Inger Christensen

Denise Newman

If Natalja’s Stories were a painting, I’d probably still be standing in front of it

She whispers to me in my own writing, a brilliant, fierce literary mother whom I will read and re-read again and again

A magnificent writer. I always hoped she would be given the Nobel Prize. When she died, I said: ‘Now they’ve let Inger die.’ I wouldn't have minded waiting. I could have received it later, or perhaps not at all

Her luminous prose confirms what was already evident in the poems: that Christensen was one of the eminent visionaries of the twentieth century

Christensen’s probing, questioning, hopeful voice was an important one and is missed

Instead of a conventional story of suffering, loss and disaster, the book is a tantalizing, playful account of a character seizing the moment, leaving the past behind, and becoming someone else – a deconstruction of the usual take on the migrant’s fate as a tragic narrative

This is the story of a young woman who is spirited away to St. Petersburg from Copenhagen by a lovestruck admirer. When she dies after the Russian Revolution, her ashes are carried back to Denmark, igniting a chain reaction of further stories, told and retold by the women in her family against a shifting ground of meaning. We meet murderers and fable-like characters, such as the hilarious and unsettling Viktor Blanke, who manages to seduce not one but three generations of mothers and daughters. Natalja, we discover, cannot be held in one place. Rather than giving in to the tragedy that befalls her, she wills herself to become someone else, reinventing her family’s narrative one irresistible tale at a time.Tantalizing and full of wit, this remarkable, shape-shifting novel is available in English for the first time.

Natalja's Stories

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