Claus Beck-Nielsen

With rare linguistic certainty Claus Beck-Nielsen (born 1963) ventures out in this novel on an unusual tour in embarrassing moments and more or less fictitious meetings with named authors. The book consists of an introductory chapter - in which the author comes to Copenhagen and makes his début in the journal Hvedekorn - and 12 subsequent chapters which each describe a meeting with one of the Danish Authors. Together the book gives a picture of the thirteenth author, the writer himself.

The dramatic thing about this book is that it is funny, but it balances all the time on the edge of the serious. The portraits of the Danish Authors are perhaps caricatured but all come with a truth - if nothing else a mythological truth, seen from the writer's memoires of himself as young and hesitant. Yes, the meetings become essentially existential because the book's author - the I that is talking - finds himself in a constant crisis, and really in a traditional identity crisis: Who am I? I have all these options, which shall I choose?

It is clear that the portraits of the Danish Authors are easier to relate to - and understand - if the reader knows the authors referred to and at best has read their books; but we are convinced that without that knowledge you can read still Claus Beck-Nielsen's book and at the same time have fun and shudder at the nature of the meetings. Everyone can empathise with the writer's experience of being outside and wanting to be in - or precisely not wanting it. You have the urge to run away, at the same time you are attracted by the character descriptions.

Despite the book's schematic structure it is not repetitive; on the contrary the form the meetings take varies. They show up elegantly, The Danish Authors, in wildly different situations - and in different roles in regard to the narrator: Poul Borum, Jens Christian Grøndahl, Peter Høeg, Pia Tafdrup, Peer Hultberg, Hans Otto Jørgensen, Henrik Nordbrandt, Jørgen Leth, Christina Hesselholdt, Klaus Rifbjerg and Ib Michael. Some of the meetings have not taken place and others took place a long time ago ...

Claus Beck-Nielsen looks up to the one, identifies himself with another, is disappointed with a third, has been married to a fourth, yes a fifth later married his wife and was perhaps in her bed in Copenhagen while he himself lay in the same author's bed in Århus - how embarrassing can it get? And how funny? And at the same time, with what delicate finesse can it be written? With smooth transitions from the Danish Authors to the author's own life, own memoirs of relatives - and even more embarrassments in the past, in other towns, other realities.

This is a novel that works on several levels: as a humorous literature story; as a study in human frontiers, where recognised psychological barriers are crossed, caution, modesty, anxiety; as profound self-knowledge; as a hall of mirrors - as the subtitle suggests - for the author, but also for the reader. And the paradox is that the language in the middle of this unruly amusement (as said: something rare) is itself cautious, modest and anxious, yes, amongst the most precise we have read in Danish for years.

Lilian Munk Rösing, Asger Schnack