What unites the characters in the first three novels of the Copenhagen Quartet is that all are acutely aware of the role art, music, and beauty in bringing peace to the damaged souls of the main characters as they explore the themes of love and death, freedom and confinement, commitment and betrayal, and the worldly and the spiritual within their Danish environment. The final novel, Beneath the Neon Egg, set in winter, also explores these themes, but it does so within a still different genre from the other three (each of which differs from the others), as Kennedy writes a noir novel of a lost man who haunts jazz clubs and bars in Copenhagen, looking for happiness in alcohol and experimental sex. Employed, ironically, as a translator, Patrick Bluett, a forty-three-year-old transplant to Copenhagen, can work when he wants, the only requirement of his job being that he produce five translated pages a day, leaving him ample time to “follow desire, abandon his work, [and] escape to the wild.” A man who feels betrayed in his marriage but who still wants to be part of his children’s lives, Bluett does not have a clue about what it takes to be a grown-up as he looks for quick and easy fixes for his malaise. Throughout the novel, he plays John Coltrane’s music, with “A Love Supreme” being a favorite, because it “swells his heart with acknowledgement of his existence,” and author Kennedy uses the structure of this four-part suite for his chapter divisions within the novel.
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If the title of this book doesn’t pique your curiosity from the outset, the photo of the author in Eskimo dress probably will. The astounding ironies – the contrasts between what we are seeing in the author photo vs. what we expect when we see someone wearing traditional Eskimo (Inuit) dress – are only the first of many such ironies as Tete-Michel Kpomassie, a young man from Togo in West Africa makes a journey of discovery to Greenland. For the first sixty pages, the author describes life in Togo in lively detail, setting the scene for his lengthy journey from Togo to Copenhagen to get a visa for Greenland, an autonomous country within the kingdom of Denmark. As he travels over the next ten years through Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Mauritania, before arriving in Marseille, Paris, Bonn, and eventually Copenhagen, he clearly establishes his background and experiences and the mindset and cultural background he will be bringing with him when he finally gets to Greenland. With a wonderful eye for the telling detail, Kpomassie becomes real, a stand-in for the reader who will enjoy living through his journey vicariously. The people he meets not only represent their culture but emerge as individuals through their interactions with him. Despite language differences, he is able to communicate and share their lives, and because of his honesty and his curiosity about their culture, he makes many friends in Greenland – and with the reader who shares his enthusiasm for discovery.
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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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