Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt, Paul Russell Garrett (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910695340
Publisher:	Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publication date:	08/30/2017
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	408
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

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.

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.
 Paul Russell Garrett translates from Danish and Norwegian. He serves on the management committee of the Translators Association and is Programme Director for a new theatre translation initiative, [Foreign Affairs] Translates! 

Read an Excerpt

Last summer I rambled through the rolling landscape of Wordsworth, where the shadows on the hills are so dark and so pronounced that the tops look like they are drenched in water, and the lakes are so deep … when suddenly a fighter jet appeared and without thinking I threw myself to the ground, terror-stricken. I had neither seen nor heard the jet until it was directly above me. It wagged its wings, turned on its side and disappeared between two hills. It was so elegant, so fast and so sudden, and from that moment on I lived and breathed to see another one, preferably many. I was lucky, because that summer British fighter pilots were performing training exercises there, weaving in and out of the hills of the Lake District, and perhaps they continued all the way to the Scottish highlands before departing on a mission to Afghanistan; like predatory shadows above the endless opium fields and endless mountain ranges, ‘bearing their cargo of death,’ something I repeated to myself in order to curb my enthusiasm, in any case I managed to see one or two every day. I made a few notes, this is what I wrote: ‘F-16s, sublime, flashing, wagging, terrifying noise—and then gone. In the very landscape where WW had one vision after the other, where in sudden flashes of insight, he looked and looked.’
As I walked around in Wordsworth’s landscape, dragging myself up his steep hills, I thought of the fighter planes as an embodiment of his inspiration, the sudden insight, a divine flash of realisation, a thought like a bolt from the blue and full of load-bearing force—enough to carry a poem through. These are not words I would ordinarily use, but I do not think William Wordsworth would have shied away from them.
What consumed me more though, was that I could get so excited, so fulfilled by the sight of these fighter jets. I was not free from shame. I was ashamed to sense delight at observing a phenomenon that was brought into the world to cause death and destruction. I was ashamed and I could not wait until the next one arrived. The fact that the plane only appeared for a brief moment certainly played a big part. I never tired of looking. I pursued my own ocular pleasure.

Editorial Reviews

If [Virginia Woolf's] The Waves weaves strands of consciousness into a single broad cord, Hesselholdt's book is more light-footed and choreographic, suggesting that contingency, change and tenuous separation can sometimes enable startling moments of connection…Not every reader will find the dense, intricate mundanity of these interlinked monologues easy to appreciate. As in actual life, it can sometimes be difficult to tell whether something crucial is happening, or nothing at all. But those who find connections among these disparate moments will be rewarded with a rare and fragile experience: a rediscovery of the strength of narrative bonds, impossible to dissolve and difficult to forget, a miraculous substance that links the characters to one another and holds them in companionable relation.

The New York Times Book Review - Alexandra Kleeman

★ 03/12/2018
In her meditative and engrossing English-language debut, Hesselholdt dives into the consciousnesses of six cerebral, animated, eccentric, and occasionally melancholy Danes. “I want to have my portrait done in a shower of puzzle pieces,” says Camilla, the book’s central figure, in one of the many reflexive statements of this homage to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. The six titular companions are childless and (mostly) 30-somethings, three men and three women who have coupled and decoupled over the years. Edward spends his days writing a mourning diary for his deceased parents and strolling for hours with his dog. His ex-wife, Alwilda, is less mopey: “I have been out mating,” she informs the assembled group. Exhausted from years of taking care of her mother and ailing husband, Camilla, seeking solitude, retreats to the countryside and tends to her animals, a dog and the horse she impulsively buys. Her best friend, Alma, is a writer who has left her husband, Kristian, an Eeyorelike man whose “self-loathing is like a ram.” Their stories are told in introspective monologues by turns splenetic and lyrical. The anxious characters wrestle with whether to retreat from or let oneself be “consumed by life,” turning to the “saturate” works of Woolf, Lawrence Durrell, Thomas Bernhard, and Sylvia Plath for sustenance. For this bookish lot, literature supplies invaluable companions, and readers will be captivated. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

‘Hesselholdt’s most penetrating insights into the texture of lived experience come in moments of vivid imagery and unexpected humor, which bridge the weight of biography and the lightness of an instant. … those who find connections among these disparate moments will be rewarded with a rare and fragile experience: a rediscovery of the strength of narrative bonds, impossible to dissolve and difficult to forget.’
— Alexandra Kleeman, New York Times

‘In her meditative and engrossing English-language debut, Hesselholdt dives into the consciousnesses of six cerebral, animated, eccentric, and occasionally melancholy Danes. … Their stories are told in introspective monologues by turns splenetic and lyrical. The anxious characters wrestle with whether to retreat from or let oneself be “consumed by life,” turning to the “saturate[d]” works of Woolf, Lawrence Durrell, Thomas Bernhard, and Sylvia Plath for sustenance. For this bookish lot, literature supplies invaluable companions, and readers will be captivated.’
— Publishers Weekly,

‘A blend of arresting detail, digression, and erudition tinged with nostalgia characterizes this novel, which ranges back and forth between different points of view. … Both the difficulty and the pleasure of being human shine through in these pages.’
— Kirkus Reviews

‘[A]n affecting homage to, and a high-spirited literary dissection of, Woolf’s book [The Waves] ... Companions, translated with care and élan by Paul Russell Garrett, is not at all a gloomy work. Hesselholdt’s touch is light, even mocking, as much as her subject matter is grave. There is a dancing intelligence roaming free here, darting back and forth among ideas and sensations. Her novel is a deceptively nonchalant defence of modernism and a work of pure animation.’
— Catherine Taylor, Financial Times

‘Hesselholdt writes well. There is a profundity to her exploration of middle age…her tender, considered scrutiny of mourning.’
— Samuel Graydon, Times Literary Supplement

‘Wonderfully rich prose, what a precious companion.’
— Helle Helle, author of This Should Be Written in the Present Tense

‘At times, the language is poetic and nostalgic, at others almost clinical, which reflects the internal conflicts of the characters well. Hesselholdt writes with a sharp ability to pinpoint the trials and tribulations that plague the human condition...’
— Buzz Magazine

‘Hesselholdt has never been better. Humour and grief go hand in hand, and the language shimmers from the drily caustic to the tenderly casual to the breathtakingly erotic.’
— Berlingske Tidende

‘I am quite certain that this book will do something to Danish literature. Hesselholdt is part of a generation of remarkable female authors who had their breakthroughs at the beginning of the 1990s and who in the past decade have turned their writing in new and surprising directions. None of them has moved to as wild and, yes, as promising a place as Hesselholdt has come to now.’
— Information

From the Publisher