Termush: A Novel

by Sven Holm, Sylvia Clayton (Translator), Jeff VanderMeer (Foreword by)

Overview

"Like the radioactivity of its world, Termush crackles with an invisible, deadly energy." —Ray Naylor, author of Mountain in the Sea

With an introduction by Jeff VanderMeer that makes an ardent case for its relevance to today’s world, this rediscovered classic of Scandinavian fiction is still shockingly relevant more than fifty years after it was first published. Sven Holm’s Termush is a searing and prophetic study of humanity forced into a moral bind through its own doing.

Termush caters to every need of its wealthy patrons—first among them, a coveted spot at this exclusive seaside getaway, a resort designed for the end of the world.

Everyone within its walls has been promised full protection from the aftereffects of “the disaster.” The staff work behind the scenes to create a calming and frictionless mood; they pipe soothing music into the halls and quickly remove the dead birds that fall out of the sky. But the specter of death remains. Recon teams come and go in protective gear. Fear of contamination spreads as the hotel cautiously welcomes survivors only to then censor news of their arrival. As the days pass, the veneer of control begins to crack, and it becomes clear that the residents of Termush can insulate themselves from neither the physical effects of the cataclysm nor the moral fallout of using their wealth to separate themselves from the fate of those trapped outside.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374613594
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/09/2024
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	474,568
File size:	448 KB

About the Author

Sven Holm (1940–2019) was a celebrated Danish author and playwright. In 1974 he was awarded the Grand Prize of the Danish Academy, where he was made a member in 2001, the same year he won the Danish Critics Prize for Literature, followed by the Holberg Medal in 1991.

Sylvia Clayton (1926–1994) was a novelist, journalist, and translator. Her novel Friends and Romans won the 1975 Guardian Fiction Prize. Her other novels include Crystal Gazers, The Peninsula, Top C, and Sabbatical.

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander, the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts), and The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. He speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change as well as urban rewilding. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, on the edge of a ravine, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and their cat, Neo.

Editorial Reviews

★ 11/27/2023

Holm, who died in 2019, makes his U.S. debut with an excellent portrayal of nuclear destruction that—though it was originally published in 1967—speaks to the recent impact of Covid-19. Termush is a luxury coastal resort where patrons receive temporary respite from the nuclear fallout that consumes the world just outside its chandeliers, swimming pools, and fine art. Radiation meters keep track of drifting phosphorous, guests have their urine checked for radiation, and the management does its best to insulate them from the blasted landscape, mass death, and desperate survivors beyond the resort’s gates. The insomniac narrator trusts only the radio and an enchanting fellow guest named Maria, with whom he begins to discover a truth that Termush’s staff struggles to conceal. Soon, however, there’s no denying the bodies piling up, the strangers trespassing in the hotel’s rarified atmosphere, or the blaring alarms that foretell pandemonium. The images and motif are nightmarish, as are the narrator’s creeping revelations: “Is nothing changed, can everything be swept away as a dream is swept out of the conscious mind in the morning?” This vision of apocalyptic horror and class critique contains multitudes. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"In this eerie last-days-on-earth scenario, the ones that can pay for survival spend their days in a mirage of security that crashes slowly and silently. The distance that Holm puts between the narrator and the reality of the resort creates a well-mannered, minimal, and disquieting style." —Mariana Enríquez, author of Our Share of Night

“In the more than 50 years between its writing and its American publication, Termush has lost none of its power to disturb . . . In this short book, [Holm] created something timeless . . . The clarity of [the novel’s] prose and the intensity of its vision inspire.”
—Matthew Keeley, Washington Post

"Timeless . . . with something of the power of parable."
—The Chicago Review of Books

"Excellent. . . This vision of apocalyptic horror and class critique contains multitudes."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Termush’s universal setting and farsighted themes combine with the author’s eerie minimalism to make it feel as modern as it is avant-garde . . . A prescient parable that finds the rich dismayed with what happens after the world ends.”
—Kirkus

"A superb find . . . An addition to the post-apocalyptic canon that lingers disquietingly in the reader’s mind . . . [A] survivalist variation on the hotel in The White Lotus . . . A travel guide to the world in which we are learning to live."
—John Gray, The New Statesman

"A creepy and enigmatic masterpiece."
—Doug Johnstone, The Big Issue

"Termush is gripping and brilliantly spare, provocative and suspenseful. It was difficult to put this novel down, and its echoes stayed with me long after reading, haunting and lovely."
—Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King

"Termush is a terrifying inquiry into the nature of survival and the fragile calm that comes after a disaster. Sylvia's Clayton's translation of Sven Holm's work is crisp and elegant; I couldn't put it down."
—Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X

“Termush offers a soul-chilling inquiry into human behavior—cruel acts and generous ones, arguably defensible and hauntingly indefensible ones—in a past that may just be approaching us again."
—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning

"At Sven Holm’s exclusive hotel at the end of the world, the wine is chilled, management is on edge, and the Discreet Charm of the One Percent is on full display. To read Termush is to encounter an uncanny vision of the future delivered from the past crashing the perimeter of our catastrophic present. The collision is wicked and revealing."
—Lisa Hsiao Chen, author of Activities of Daily Living

"Sven Holm's reemergent masterpiece is a surreal exploration of human continuity at all costs in the aftermath of societal and natural collapse. Termush could be our last-chance glimpse of what the exceptionalizing aura of wealth might ultimately offer in an all but dead world."
—Pitchaya Sudbanthad, author of Bangkok Wakes to Rain

"A classic: stunning, dangerous, darkly beautiful."
—Jeff VanderMeer, author of Annihilation

"Termush is like the Hotel California after the end of the world. A chilling and prescient tale about alienation—you can dodge the apocalypse but you can't escape yourself."
—Andrew Hunter Murray, author of The Sanctuary

"A mesmerizing novel about community in the wake of a catastrophe. Both mischievously surreal and terrifyingly real, Termush is a great work on the psychology of fear."
—Sandra Newman, author of Julia

"Building with the nauseating, relentless compulsion of a tidal wave, Termush touches on something elemental and true."
—Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Dance Tree

"A dark and prophetic noir, Termush feels like a haunting, like someone from the future screaming to us in the past—but these pages are timeless. It is a remarkable and astonishing read."
—Salena Godden, author of Mrs Death Misses Death

"The novella’s themes, which will be familiar to readers of J. G. Ballard and Cormac McCarthy, haven’t lost their urgency . . . Most importantly, Termush works as a parable of inequality, reminding us that, unless the world redistributes its resources more fairly, it will continue to be haunted by visions of dystopia—devastating to haves and have-nots alike."
—Anna Aslanyan, The Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

★ 02/01/2024

In this hypnotic 1967 Danish novella, translated in 1969 by Sylvia Clayton, well-to-do doomsday preppers holed up in the specially outfitted seaside resort of Termush tentatively emerge from their fallout shelters into a world that appears unchanged. Management takes precautions against the invisible miasma of radiation and doles out the comforts of home. Soft music plays over speakers while the guests tamp down their incomprehension, desperate for normalcy amidst a pervasive uncertainty that invades their dreams. Then the first outsider arrives. COVID-era readers may nod with recognition at such uncanny details as contact tracing, seemingly arbitrary threat levels, distrust of medical authorities, and the rise of a xenophobic "chairman" whose "primitive blend of cunning and stupidity attracts supporters to rally round behind him," even as he opines that "an inspired lie could be preferred to a malignant truth." VERDICT Holm's enigmatic fable deftly imagines from the inside out what might become of our fragile societal and mental constructs when the world as we knew it is gone, placing it alongside such psychologically acute post-apocalyptic rediscoveries as Marlen Haushofer's The Wall and Kay Dick's They.

Library Journal

2023-10-07
Well-to-do survivors of a post-apocalyptic disaster hole up in an exclusive hotel.

When unbelievable events regularly happen before our eyes, it's instructive to have artifacts to give them context—for instance, this buried treasure, originally published by Danish novelist Holm in 1967, translated contemporaneously by British novelist Clayton, and resurrected from the archives with a new introduction by SF lighthouse keeper Jeff VanderMeer. It’s a slim novel, but its universal setting and farsighted themes combine with the author’s eerie minimalism to make it feel as modern as it is avant-garde. “Everything went according to plan...” says the anonymous narrator, making observations from the titular hotel where a wealthy group of survivors are sheltering from deadly radiation outside. We learn that the narrator enrolled in the program some years ago, promised "a guarantee of help” when the time came, complete with protective shelters, security personnel, and uncontaminated food and water. Before long, things begin to go wrong, from the near-constant radiation alarms that drive Termush’s inhabitants underground to dead birds falling from the air to the arrival of other survivors quickly labeled enemies. Inevitably, the denizens of the resort are transformed. Like the privileged tourists playing dress-up in dystopian fictions like Westworld or White Lotus, our narrator and the other residents of Termush devolve to their basest instincts sooner than you’d think: “We paid money to go on living in the same way that one once paid health insurance; we bought the commodity called survival, and according to all existing contracts no one has the right to take it from us or make demands upon it.” When brandy and sedatives fail and violence and death follow, the survivors of Termush soon learn that money doesn’t provide as much insulation as it did in the Before Times.

A prescient parable that finds the rich dismayed with what happens after the world ends.

Kirkus Reviews