Money to Burn, by Asta Olivia Nordenhof

Asta Olivia Nordenhof is a Danish novelist and poet. Money to Burn is the first novel is a seven part series, or septology. 

Married couple Maggie and Kurt run a farm. Both have their problems. Kurt is a sometimes abusive partner, and Maggie has suffered sexual abuse with other partners, and with Kurt. In the midst of these relationship details comes the story of the burning of the Scandinavian Star passenger ferry, which killed 159 people. A real life event mired in possible financial scandal, did Kurt invest in this apparently dodgy business?

Award winning Nordenhof is also a poet, and this sensibility informs much of Money to Burn. The narrative style is fragmentary and jumpy. Readers will find it hard to get a footing, but this is perhaps the idea. The oddest thing is the sudden dropping in the middle of this short novel the Scandinavian Star ferry fire, a major disaster that occurred in 1990. No doubt how this is related to the main characters is fleshed out in a further six novels. (Nordenhof  lists the novel titles to come. I don't know how many have already been written, besides the second installment The Devil Book.)

I thought Money to Burn was okay - just - and perhaps maybe, just maybe, I'd be intrigued to see how the story is developed in a second book. However, by the end of Money to Burn I was tiring of the two main characters. They were pretty unappealing. 

Experimental fiction for the adventurous.

Translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight. 

The Umbrella, by Tove Ditlevsen

  

Tove Ditlevsen (1917-1976) was a Danish poet and author. She is finding late fame with English readers due to recent translations of her fiction and notably her three volume autobiography, The Copenhagen Trilogy. As part of Penguin's Archive series, ten stories are published in this handy little volume celebrating 90 years of Penguin books. (I think all the stories are taken from a Penguin Modern Classics edition of her stories called The Trouble With Happiness.)

For those new to Ditlevsen, her writing is on the gloomy, existential side. Volume one of her memoir Childhood described an unrelentingly miserable upbringing, one in which a sensitive child is misunderstood by peers and parents alike. In The Umbrella, the stories concentrate on joyless marriages that are endured and offer little in the way of personal fulfillment or development. The couples often misunderstand each other and a sense of shame permeates everything. 

True, that doesn't sound too appealing. But for readers who like slow moving, intimate fiction that explores the human psyche in detail, then Ditlevsen is the ticket. At a hundred pages, with most of the stories lasting about ten pages, The Umbrella is a good place to dip into some moody Danish fiction.