Every time I notched up another hundred pages of Liberty, my sense of foreboding increased. It is the book I couldn’t put down, but never wanted to finish. Not only because the story itself will have ended at that point, but because of the author’s stupidly early, fast, death. The end of the book marks the end of the author, rabid cancer at forty years. Wiki quotes his publisher at the funeral: “And now here I stand, with a freezingly clear and merciless awareness that, in the course of the past year, I have witnessed something of the most unfair and meaningless I have experienced in my life. To see so much originality, so much talent go to waste and never get the chance to unfold. It is unbearable.”
And he died alone, no partner, no children, which is how he might have died in his own book which is about the aloneness of everybody.
It pains me to put this book – and the whole trilogy, I suppose, and maybe everything he wrote – into my shelf ‘books you won’t read before you die’. It drives me crazy that the Anglo-world’s obsession with Scandi is limited to ‘noir’ (an abused word if ever there was one) and a certain type of furniture. I recommend An ‘Un-business-like Business’: Publishing Danish Literature in Translation in the UK 1990–2015 by Ellen Kythor for a consideration of why it is that Miss Smilla sold over 1M copies in GB, whilst the three volumes of the African Trilogy together sold 600 copies between them. Shakes head.
It was particularly hard to track down volume three of this trilogy. By accident I ended up with two copies, both ex-library. So you can’t even read this by asking your library for it. Shakes head again.
A little tea, a little chat 