A passionate love story about a Danish woman and a much younger Portuguese artist, The Endless Summer confronts ideas of time, sexuality, and tragedy in a style reminiscent of both Proust and Lars Von Trier.
Emotional and visceral, author Madame Nielsen’s book drifts through time and space, relating the lives, loves, and dissolutions of everyone who surrounds this unexpected couple. These include the woman’s former husband, who holds the family at gunpoint; her daughter and her lovers, who include a boy who finds himself and his true sexual identity in America; and a young boy who “is perhaps a girl, but does not yet know it,” who narrates it all.
Propelled by a captivating story, the real charm of the novel resides in its impeccable style and atmosphere, which gathers a sense of longing and nostalgia for times that ache with possibility, despite knowing that even the endless summer doesn’t last forever. Translated from the Danish by Gaye Kynoch.
Following the discussion, copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Madame Nielsen is novelist, artist, performer, stage director and world history enactor, composer, chanteuse, and multi-gendered. Madame Nielsen is the author of numerous literary works, including a trilogy—The Suicide Mission, The Sovereign, and Fall of the Great Satan—and most recently, The Endless Summer, the “Bildungsroman” The Invasion, and The Supreme Being.
Madame Nielsen is translated into nine languages and has received several literary prizes. The autobiographical novel My Encounters with The Great Authors of our Nation was published in 2013 under her boy’s-name, Claus Beck-Nielsen, and was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2014.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Gaye Kynoch is a freelance translator of Danish into English.
She specializes in books and essays on various aspects of the arts, together with plays and works of fiction.
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Image courtesy of Madame Nielsen
THU—MARCH 15—7 PM, free