Companions
3.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
Camilla, Charles, Alma, Edward, Alwilda and Kristian are a circle of friends hurtling through mid-life. Structured as a series of monologues jumping from one friend to the next, Companions follows their loves, ambitions, pains and anxieties as they age, fall sick, have affairs, grieve, host dinner parties and move between the Lake District, Berlin, Lisbon, Belgrade, Mozambique, New York and, of course, Denmark. In her first book to be translated into English, Christina Hesselholdt explores everyday life, the weight of the past and the difficulty of intimacy in a uniquely playful and experimental style. At once deeply comic and remarkably insightful, Companions is an exhilarating portrait of life in the twenty-first century.
Christina Hesselholdt
Christina Hesselholdt, born in 1962, studied at the Danish Academy of Creative Writing in Copenhagen. Her first novel, Køkkenet, Gravkammeret & Landskabet [The Kitchen, the Tomb & the Landscape], was published in 1991. She has written fifteen books of prose, and received critical acclaim and awards for her books, including the Beatrice Prize in 2007 and the Critics’ Prize in 2010. She was included in Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2013. Companions is her first book to appear in English. Her latest work, Vivian, a novel about the photographer Vivian Maier, was published by Rosinante in 2016. It won the Danish Radio Best Novel Award 2017 and has been shortlisted for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2017.
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Reviews for Companions
9 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I was rapt by the first section of the book, and then slowly started to hate the whole thing. There is an objective reason for this, which a superior reviewer has told me: this is really four novellas, not one novel, and I can imagine being much more enthralled by the whole thing had I read it over a period of eight years, instead of eight days.
There is also a subjective reason for this: reading the first section, it was clear that the book is identity political literature for rich white people, which is essentially what I am. I kept waiting for the book to develop some critical bite, but instead, it got softer and softer and nudged me to sympathise more and more with these horrible people (qui? c'est moi). It was a repulsive experience.
Having said that, I'd much rather read this than a single page of K Ove K, the last volume of whose Struggle is glaring at me from the half-read pile.