Of Darkness
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Klougart has an unusual ability to create phrases, images and a language that you long to stay in and remember forever."—Dagens Nyheter
"One can speak of unbearable beauty, but one can also speak of a linguistic beauty that makes it possible to bear the unbearable."—Politiken
In this genre-bending apocalyptic novel Josefine Klougart fuses myriad literary styles to breathtaking effect in poetic meditations on life and death interspersed with haunting imagery. Her experimental novel asks readers to reconsider death, asserting sorrow and loss as beautiful and necessary aspects of living.
Hailed as "the Virginia Woolf of Scandinavia," Klougart mixes prose, lyric essay, drama, poetry, and images to breathtaking effect in her writing, and Of Darkness marks the arrival of a wholly new literary talent in world literature.
Josefine Klougart (b. 1985) made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Rise and Fall, which was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize. Her third novel, One of Us is Sleeping, forthcoming from Open Letter Books in summer 2016, was also nominated for a Nordic Council Literature Prize, making her the youngest author ever nominated twice for this prominent prize. Her fourth and most recent novel, Of Darkness, appeared in Denmark in 2014 to universal critical acclaim and became a massive bestseller in Denmark and Norway.
Translator Martin Aitken has won numerous awards for his translations of Danish literature, and he is currently working with Karl Ove Knausgaard to translate the final volume of My Struggle and his nonfiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Timeless meditations on life and death weave a tantalizing, sometimes treacherous web through Klougart's sixth novel and second American publication (following One of Us Is Sleeping). Copenhagen serves as a starting point, but the tale flows through settings as deftly as it does through seasons. A cast of anonymous characters populates the narrative, beginning with a man and woman in mourning, scattering the man's father's ashes at sea. Loss weaves through the pain of their strained relationship, and the intimacy of time has both bound them together and worn out their romance. Carefully crafted prose both clouds and illuminates the ache of watching a loved one fade in sickness or extinguish himself in suicide. The woman must face her aging mother's regression into childlike dependence. Later, the unbridgeable space that opens between the woman and man plays out in the form of a script. The man ruminates on the past through photographs, noting that the woman is "the only family he has left." Sometimes told in a few spare words per page, the story's ever-changing form emulates the continuously evolving shape of grief. The story ends as it began, with the man and woman drawn together in grief by the ocean. The weight of the revelations that all things are "joined and dependent on something else" and that everyone is isolated but also "in danger together" are tempered only by fleeting moments of feeling "more together than alone."
