"Perhaps a Novel" – Well, immediately a most peculiar title, nevertheless, it certainly is a novel and even an excellent and very different written novel than we are accustomed to. When you reach the very last page of this book, page 430 in fact, you know why, this title is a very good title indeed. As the reader en route through the story may be a little bit uncertain as to whether it is reality or fiction you are reading, it’s just because the book is so elegantly written, that the writer let the tale and the book grow wild in reader’s mind.

 

What genre do we move into? The narrative starts slowly as a fairly and almost ordinary family novel, where the focus is on modern adults strange and daily behavior with all it’s hidden conflicts and unpronounced expectations and duties. The spark of love is turned on and we are heading deep into the romance novel for adults with delicious and well-written eroticism and new expectations, as the reader after about 60 pages suddenly is in the midst of a bold "noir" crime with murder and Mafia and everything. How it just happened, that's not to say; but slowly the narrative tempo increases, and more and more dramatic plots begin unnoticeably to fold out. Even more surprising, Raymond Chandler's amazing master detective, Philip Marlowe, is just about a candle in the reader's head. Over all the narrative is teeming with delicious literary and musical allusions that at the best challenge the reader's intellect. Combined with a rarely seen language sensation and a deep and fiercely understated humor, it is a very high-level entertainment novel that unfolds for the reader.

 

Places and environments are unnoticeably depicted, so that the book may even be used as a travel guide but, it does not work in any way artificial or exaggerated, it is just the Universe of the book which unfolds to the reader, and it is instrumental in making it easy for the reader to distinguish between fiction and possible facts.

 

The Narrative is on the surface simple and coherent and written in complete chronological order but, is in fact very sophisticated built up with two widely varying sequence of actions. The courses of action are quite parallel, they take place at different end of the book, they take place in two different locations around Southern Europe, and they have a wide variety of outputs. As in the real world, it is just marginals that divide life and death, failure and success. Very elegantly is the beginning and the end of the novel identical, the ring closes.

 

In the tradition of faith, the author also takes his own discrete and indirect approach to the roles and relationships of men and women. I am sure that many feminist defenders will also get this novel completely wrong, because they forget that the author also saves a whole world to the reader in between the lines. There are many layers and threads to get started with for the reader that the book can be usefully read several times. Every time new thoughts emerge!

 

As a reviewer, the author has, as usual, made the work almost impossible for us to do the work of critics, and I know from colleagues that there are not many, whom are boxed to report the book because it cannot be easily put into a booth or box. Personally, I think this kind of thing is funny, and I hope that very many readers will think the same. Dear potential reader, if you dare to move into this exciting Universe, then you simply have bold entertainment in the hammock this upcoming summer."

 

April 14, 2019

T. V. Nielsen, Helsingør

Free Lance Journalist