One of Us Is Sleeping
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"Scandinavia now has its own Virginia Woolf. Few get as close to the human mind as Klougart"—Mari Nymoen Nilsen, VG
The English-language debut from one of Denmark's most exciting, celebrated young writers, One of Us Is Sleeping is a haunting novel about loss in all its forms.
As she returns home to visit her mother who is dying of cancer, the narrator recounts a brief, intense love affair, as well as the grief and disillusionment that follow its end. The book's striking imagery and magnificent prose underpin its principal theme: the jarring contrast between the recollection of stability, your parents, your childhood home, your love, and the continual endings that we experience throughout our lives.
A true-to-life, deeply poetic novel that works in the same vein as Anne Carson, One of Us Is Sleeping has won Klougart countless accolades and award nominations, including the Readers' Book Award, securing her place as a major new voice in world literature.
Josefine Klougart has been hailed as one of Denmark's greatest contemporary writers. She is the first Danish author ever to have two of her first three books nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. She's been compared to a range of authors, including Joan Didion, Anne Carson, and Virginia Woolf.
Martin Aitken has translated dozens of books from the Danish, including works by Dorthe Nors, Jussi Adler-Olsen, Peter Høeg, and Kim Leine, among others.
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A brokenhearted writer returns home to her family farm in this elegiac and disorienting novel, the author's English-language debut. While staring out at the snow that has "upholstered everything in frost" on Denmark's Jutland peninsula, separating the North and Baltic Seas, Klougart's unnamed narrator obsessively recalls "pictures of the emotions" from the past eight years foraging for False Chanterelles, a disappointing visit to Pompeii, the time her boyfriend slapped her hand to stop her from chewing her lip. Her mind also wanders to the events that followed the breakup with her boyfriend: a fling with an older man, a dreadfully uncomfortable meeting with her ex outside his used bookstore, an ill-fated attempt to start over; the timeline is muddled, but so is the writer's mind. "She can't remember beginning to love him, and she can't remember stopping," Klougart writes. "The feeling doesn't move like that, forward or backward. It exists." Mystifying, certainly, but Klougart's graceful and precise language propels the novel through a succession of images that justify the vagueness of that feeling, what is eventually described as something akin to "separating an egg, passing the yolk from hand to hand, the fragile yolk that might break at any moment." This is a beguiling conjuring of consciousness.
