We know so very little; so little that what we think to be knowledge is hardly worth reckoning with at all; instead we ought to settle for being pleasantly surprised if, on the edge of things, against all expectations, our assumption should be disproved.

Constant motion, collapsing buildings and meticulous work in stone. The unfamiliar as a wall we must forever scrabble to remove in order to find our humanity there and perhaps even love someone.

The first of Josefine Klougart’s award-winning novels to be translated into english, One of Us Is Sleeping (Én af os sover) is a dolorous, yet beautifully composed work of failed love, loss, and lament. The star of Klougart’s book is her gorgeous, evocative imagery and emotional acuity. With grief aplenty—mourning the fated end of a romantic relationship, as well as her ill mother—the Danish author’s sorrowful narrator is ever-conflicted, trying as she does to move beyond what’s been, despite being eternally bound to it.

The past does not come creeping in the form of images, it’s there all the time, tugging at your sleeve, trailing along behind you, occasionally wanting to be lifted up and carried.

The uncertainty, instability, doubt, regret, and longing that so often follow a failed relationship are richly and realistically conveyed. Klougart’s narrator’s emotional turmoil (punctuated, staccato) are quite nearly palpable and viscerally received. One of Us Is Sleeping, as much a series of thematically linked poetic offerings as a novel proper, is graceful and unforgettable. As Klougart’s narrator strives for clarity, understanding, and consolation, she’s left, as the rest of us undoubtedly are, to make sense of her own perceptions and boldly reassemble for herself the pieces of her shattered, shattering heart.

How naïve I’ve been, I think to myself. Or rather: how lonely. How closely I scrutinized, how clearly I saw it all in my mind—all that nearly was. The person who could love, almost; this almost-love, forever postponed, something else in its place. What, exactly. Reality. Whatever that is. Yours, I suppose.

The fatality of time and again believing the world is determined by something. Something outside of itself. Or just determined, in whatever way at all. Timing. Believing you can see patterns in the world is the same as imagining you can reach out of a window, hold out your hand and wait a couple of seconds until a leaf, a feeble, tattered leaf, settles there gently, surely in your palm. The same as expecting you can fall asleep, in such a world.

And yet it happens all the time: people fall asleep. You see connections. Or you think you see connections; and for a moment you might feel you belong.

That something like a home exists.

Only it’s not as simple as that; there are moments of collapse, life consists of little else.

A face brought down, revealed to be one’s own.

Sensing how the sand on the beach in front of the hotel at Svinkløv is retrieved by the sea as each wave retreats. The current they warn you against, and which the body recognises before the mind; an urge to succumb.

And that would be it.

What such an urge might mean.

She misses having a home, it’s a condition.

Eventually she falls asleep and dreams about a man who says in English: My hands are dirty, you don’t want to meet me.

The world laughing in your face like that. The writing laughs with it, that line of dialogue. It all gets entangled in the writing. What was, and what is, or perhaps may come. Sentences and lines of dialogue.

A desire to be older, revealing itself to be a desire not to lose one’s childhood. Not to lose anything, whatever it might be, to maintain a hold in the flow of all things, to stand firm there and: preserve. In some form, to keep hold of it all, and not leave anything behind in that burning house. Wherever you go, you leave behind you a trail of disaster, no matter what the circumstance, that’s how it is. A trail of collapse, something falling outside of all recollection, all that is not remembered by anyone and is forgotten by the world. She is not quite sure, but the feeling grows stronger, she sees it in him; a kind of reverse will to live; a nostalgic reluctance towards surrendering oneself to the world that exists. That kind of panic in the tissue, a fear of forgetting. She writes so as not to forget things, or else she writes in order to forget things and invent others more worthy of remembrance. Perhaps that’s what writing is: you start moving about in the world like a sleepwalker in the night, looking for something more real, a truth there; and then all of a sudden it is sleep that you sacrifice, then suddenly the family, then everything that is valuable and means something. Dreams while awake, ideas, pulling everything with them like waves returning, returning to the sea, faces washed away, washed clean of all humanity. Or the opposite: invoking a humanity all too exaggerated: too much human in too small a space, that pealing reality when your entire being wants that someone else.

She thought the right thing to do was perhaps to find a life first, and only then look for a way of working that fit in with that life. That it should happen in that order, instead of carrying on the way things were; searching for a way of living that fit in with her work.

This is Bengtsson’s third novel, though his first published in English—the book is actually already available from House of Anansi Press in Canada, but they’ve teamed up with the wonderful Other Press to bring the book even further in its English Travels.

Here’s the beginning of Tiffany’s review:

It is destined that we will all become our parents. Some try to avoid it while others embrace the metamorphosis. Either way, it never fails— children eventually become their parents. A Fairy Tale is a psychological novel told through day-to-day activities that appear mostly normal from the narrator’s point of view and explores this exact phenomenon.

bq The novel is told in two parts: life with a runaway yet resourceful father through the eyes of his son, a child less than 10 years of age, and then the life of that son who, as an adult, attempts to avoid becoming this father through detachment from his former life. The novel follows this unnamed father and son on a journey through Denmark, mostly in Copenhagen. At first glance the pair’s numerous relocations seem innocuous, but when a closer look is taken, the reader will notice strange aspects of this transient family situation. Most apparent being the descriptions of the living conditions of the father-son pair and the mature aspects of life to which the father exposes the son, but never the relationship between the two.

After numerous rebellious actions are taken by the father to sabotage any semblance of stability, the father-son relationship is effectively destroyed when the father attempts to assassinate a well-regarded politician of the common people of Denmark. This action leads to a separation of father and son, and marks the end of the first half of the novel with no fuss, akin to the closing of a store by merely flipping the “open” sign to “closed.”

For the rest of the review, go here.

The novel is told in two parts: life with a runaway yet resourceful father through the eyes of his son, a child less than 10 years of age, and then the life of that son who, as an adult, attempts to avoid becoming this father through detachment from his former life. The novel follows this unnamed father and son on a journey through Denmark, mostly in Copenhagen. At first glance the pair’s numerous relocations seem innocuous, but when a closer look is taken, the reader will notice strange aspects of this transient family situation. Most apparent being the descriptions of the living conditions of the father-son pair and the mature aspects of life to which the father exposes the son, but never the relationship between the two.

After numerous rebellious actions are taken by the father to sabotage any semblance of stability, the father-son relationship is effectively destroyed when the father attempts to assassinate a well-regarded politician of the common people of Denmark. This action leads to a separation of father and son, and marks the end of the first half of the novel with no fuss, akin to the closing of a store by merely flipping the “open” sign to “closed.”

In the second half of A Fairy Tale, the son is placed with his estranged mother and the father falls from the prose as if he never existed. After several socially awkward attempts to find inclusion within a non-transient society, the son reemerges under a fake identity (now Turkish instead of Danish), plants roots, and finds love. However, this arrangement is impermanent since, to bring us full circle, we all inevitably become our parents.

A Fairy Tale is addictive in the way it slowly progresses while preventing the reader from moving to another novel. It’s probably the strength of the father-son relationship with the combination of questionable life decisions on behalf of the father. As Javier Marías posed in The Infatuations, it is not necessarily the plot, but rather the experience the reader has while progressing through the plot that should be the focus of a novel. However, once the novel is completed, all we hold in our memories is that simple plot. A Fairy Tale is a direct example of this proposition.

The novel is also compelling for showing the dark side of seemingly normally things—the city of Copenhagen, theater shows, gardening—and its showing of the bright side of things that are normally seen in their darkest light—strip clubs, shoplifting, and mental institutions. The work is also carefully paced by short chapters and controlled prose that almost makes this nomadic anti-socialized life as normal as a cup of coffee with the newspaper every morning.

This is a worthy introduction of Jonas T. Bengtsson to the English audience. Those drawn to Updike’s Rabbit Series and who have traveled to Denmark and Sweden and appreciate the European collective society will gravitate to A Fairy Tale because it has the underlying rebellious spirit that does not often bubble to the surface in such a collective environment.

Hilary Wermers is a senior at the University of Rochester, majoring in English and Women’s Studies. Her book reviews have also appeared in The Bloomsbury Review. She hails from Denver, Colorado. This summer, you can find her sprawled in a lawn chair next to the pool, book in hand. This is her first review for threepercent.

Here’s part of her review:

Peter Hoeg, Danish author best known for Smilla’s Sense of Snow, has created a fictional world in his new work, The Elephant Keeper’s Children, which not only entices readers to return to it again and again, but also encourages us to examine our reality. The story takes place partly on the fictional island of Fino and partly in Hoeg’s fictional realization of Copenhagen. Peter, our charming fourteen-year-old narrator, tells of the adventures of himself, his older siblings Hans and Title, and their dog Basker leading up to the “Grand Synod”, a religious conference of improbable size and importance. Peter’s parents are mysteriously involved in the Synod; he and his siblings are on a mission to save their parents from themselves.

The title seems somewhat ambiguous until Hoeg reveals the definition and importance of “elephant keepers.” They are present throughout the story and a force to be reckoned with. Like the definition of elephant keepers, much of this novel is revealed at exactly the most satisfying moment, at the point when readers (or this reader, at least) begin to become frustrated with our lack of insight into Hoeg’s complex world. This delayed effect made me think of Peter as a thoughtful host, who brings up business or unpleasantness only when his guests are comfortably seated with a cup of tea in hand. Needless to say, I felt a great deal of affection for Peter by the time I turned the final page.

Click here to read the entire review.

The title seems somewhat ambiguous until Hoeg reveals the definition and importance of “elephant keepers.” They are present throughout the story and a force to be reckoned with. Like the definition of elephant keepers, much of this novel is revealed at exactly the most satisfying moment, at the point when readers (or this reader, at least) begin to become frustrated with our lack of insight into Hoeg’s complex world. This delayed effect made me think of Peter as a thoughtful host, who brings up business or unpleasantness only when his guests are comfortably seated with a cup of tea in hand. Needless to say, I felt a great deal of affection for Peter by the time I turned the final page.

Much of the joy of this book comes from the intimacy formed by Peter’s narration and the extent to which we, the readers, become invested in the outcome of his adventures. Peter shares his fears, his hopes, and his myriad of insights with us:

If we’d had more time, and if I’d been less shaken, I would have asked her for concrete examples of who exactly had ever changed the course of their lives in seven minutes, but now Tilte takes me by the arm and draws me over to the open window.

Other than Peter’s family, The Elephant Keeper’s Children is populated by a whole cast of wacky characters. Leonora Ticklepalate is a Buddhist nun who performs phone sex to pay the bills. Count Rickardt Three Lions is a close family friend, drug addict, and proprietor of the Fino drug rehabilitation facility. Alexander Flounderblood is the head of the Fino school district and Peter’s sworn enemy.

This book manages to be both highly entertaining and seriously thought provoking. I must also mention the flawless translation, which allows us to step into the streets of Copenhagen and to enjoy Hoeg’s play with words. Peter regales us with tales of his hilarious misdeeds on one page and delves into the true nature of spirituality on the next. I closed this book feeling wiser. I want to reopen this book when I am feeling lonely to find company among friends.

Adolphsen has not yet been fully translated into English, but a good start has been made with the 2009 translation of his excellent novella Machine, and excerpts from his collections Small Stories I and Small Stories II, which were included in 2011’s Best European Fiction Anthology. Readers familiar with these other works will recognize many of the author’s prevailing thematic interests, as well as his favorite formal constraints in The Brummstein.

The book starts with a playful explanation of “the constant orogeny of the Alps,” and how the formation of the earth might be conceptualized on a time-line. “. . . if we apply the famous metaphor which depicts the Earth’s age as a calendar year,” the narrator begins,

when dinosaurs became extinct on Boxing Day, hominids emerge on New Year’s Eve, and when, at the time of writing, ten seconds have passed since the Roman Empire’s five seconds expired, then these events took place on December 19 and 23 respectively. In the West, the process of comprehending this vast expanse of time commenced just one and a half geological seconds ago . . .

There’s a PBS-narrator quality to Adolphsen’s explanations of the natural world, which manage to be clinical and dignified while simultaneously geeking out about how awesome geology is. (Machine, with its first page explanations of the petrification of a prehistoric horse, which eons later becomes a drop of gasoline, maintains the same delightful tone.)

But the book’s concern is not really the Brummstein—the mysterious humming stone that an amateur explorer looking for the entrance to another world finds at the beginning of the story is basically a MacGuffin. This has been true for many other “lives of objects” narratives as well—Jenny Erpenbach’s Visitation and Nicole Krauss’s Great House come to mind—and is not in itself that unique a premise. What makes The Brummstein special, then, is Adolphsen’s incredible specificity and gift for compressing deeply incisive observations into just a few short passages.

It’s rare that the full emotional weight of a relationship or a life can be concisely summarized—just think of how bland many obituaries are. But this is precisely what Adolphsen excels at. Consider a passage in which we’re introduced to Georg Wiede, an elderly retiree in Germany during WWII. After his apartment was destroyed by Allied air raids, Georg moves to a railway station lost and found hut:

It wasn’t until December 1943 that Georg finally overcame the inhibitions which had so far deterred him from helping himself to the lost items. He was driven by a noble motive: hunger. One of the suitcases might contain a tin of goulash or a bag of boiled sweets. He organized clothing such as coats and hats in neat piles at one end of the hut, making sure that each item retained its original ticket. Then he turned his attention to the suitcases, briefcases, et cetera. One by one he placed them on the table, and feeling like a surgeon with a patient on the operating table, he opened them up and laid out the contents in regimented lines. Then he returned the items in reverse order less anything he needed, which included two fountain pens, a small pile of books, a little money, some clothes, and an antique pocket watch. Whenever he took something, he would replace it with a small note with a brief description of the object and the following sentence: “I, Georg Weide, took this item of lost property in a time of great need.”

When it doesn’t work, The Brummstein tends to undercut its emotional resonance with an unsettling sense of absurdity that borders on nihilism. More than one character is dispatched in a freak accident—for instance, a married couple survives Spanish Flu only to be crushed by a chaise lounge falling from an apartment window. The narrative also drops off abruptly and unresolved, which may be alluding to the continuation of the story outside of the novella, but instead feels slightly apathetic.

If, in the end, The Brummstein has some shortcomings, these are mostly recognizable only in comparison to Adolphsen’s more polished Machine which, it should be noted, was written a few years later. Overall, it is a remarkably creative, unique, and resonant work, which can—and should—be read in one satisfying sitting.

Apparently, this is the week of Larissa and AmazonCrossing books . . . As with her review of The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning, this sounds like a really interesting book:

By examining the minute connections, unlikely coincidences, and painstaking natural processes that give shape to the daily world, the work of Danish author Peter Adolphsen encapsulates—both in form and content—Blake’s image of “a world in a grain of sand.” This has never been more literally true than in his most recently translated work, The Brummstein. Beginning in 1907, and ending over eighty years later, the novella follows a mysteriously humming stone found deep within a Swiss cave through its series of unlikely owners: a hapless German anarchist and his young Jewish sweetheart, a retired ticket clerk at a railway station lost & found, an orphan boy living alone in the woods, an avant-garde artist, and a museum curator. In following the ownership of the stone, The Brummstein also traces a crash course through European (German) history—in less than 80 pages, the reader experiences both World Wars, Spanish Flu, the rise of the Soviet GDR, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But, rather than focus on a larger, more sweeping narrative, The Brummstein is told on a much more personal, human scale. [. . .]

But the book’s concern is not really the Brummstein—the mysterious humming stone that an amateur explorer looking for the entrance to another world finds at the beginning of the story is basically a MacGuffin. This has been true for many other “lives of objects” narratives as well—Jenny Erpenbach’s Visitation and Nicole Krauss’s Great House come to mind—and is not in itself that unique a premise. What makes The Brummstein special, then, is Adolphsen’s incredible specificity and gift for compressing deeply incisive observations into just a few short passages.

Click here to read the full piece.

“You have arrived in Scandinavia. You have just entered a long, bitter winter. Here there are no free rides. Here you are left to your own fate.” So begins Naja Marie Aidt’s “Women in Copenhagen,” the first story in Copenhagen Noir. And while this bleak depiction of Denmark’s welfare state may seem a tad overwrought to an outside observer, it does characterize a general unease that underlies each of the collection’s stories. Copenhagen Noir serves as a sort of shadowy primer to the growing insecurities and upheavals taking place in Denmark today. As Bo Tao Michaëlis (a cultural critic and author of several books on American authors including Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler) notes in his introduction to the collection,

Gone is the provincial city appointed as capitol; instead, one is confronted with a metropolis where the food is from the Middle East, the wine from California, the women from Africa, and the mafia from Russia. Mafia! A new word at these latitudes, where crime formerly took place among bands identified with city neighborhoods and regions.

A threat from without characterizes many, if not most, of the stories in the collection. The featured immigrants or “New Danes,” embody a general, though never fully articulated, xenophobic fear. Within the collection, these Others tend to fill three basic roles: victim (underage, illegal sex workers; asylum seekers), small-time delinquents (thieves, drug dealers), and brutal crime bosses. It bears noting that one of the better stories in the collection, “The Booster Station,” was written by Seyit Öztürk, identified in his bio as a ‘New Dane’ of Turkish descent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Öztürk’s story—a sort of Stand By Me tale of two teenage boys finding a dead body by the train tracks in the residential neighborhood of Valby—entirely lacks any ethnic or racial signifiers, as well as the associated dread that these characteristics seem to carry in many of the collection’s other stories.

This is not to say that Copenhagen Noir doesn’t have it’s high points. A skittery tension and ominous atmosphere pervade many of the stories, and are strong enough features in several (such as “The Elephant’s Tusks,” and “Savage City, Cruel City”) to make up for any plot-based shortcomings. The collection reaches its apex with the classically noir tale of a down and out detective called “Slepneir’s Assignment,” which was written by “former public servent” Georg Ursin who “had his literary debut at the age of seventy-one.”

But as Akashic Books has cleverly ascertained with its noir series, a large swath of avid crime readers are also armchair travelers, so Copenhagen Noir is also thankfully peppered with unique, regionally-specific details which subtly convey the cityscape and cultural customs of Copenhagen and Danes in general. Helle Helle has some fine (and completely innocuous) details of this sort her story “A Fine Boy,” in which the narrator stands in for the cashier at a hot dog kiosk (hot dog stands or polsevogns are almost as ubiquitous in Copenhagen as they are in New York City) while the cashier’s baby son, sleeps unattended in a pram outside on the back porch (another Danish custom: babies are often left alone in their prams on the street while their parents go into shops or are otherwise engaged). These small details add to the overall picture of Copenhagen, and balance out the otherwise grim portrait of pimps, prostitutes, and omionous outsiders that frequent the collection.

As Larissa notes at the start of her review, this is one of the recent entries in Akashic’s long-running and very successful “CITY X Noir” series. Here’s a list of

And here’s the opening of Larissa’s piece:

Although the current social and political landscape of Denmark make it a natural setting for contemporary crime writing, the country has, until recently, remained in the shadow of its Nordic neighbors in this respect. This is not to say that Denmark is lacking authors of mysteries, crime stories, and thrillers of all stripes—merely that those authors have not generally made their way into English translation, and more particularly, into the American market. But the Swedish/Norwegian (and to a lesser extent, Icelandic and Finnish) choke-hold on the English-language crime market relented last year, with a wave of Danish publications. The Boy in the Suitcase by writing team Lene Kaaerbøl and Agnete Friis, The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen, Call Me Princess by Sara Blædel, and, of course, Denmark’s obligatory entry in the astoundingly successful Akashic Noir series, Copenhagen Noir, all were published in the US in 2011.

“You have arrived in Scandinavia. You have just entered a long, bitter winter. Here there are no free rides. Here you are left to your own fate.” So begins Naja Marie Aidt’s “Women in Copenhagen,” the first story in Copenhagen Noir. And while this bleak depiction of Denmark’s welfare state may seem a tad overwrought to an outside observer, it does characterize a general unease that underlies each of the collection’s stories. Copenhagen Noir serves as a sort of shadowy primer to the growing insecurities and upheavals taking place in Denmark today. As Bo Tao Michaëlis (a cultural critic and author of several books on American authors including Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler) notes in his introduction to the collection,

“Gone is the provincial city appointed as capitol; instead, one is confronted with a metropolis where the food is from the Middle East, the wine from California, the women from Africa, and the mafia from Russia. Mafia! A new word at these latitudes, where crime formerly took place among bands identified with city neighborhoods and regions.”

Click here to read the full review.