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Category Archive for 'Denmark'

This can’t-put-it-downer of novel about the interconnected lives of a disturbed family excites and unnerves the reader at the same time that it puzzles and sometimes terrifies with its eerie atmosphere and constant sense of imminent doom. A coming-of-age novel with a twist, it reveals the trials of a young boy, age six when the novel opens, constantly moving through dark locales in and around Copenhagen with his father, who is obviously hiding a terrible secret, not only from the boy, who is never named, but also from everyone else. The boy and his father clearly love each other and want to help each other, but they are constantly moving, and their lives are always changing with the father’s succession of oddball, low-paying jobs. Filled with surprises, the action in this novel is non-stop, and many readers will be unable to put down the book, once they get into it. The sense of menace throughout contrasts with the intrinsic “niceness” of the boy allowing the reader to wish fervently for his success while fearing the worst. The author releases information and paces his dramatic moments effectively so that there are no “dead spots” in the novel. Past and present overlap, often converging unexpectedly and then veering in new directions to provide new information. The author is so good at controling his tone and the sense of atmosphere, that it may not be until the conclusion that readers will begin to wonder about some of the “reality” here and whether it actually makes sense. Outstanding novel which defies genre.

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Strange and twisted characters, the vivid but often sinister lives they inhabit in their imaginations, and their almost universal preoccupation with death make this collection of short stories compelling, even mesmerizing, despite the sense of menace lurking within each story. The characters all appear on the surface to be “just like us,” ordinary people with similar sensibilities and familiar goals for the future, but as they develop during the fifteen unusually short stories in this collection, Danish author Dorthe Nors slowly and subtly reveals how off-kilter they really are. Virtually all these characters are lonely and unloved, craving companionship, if not a lover, and they depend on their imaginations to provide the excitement which is missing from their real lives. Most them, however, do not recognize that there is a fine line between their harmless daydreams and the nightmarish visions which sometimes threaten their equilibrium and control their actions. Dorthe Nors writes in a compressed style in which each story becomes the equivalent of an outline in a children’s coloring book for which the reader sometimes has to color “outside the lines” before the story takes full shape. Some of the stories are dramatic, some are extremely sad, some are mystifying, and some genuinely touch the heartstrings. All, however, are filled with ironies (and occasionally humor) based on the ways that the reader fills in the blanks to draw his/her own conclusions.

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In his fourth novel published in the US and UK, Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen again tackles an unusual subject, this one based on Denmark’s past history, the imprisonment of uneducated or mentally challenged women and young girls, some as young as fourteen, on a tiny island in the Great Belt of the Danish Straits. Most of these benighted inmates were poor, and many had been sexually abused at home or had resorted to prostitution as a way of supporting themselves and/or their families. No escape was possible from this island, and bad behavior, sometimes as a result of further sadistic treatment by the matrons and those in power at Sprogo, was punishable by sterilization. Here Adler-Olsen depends heavily on the characterizations from his earlier novels, doing little to add to what we already know about Morck, Assad, and Rose, but making quantum leaps in the number of subplots and their complications. The number of complications is so large here that the novel becomes an intellectual exercise, with fewer memorable action scenes that involve the reader, and much less humor and genuine feeling. As a fan of Adler-Olsen, I was both disappointed and surprised by the changes that have evolved over the course of the four novels now available in English, and I am hoping that more careful editing by the author himself as he plans his future novels will bring back the literary joys I celebrated in my review of The Keeper of Lost Causes.

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Wanting to find serenity, a new life, and maybe even a new love, Kerrigan has arrived in Copenhagen, the birthplace of his mother, hoping for changes in his own life, but “like Gilgamesh he kept finding instead a Divine Alewife who filled his glass and chanted” words like those above, urging him, instead, to eat, drink, and be merry. Kerrigan, who has a Ph.D. in literature, experienced a personal disaster three years ago, one in which he lost his young wife, his three-year-old daughter, and an unborn child, and he has come to believe that “that is how all stories end. With the naked, withered Christmas tree tilted against the trash barrel.” Now, as the new millennium is about to arrive, Kerrigan plans to “clothe himself in [Copenhagen’s] thousand years of history, let its wounds be his wounds, let its poets’ songs fill his soul, let its food fill his belly, its drink temper his reason, its jazz sing in the ears of his mind, its light and art and nature and seasons wrap themselves about him and keep him safe from chaos.” For Kennedy, as he relates the story of Kerrigan, Copenhagen becomes the equivalent of the Dublin which Stephen Dedalus explores in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

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Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s third mystery to be translated into English continues the characters he introduced with The Keeper of Lost Causes and The Absent One, both of which topped of best-seller lists in Europe for almost a year. Carl Morck, the lead detective of these novels, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of a shootout several years ago in which one of his friends was killed and the other, a six foot-nine inch giant, was left a quadriplegic. Morck’s drinking does not help his attitude, nor does his unfortunate love life. Relegated to “Department Q,” created especially for him, and located deep in the basement of the Copenhagen Police Department, he is assigned the cold cases to keep him out of the way. A several kidnappings over thirteen years, involving the children of members of religious sects, becomes the focus of a series of investigations by Morck and his intriguing assistant, Assad. Though it is difficult to imagine any five hundred page mystery being more complex, this mystery is so well organized, and the characters and actions are so well integrated, that it is easy to see why this novel has won so many prizes in Scandinavia and why it has been so popular. The characters are all observed in action, with lively dialogue, as well as first person commentary, and whole episodes are devoted individually to each of the main characters and their associates. A good stand-alone.

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