Beneath the Neon Egg
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Beneath the Neon Egg is a novel of jazz, violence, sex, death, love, and the underbelly of life, set in the low light of a Copenhagen winter. It is the story of Patrick Bluett, a forty-three-year-old Irish-American in Denmark, divorced and navigating his relationship with his college-age children, searching for life in a new country. It is also the story of his neighbor, a man in a similar circumstance who becomes his friend-and becomes entangled with a Russian prostitute.
The novel borrows its four-part structure from John Coltrane's majestic jazz symphony A Love Supreme, which Patrick Bluett listens to as he gazes out the window at the frozen streets of his adopted city, unaware of events in the apartment across the hall, and unaware of the consequences his friend will meet-or will, perhaps, escape.
The final novel of Thomas E. Kennedy's acclaimed Copenhagen Quartet-four independent novels about the seasons and souls of Copenhagen-Beneath the Neon Egg cements Kennedy's reputation as a literary revelation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The uneven final installment of Kennedy's Copenhagen Quartet is shaped by the winter season and structured with inspiration from John Coltrane's jazz album "A Love Supreme," whose track titles it reprises as the names of the novel's four distinct parts. American expat Patrick "Blue" Bluett makes his living translating Danish documents into English. The divorced father of two grown children, Blue spends his free time listening to jazz, drinking in Copenhagen's watering holes, and fumbling for real connection amid fleeting encounters. When his closest friend and neighbor, Sam Finglas, confides that he has found rapture with a Russian girlfriend, Blue is envious. His curiosity grows when he glimpses the couple entering the mysterious Satin Club. Preoccupied with his new lover, Liselotte, Blue barely registers Sam's deepening dismay, until he learns that his friend has died in an apparent suicide. What Blue discovers in the aftermath of his friend's death changes his vision of Sam and of his own life. Music is richly woven throughout the tale, and the sights and sounds of wintry Copenhagen are lyrically evoked. But while Sam's story wraps emotional pathos in gritty, noir-flavored suspense, Blue's aimlessness flattens the larger narrative. Too often, momentum stalls amid jejune philosophizing ("Do I like existing? Would I prefer not to?") and exhaustive accounts of unremarkable days.
