Book Description
A complex, ambitiously constructed novel evoking the history of a tiny but hotly contested fragment of northern Europe's coastal landscape
Product Description
It is 1938. A corpse is found preserved in a peat bog on the border between Germany and Denmark. The body in the bog is that of a 19th-century soldier bent double underneath his coat as if asleep - a disquieting reminder of old ferocious battles fought over the region known as Schleswig-Holstein at a time when a new world war is just about to begin. The border area is steeped in myth and folklore, which at times seem to intermingle with present-day reality in baffling ways. Three men -- a Danish policeman, a young German Jewish refugee and a German professor -- venture out into the quagmire to find clues to the soldier's identity. Soon afterwards, the professor disappears without a trace. It is 2000. Esm- Olsen, who works as a cleaner in the Institute for Historical Studies in Copenhagen, stumbles upon documents concerning the find in the peat bog while cleaning up after a student party. An amateur historian with a quirky personality, she can't resist "borrowing" the documents to read at home. Thus begins a many-layered journey into the past, both real and imagined. Esm-'s childhood, her relationship with her eccentric dead father, the particular opulence of 1960s American automobiles, a brilliantly delineated mutt called Terror, a packet of letters to the writer J D Salinger, the young soldier's drunken rape and the discovery of the German professor's body down a well are subtly interwoven to create a multivalent, atmospheric tale of mystery, memory and remembrance. (20040315)
About the Author
Eva-Marie Liffner was born in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1957. After studying, among other things, archaeology and the history of ideas, she became a journalist, later deciding to write fiction. Her first novel, Camera, was awarded four Swedish literary prizes, among them the Flint Axe for the best historical crime novel of 2001. Imago, Liffner's second novel, was nominated for the August Prize 2003. She is currently working on her third novel, set in Gothenburg in the early 1900s. (20040315)
