind the actions in detective stories, Bess looks back on her own actions with doubt and perhaps regret. Was it right of her, for example, to leave her husband and daughter for Halland? Even after ten years with Halland she is still not sure. ‘Doesn’t everyone look back on his or her doings with incomprehension?’ she asks.
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Pia Juul, who is unquestionably one of the most highly regarded lyrical poets of her generation, has simultaneously made a substantial contribution as a prose writer, for example with her novel Skaden (‘The Damage’) and her collections of short stories Mit forfærdelige ansigt (‘My Awful Face’) and Dengang med hunden (‘Back then with the Dog’). A critic once remarked that Juul’s works almost always contain an underlying criminal motive. This comes right to the surface in Mordet på Halland (‘The Killing of Halland’) , her second and most recent novel.
Pia Juul Mordet på Halland / The Murder of Halland Tiderne Skifter 2009, 187 pp. Foreign Rights Emma Tibblin Stilton Agency Phone: +46 73 673 09 32 emma@stilton.se Sold to The Netherlands Sweden Previous titles translated
‘The Murder of Halland’ dispels fiction with secondary fiction and invites the reader to question the relationship between life and fiction in general and the detective story in particular.
into German, Hungarian, Spanish, Swedish
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The World and Varvara In this simple prose a complex tracery is composed made up of many different life stories woven together. By Lilian Munk Rösing, translated by John Mason
You might write: ‘I was aroused by the sight of the young woman’s bikini bottom by the pool’. Fruelund doesn’t do that. Instead he uses the little word ‘smile’ to draw an unmistakeable parallel between the young woman’s anatomy and the facial expression of the observing ‘I’: ‘I can see that she has little smiledimples, one above each cheek in the curve of her back./ I smile.’ You might write at length about the way the smiling ‘I’ narrator and the woman with the dimples frolic between the sheets one summer’s night by the sea, but if you are Simon Fruelund, you let your readers fantasize about what happens between the bit when the pair are swimming together in the dying light of a summer’s night and the following passage, which describes a morning of haze and calm sea. In Fruelund, sex (and violence) are things that play themselves out on the blanks between two sentences or two passages. In this simple prose – through parallel main sentences, external observation, suggestion, omission, showing rather than telling – a complex tracery is composed made up of many different life stories woven together. The first person narrator is an author and in the midst of a commission, which is to write the memoirs of the nearly 80-year-old Varvara Eng.
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In Varvara’s company he meets the cool photographer, Knirke (the woman with the dimples above her cheeks), falls in love with her and leaves his partner, Johanne, who is a hysterical poetess with feminist sympathies and masochistic tendencies. During all this Knirke and the narrator separately travel the world. We get the story of racy Varvara (who ‘has lived nine lives’ and who has had one husband after the other die in the backwash of her vitality), the love story of the first person narrator and the photographer plus a whole series of life stories from the world at large held together as snapshots using the ‘pass-the-parcel’ principle of the itinerant tale. However, the book is more about how to tell a story than which stories are told. Varvara’s story ends up existing in two versions – that of the narrator, which is quite a short book, and that of the journalist, Gunilla, a door-stopper of a biography, which, according to the publisher’s editor, is ‘what people want’. Fruelund’s novel does not, then, simple practise minimalist literary prose but also addresses this literary form’s (slim) chances on the market. Rather than telling the story of ‘The World and Varvara’, Fruelund’s book is a story about narration. This is not to suggest that it simply closes around itself in a meta-literary way, for the literary question of how to tell a story is at the same time an existential question about what a life story is. And Fruelund writes with a stylistic perfection that is a pleasure to read.
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You could write: ‘Varvara met a young actor, then a lord, after that a cricketing star, followed by an Indian professor and lastly a waiter’. But not if your name is Simon Fruelund. Then you’d write: ‘Varvara met a young actor./ Varvara met a lord./ Varvara met a cricketing star./ Varvara met an Indian professor./ Varvara met a waiter.’
Simon Fruelund Verden og Varvara / The World and Varvara Gyldendal 2009, 151 pp.
Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Phone: +45 33 75 55 55 sofie_voller@gyldendal groupagency.dk Previous titles translated into Hungarian, Italian
The big taboo Julia Butschkow’s writing shows a remarkable development and greater maturity in her story of a grandfather’s Nazi past By Klaus Rothstein, translated by John Mason
The narrator is a mentally unbalanced young woman. A drop-out student, lonely and depressive, she holds onto a random job at the watchmaker’s on Copenhagen Central Station. Her father came from West Germany to Denmark in the wild flower-power days, and met a girl by the Stork Fountain in the centre of Copenhagen, which was at the time the mustering point for all the city’s flower children. They fell in love and had a daughter, but when the father fell into the arms of other women and of love with no strings attached, the mother started up a new family in Jutland, and subsequently travelled to Goa to practise yoga. Back in Copenhagen the father keeps up his consultancy as a psychologist while at the same time brooding over an untold story about what his own father did during the Second World War. One day a young, skinny youth walks through the door to the watchmaker’s. He has recognised the young woman and introduces himself as her German cousin. They have not seen each other for 20 years, for the father has broken off all contact with his parents and the rest of the family, but now the cousin, an artist, has come to Copenhagen to exhibit – himself. He also reveals to his cousin the great family taboo. Opa was an archaeologist. That much the young woman had learnt from her father. What he has kept under wraps is that at the same time her grandfather wrote a philosophical doctoral thesis in which
he defended the idea of racial purity. It came to the notice of Himmler himself, and Opa was caught up in the work of breeding more racially pure Germans and exterminating the Polish Jews. Her knowledge of him has only been very peripheral, for her father had always kept himself well away from his homeland in an attempt to become the perfect Dane. In the post-war period a German background is no proper platform, but it does not prove to be so easy to cast off a country, a language and a family history. When he makes a rare visit to Berlin, the grandmother says to her son that while he may have finished with Deutschland, Deutschland has not finished with him. And true enough, as Opa lies on his deathbed, his son is obliged to return to the father he has always hated and despised, not only for his Nazism but also for the emotional coldness, the lack of love and the intimidating threats, the subjugation and the insecurity that filled their childhood home. And his daughter is forced to follow him – not to be reconciled with her family but to understand herself. At all events ‘Apropos Opa’ describes a large number of different milieus for three generations of the family. A Germany bombed to bits during the final hours of the war, the divided family’s reunion, the traumatic and impossible notion of normality in the post-war period, the anti-authoritarian dream of the flower-power children in the way-out 60’s – and the inherited traumas of our time, which leave their marks as psychological scars and perverse views of the body. The novel has depth in its content, a lightness of linguistic touch and a precision in its portraits, which promises well for the future of a young and talented author, who with this change of form shows a remarkable development and a greater maturity.
| HISTORY |
With her stunning and liberatingly good novel Apropos Opa, Julia Butschkow (b. 1978) has won the positive attention of many reviewers. Here is an author with something very special that she burns to tell us.
Julia Butschkow Apropos Opa / Apropos Opa Samlerens Forlag 2009, 202 pp. Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Karen Vad Bruun Phone: +45 33 75 55 55 karen_bruun@gyldendal groupagency.dk
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Between memory and suppression A richly toned and ambivalent borderland – between past and present, Germany and Denmark, inner and outer, homeland citizen and stateless refugee, decency and fascism, grief and love, war and peace, oblivion and suppression. By Mikkel Bruun Zangenberg, translated by John Mason
In other words the book sets up a richly toned and ambivalent borderland – between past and present, Germany and Denmark, inner and outer, homeland citizen and stateless refugee, decency and fascism, grief and love, war and peace, oblivion and suppression. The novel ranges from the coolly distanced to the deeply gripping as it explores the advanced double tie between the mother-son relationship and the son’s own relationship to his native country, his lovers, his withdrawn father and his brother Kurt, the accountant and dedicated homebody. In his expedition into this inflamed and, in part, politically topical border country, Conradsen runs a clear risk as a writer. The risk is to cede to unequivocal sermonizing – memory is good, suppression insidious; Nazis
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and nationalists are bad, lefties are good, and so on. A significant portion of the novel’s quality lies in the fact that Conradsen succeeds in navigating around this kind of black-and-white formula. Using the novelist’s understanding and power (which fortunately can be distinguished from the journalist’s far too frequently incomplete half-reasonings) Conradsen succeeds in writing up the more distressing and intransigent intermediary zones between simple extremes. The mother includes both good and evil; the same is true of the narrator and by and large all the characters in the novel’s borderland. The most unsympathetic of these are probably bit parts such as the butcher Rahtje and the teacher Gormsen – Nazi sympathisers from Sønderborg who switch horses with lightning speed after the war, hush the story up and repent nothing. But even here Conradsen avoids making Rahtje and Gormsen into anything other than minor incarnations of evil. When the narrator returns home, both are dead, and the grandchild of one of them serves the narrator listlessly but more or less amicably at the local inn. And then an extraordinary thing happens, for the temperature of the reader rises imperceptibly as the novel proceeds, as the plot moves forward towards the dramatic pressure points that were concealed in the mother’s soul and in her life.
| HISTORY |
Keld Conradsen’s third novel Stemte s’er (‘Stressed S’s’) is shaped as a contemporary launchpad for a complicated drama of reminiscence taking place between the dead mother and the writing author/son, and also as a political novel that sets out an explicit criticism of dominant refugee policy in Denmark in our day. The starting point for the plot is the fact that the author/narrator’s mother, Erika Philippa Wund, has died in Sønderborg at the age of 79. Her middle-age son, originally trained as a journalist, returns home from his voluntary and privileged exile as correspondent and translator based in Lisbon. Up in the attic he finds his mother’s old diaries in a suitcase, and from these he learns that she had been a refugee from Nazi Germany and discovers why she nurtured a lifelong, deep and ambivalent antipathy for all things German – the German that at moments of excitement could make itself heard in his mother’s own language as ‘stressed S’s’.
Keld Conradsen Stemte s’er / Stressed S’s Forlaget Modtryk 2009, 199 pp.
Conradsen was born in 1963 and now has a couple of novels to his name. It will be interesting to see whether he will continue in the future to write his way towards new forms of novel of reminiscence and political text.
Foreign Rights Forlaget Modtryk Phone: +45 87 31 76 00 forlaget@modtryk.dk
Nurse in the Third Reich By Professor Claus Bryld, translated by John Mason
Ebba was born in 1924 and grew up in Tarm, a small town in western Jutland. She was an ordinary though gifted girl with a desire to be of use to society. Her father was a convinced Nazi and played a large part in Ebba’s decision as a 16-year-old to join the party in 1940. The book follows her from the occupation through her two years as au pair in the house in Kassel where she experiences the first allied bombing raids, to her time as a nurse at field hospital for German soldiers in Poland and Czechoslovakia. It was also, in fact, her father who encouraged Ebba to join the German Red Cross in 1943, for, as he said, ‘One of us has to take up arms against world Communism!’ At the age of eighteen, therefore, she applied as a volunteer to join the German Red Cross, which belonged under the SS and whose job it clearly was to look after German military interests. During the next two years she served in Breslau and Deutch-Brod, until the Russian offensive in 1945 forced her to Berlin. Here she remained to the bitter end – on a primitive first-aid station in a bunker at the heart of the Third Reich and just a few hundred yards from Hitler’s last headquarters. Having been raped by Russian soldiers and after internment in a camp near Moscow, she finally returns home to Denmark, where she is among the fortunate who are not liquidated in the purge of German sympathisers and Nazis.
However, ever since then Ebba has suppressed her experiences and her involvement in Nazism and the German cause. On the other hand she had actually forgotten that she made it her youth. It is only a chance meeting with author and philosopher Peter Tudvad in 2007 that opens a chink in the door to her youth. And when Tudvad offers to write her story, she accepts. Now a fascinating eye-witness account opens up before us with the author as midwife and commentator. With an acute eye for detail, Tudvad regularly confronts his witness with the many written sources he finds in Danish and German archives, and gradually the old lady is forced, as though under psychoanalysis, to open herself up and to see her youthful involvement in a light that is not only pure and apolitical philanthropy. For example, she had completely forgotten that she applied to join the Nazi party, a fact that Tudvad can document through her membership card discovered in the archives. ‘The treatment’ does not, however, make her break down. More and more details of her life emerge until at the end she can with complete mental composure look upon the reality of her youth in another and more realistic light. The author, who was born in 1966, treats Ebba and her milieu during the war with both the empathy of understanding and with a critical historical distance. He takes as his starting point his amazement that a warm and good-hearted person such as Ebba Mikkelsen could ever have become a Nazi and a helper in the German war effort, and as a result he succeeds in creating a picture of some people’s adherence to Nazism that does not dwell on relative qualities but provides a deeper and more subtle insight. He also manages to combine the small and personal dimension and the large-scale history of the war, so that an alternative and refreshingly new form of historiography emerges.
| HISTORY |
This book is the story of Ebba Mørkeberg, née Mikkelsen, now 85 years old, who throughout her adult life has lived with a secret. As a young woman she was a member of the Danish Nazi party, DNSAP, and during the Second World War she travelled to Germany to work for the German Red Cross. ‘Nurse in the Third Reich’ is the story of her life and about how as an 83-year-old she breaks out of the shell of repression that she had constructed after 1945.
Peter Tudvad Sygeplejerske i Det tredje rige / Nurse in the Third Reich. The story of a Dane Politikens Forlag 2009 511 pp. Foreign Rights Politikens Forlag Nya Guldberg Phone: +45 33 47 07 07 nya.guldberg@jppol.dk
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Mother’s secret The dimension dealing with cultural history is fascinating and supports the story that the journey back into family history provides material for. By Morten Thing, translated by John Mason
The question arose as to why her mother had not told her children that she was Jewish. Had their father not known either? It is not possible to get quick answers from deceased parents. However, the question gave rise to a journey of discovery back into Karin Lützen’s Jewish roots. As luck would have it, she could speak, read and write well in French, for the journey took her to France, where she tracked down that part of the family that still was still living but that she had never met, among them her mother’s cousins. At the same time she began collecting sources and reading books. She investigated churchyards and church registers. In principle the historian and the detective work in the same way, except that it is rare for historians to have to uncover anything as limited as a crime and they do not need to have anyone sentenced. Karin Lützen’s book deals with this journey of detection. It has two narrators. On the one hand it has the private individual, Karin Lützen, who is on the track of her mother’s secret and who experiences events and narrates the story in the first person. On the other hand there is lecturer Lützen, who tells the story of Jewish immigrants in France. She speaks in the third person and tells us about legislation and the police, about work and accommodation, about organisation and culture. The book is, then, both a reminiscence of her search and a narrative of cultural history.
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The two narratives have quite different driving forces. We clearly sense the joy and amazement that fill Karin Lützen, as she meets the family that she has found by chance. The narrative of cultural history is driven forwards by the tension or the textual desire that the author manages to generate in her narrative. The two strands are woven together very successfully, and even though we meet and hear about many members of the family, Karin Lützen remains a fine narrator. The dimension dealing with cultural history is fascinating and supports the story that the journey back into family history provides material for. The individual examples are in this way inscribed into a large story but without losing their personal significance. In one particular chapter she addresses genealogy and the interest in ‘roots’. She underlines the fact that the interest in roots is a choice. Alex Haley, who wrote his book ‘Roots’ about his African origins, could just as well have written about his Irish forefathers. Many American Jews travel to Kraków or Vilnius to see where ‘they’ came from. In these places, however, there are no longer any Jews but an interest for Jewish culture that is borne by tourism, a culture without Jews. She sees our interest in our prehistory as a way of creating a story for ourselves and that is a part of everyone’s identity. She admits, for example, that she does not really know why she opted for the Jewish part. Her choice of kinship ties is in all probability related to her mother’s choice of secret.
| BIOGRAPHY |
Karin Lützen was really quite happy to grow up halfFrench. Her mother, Irène, had come to Fredericia with Alliance Française in 1946 and married Karin’s father the following year. It was only after her mother’s death in 1998 that she found out that her mother came from an immigrant Jewish family.
Karin Lützen Mors hemmelighed. På sporet af en jødisk indvandrerhistorie/ My Mother’s Secret: Uncovering a Jewish Immigrant Story Gyldendal 2009, 421 pp. Foreign Rights Gyldendal Group Agency Sofie Voller Phone: +45 33 75 55 55 sofie_voller@gyldendal groupagency.dk
The many trails, the long journey By Morten Thing, translated by John Mason
This year and a half of hard ideological battling were about the religious establishment seeing this as the final battle about power in schools. It was one thing that modern educational ideas were gaining ground and contesting religious pedagogy. Another was that the church had had a weighty influence on schooling from the start. Now they could see a future in which women could have children on their own and where atheists, maybe even communists, would be able to teach in schools. In fact, the Nordentoft case did provide the impetus for a showdown with the church as the power behind the educational system and thereby for the beginnings of the modern school that came into being during the 1950’s and 60’s. To judge from her background, Inger Merete Nordentoft was far from preordained to be a rebel. Her grandfather was a powerful provincial clergyman with many children, who became doctors, priests and lawyers. But Inger Merete’s father felt that even as a small child the girl was a rebel. And her – to put it mildly – unusual upbringing undoubtedly turned her into a highly independent person. Her father, a doctor, found himself on several occasions on the wrong side of the law and at the beginning of the
1920’s was even sentenced to death for the murder of his wife. However – and this was the basis for the high court’s sentence of 12 years in prison – there was no evidence for uxoricide. After her parents’ divorce, when Inger Merete and her two siblings were children, she lived with the father, who was, however, in no position to care for the child. Adda Hilden tells the fascinating story of the girl who became so independent and wanted to change the world. And she tells a well-researched and wellnarrated story, which includes many interesting points about the history of women. As a girl Inger Merete Nordentoft becomes part of the early Girl Guide movement and follows a career that does, in fact, bring her into close contact with the leadership of the guides. Through her connections with new educational theory she came into contact with the group of cultural radicals around the association known as Frisindet Kulturkamp (Liberal Culture Struggle). In 1942 Inger Merete Nordentoft was arrested by the German occupying force. She had sheltered a Swedish Communist and had connections to Aksel Larsen, leader of The Danish Communist Party, DKP. She was given a short sentence and released in May 1943, at which point she applied to join the DKP, to which she had become closer at the start of the war. In April 1945 she was appointed headteacher of Katrinedal School in Vanløse. In October that same year she was elected to parliament for the DKP. In 1957 she left the DKP in opposition to the party’s authoritarian view of politics. When she died only three years later at the age of 57, she had through her long cultural journey truly left an indelible mark on educational theory, on the history of women and on politics.
| BIOGRAPHY |
Most Danes who still remember Inger Merete Nordentoft (1903-1960) will remember that at Christmas time 1945 she told her school, Katrinedal, that she was pregnant, that she wished to remain unmarried and refused to reveal the name of the father. Few, however, remember that this event, which would be innocent today, led to a year and a half of public battles in the media and at meetings. In fact, the statement led to her school being divided in two and to the minority, her opponents, getting a new school, Rødkilde School.
Adda Hilden At sætte sig spor / Leaving Your Mark Lindhardt og Ringhof 2009 294 pp. Foreign Rights Susanne Gribfeldt Phone: +45 33 69 50 00 susanne.gribfeldt@lindhardt ogringhof.dk
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Something very precious, something completely universal Picture books are for children, but they are generally read by adults for children. For one of the greatest things about children is that they have to have stories read to them. Again and again. And here the picture book creates a very special space for aesthetic experience and togetherness between the adult and the child. There are the words that the adult reads aloud, and there are the pictures that the child pores over while that is going on. And then there is the third aspect that arises when text and illustrations meet. A good picture book has something extra, something that firstly makes the adult want to read the book for the child and secondly makes adult and child want to read the same book again and again. And then a good picture book has to have a wealth of exciting illustrations, which exist in their own right and into which child can embark on long voyages of discovery. This particular way of reading has probably contributed to the picture book developing through its long tradition into being both an artistically refined genre and one in which author and illustrator tell richly facetted stories that permit many re-readings. Such books are handed down by the adult to the child as something very precious. The Danish Arts Council’s exhibition ‘Illustrated Children’s Books from Denmark’ aims to display a selection of Danish picture books that both illustrate the Danish picture book tradition and show the development and renaissance that the genre has seen since the 1940’s – when the artist Arne Ungermann became a household name across Denmark and contributed to modernising the Danish picture book – up until 2009, when the most recent works originate. The oldest examples are works that are still read and reprinted, and they represent a rich tradi-
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tion, while the most recent works with their artistic derring-do are contributing to further enriching that tradition. The exhibition can be seen as being linear in two senses. It describes a time line from 1943 and Arne Ungermann to the innovative work of contemporary Danish illustrators such as Cato Thau-Jensen, Otto Dickmeiss, Helle Vibeke Jensen, Rasmus Bregnhøi, Lars Vegas Nielsen and Els Cools. At the same time it shows up the relationship between, for example, the classic draughtsmanship of an Ib Spang Olsen and the new, cheeky newcomer in the class, Jacob Martin Strid, who has already been published outside Denmark and who also draws inspiration from comics, as indeed another of the illustrators in the exhibition, Anders Morgenthaler, clearly also does. Ib Spang Olsen is represented by two works in the exhibition, and in both cases he has both written and illustrated the story. Det lille lokomotiv (‘The Little Steam Engine’) from 1954 and Drengen i månen (‘The Boy in the Moon’) from 1962 can be read for children as young as three and are related to an older genre, namely the story woven round objects, especially familiar phenomena that particularly attract the attention of small children – here in Ib Spang Olsen the moon and a train – which are given life and behave as people in exactly the same way as the nutcracker, the porcelain figures, the darning needle or toys do in the stories of E.T.A Hoffmann or Hans Christian Andersen. As it happens, a couple of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories are also included in the exhibition with new illustrations by Otto Dickmeiss. He is an illustrator whose pictures have their very own style and are very characteristic, their figures looking out with huge, innocent eyes and their strong, at times uncompromising and at times beautiful symbolic language in the midst of an almost surrealistic uni-
| CHILDREN’S BOOKS |
By Kamilla Löfström, translated by John Mason
Later on it is an advantage for books to be a little more challenging, the format grows and the illustrations become richer and more crowded. They may also say a little more than the text itself – as, for example, in Snabels herbarium (‘Snabel’s Herbarium’), Sebastians monster (‘Sebastian’s Monster’) and Da Bernard skød hul i himlen (‘When Bernard shot a hole in the sky’) – or the illustrations become fully fledged artworks in which you can go exploring, as in Helle Vibeke Jensen’s illustrations for Hør her stær (‘Listen here, Starling’) or Bente Olesen Nystrøm’s Hr. Alting (‘Mr. Everything’), which is a story completely without words. One of the richest Danish picture books is Cykelmyggen Egon (‘The Tale of Two Mozzies’) by Flemming Quist Møller about a cycling mosquito, Egon, who meets a dancing mosquito. The ‘cyclesquito’ arrived on the scene in 1967 and in 2005 a successor came along in the same explosive style. Both works are in the exhibition. After a more advanced form of picture book comes a time when children begin to read for themselves. Here Jeg er Frede (men det er ikke altid det de andre kalder mig) (‘I am Frede (but that’s not always what the others call me)’) is an obvious beginner’s book, in which minimalism on the textual page makes it easy to
read but also creates considerable room for interpretation, which illustrator Cato Thau-Jensen exploits to the full. The illustrators narrate in a universal language, the language of pictures. This can be swarming with life and multi-coloured as in Flemming Quist Møller; it can be kept in a very limited range of colours as, for example, in Hanne Bartholin’s illustrations for Den lille gule pige (‘The Little Yellow Girl’), which consist of watercolours in yellow and red; or it can be such simple graphic expressions that the figures almost end up looking like pictograms as in the Cirkeline books. Cirkeline with her polka dotted ladybird dress and her bare feet lives on the artist’s desk and helps keep things tidy, and she is so small that she can sleep in a matchbox. She came into the world in book form in 1969, and now forty years later yet another book about the little elf has just appeared. Cirkeline and the cycling mosquito have, then, been with us most of the way. The first books continue to be in demand and, with the most recent additions in 2005 and 200 they have been kept up to date. ‘The Tale of Two Mozzies’ about the two mosquitoes is really a classic tale, a miniature Bildungsroman. It takes place way out in the forest among speaking insects, who wear clothes as though they were humans. Egon himself shoots off on his racing bike in an orange T-shirt. In this fairytale world Egon, it goes without saying, comes face to face with the caterpillar from ‘Alice in Wonderland’, for this story makes great play with the human capacity to imagine and fantasize – as fine and universal narratives do.
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| CHILDREN’S BOOKS |
verse that reflects all eras. Another line that can be followed is that of the individual child’s development as a reader. The books for the smallest children comply with convention, strangely enough, by being the smallest in their format, just the right size to take along in your bag when you go out of the house and to provide the security of the thoroughly familiar. The Kaj books and the Poul books are examples, their very simple stories taking place in a recognisable everyday environment.
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I am the reader! An author has to know his reader if he is to put himself in her place By Liselotte Wiemer, translated by Barbara J. Haveland
The subject is murder. Of course. Several murders in fact. Announced beforehand by the killer, moreover, with nigh on supernatural precision. But the whole thing is related with such sophistication that one quite forgets how raw and primitive it is – and how brutally it ends. A holiday cottage on a dark December evening, far out on the northernmost tip of Zealand. Comes a knock at the door and … uh-oh! And that’s as much as I’m revealing here.
he is under a restraining order and has not seen his children for years.
| CRIME |
The first sentence can be crucial. Not least in a crime novel. And not least if one happens to be a sceptical female reader. So let me start with that: “Until recently I had only killed people on paper.” And let me say right now that if anyone thinks you need to have a particular ‘crime gene’ in order to be get a kick out of such weird things as serial killings and innocent victims, then they will have to think again - at any rate if they dip into Mikkel Birkegaard’s second novel, Over mit lig (‘Over my Dead Body’). After going for hours almost without drawing breath you realise that all prejudices can be broken down. All it takes is a sinister and cunning genius. Of the sort possessed by Mikkel Birkegaard, who broke onto the literary scene in 2007 with his bestselling thriller Libri di Luca (‘The Library of Shadows’).
One day an unknown person starts copying the murders in Frank Føns’s books. One by one the fictional characters are transformed into actual corpses. And Føns falls prey to his own bogey men. Everywhere he goes he finds copies of his earlier books, each one containing an insert and a photograph of the next person on the list. All people he knows. And the killer is, of course, always one step ahead! It is in this paranoid, psycho-dramatic landscape that we first meet our writer. Thus ‘Over my Dead Body’ purports to be Frank Føns’s own story. Where all is chaos. Now he is going to have to take things into his own hands. To find the murderer he will have to think like him. In the same way that, as a writer, he has to know his reader if he is to put himself in her place. And it is here that the link between these two – the murderer and the reader – really becomes deadly. Because if the ultimate murder is not to become a reality, the writer himself must become a murderer.
Mikkel Birkegaard Over mit lig / Over my Dead Body C&K Forlag 2009, 346 pp. Foreign Rights C&K Forlag Karsten Nielsen Phone: +45 30 60 57 26 info@ckforlag.dk Rights sold to Italien
We find ourselves in the world of forty-six year old writer and alcoholic Frank Føns, alias Mr Splatter, alias our confidential first-person narrator. Do we like him? No, not especially. He is an unsympathetic character who, with his sights firmly fixed on the sales figures, exploits both his wife and his children in his sick stories. Fiction and reality become more and more dangerously intermingled. We are presented with flashbacks to his previous lives as a student and a father; but by the time we meet him
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