Josefine Klougart - "One of Us Is Sleeping" - Susan Harris
Working in the vein of Anne Carson, Josefine Klougart's novel is both true-to-life and incredibly poetic in its relating of a brief, intense love affair and the grief and disillusionment that follow its end. While she recounts the time with her lover, the narrator is also heading back home, where her mother is dying of cancer. This contrast between recollection and the belief that certain things will always be present in your life—your parents, your childhood home, your love—and the fact that life is a continual series of endings runs throughout the book, underpinning the striking imagery and magnificent prose.
A powerful novel that earned Klougart numerous accolades and several award nominations—including the Readers Book Award—One of Us Is Sleeping marks the launch of a major new voice in world literature.
About the author: Josefine Klougart has been hailed as one of Denmark’s greatest contemporary writers. She is the first Danish author ever to have two of her first three books nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and has been compared to Joan Didion, Anne Carson, and Virginia Woolf.
About the interlocutor: Susan Harris is the editorial director of Words Without Borders and the coeditor with Ilya Kaminsky of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.
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2016 Staff Favorite
A poetic and patient novel that is a celebration of loss and how it shapes us. With careful and measured prose, Klougart reveals life's remembered stability to be situated firmly as a point in our past that progresses toward deterioration, but in that journey there is a beauty of experience that only exists due to our fragile memories. Klougart has been called the Scandinavian Virginia Woolf, and she lives up to it here.
-Kevin
Scandinavia now has its own Virginia Woolf. Few get as close to the human mind as Klougart--Mari Nymoen Nilsen, VG
The English-language debut from one of Denmark's most exciting, celebrated young writers, One of Us Is Sleeping is a haunting novel about loss in all its forms...