Christina Hesselholdt, born in 1962, studied at the Danish Academy of Creative Writing in Copenhagen. Her first novel, Kokkenet, 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.
'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
'[A]n affecting homage to, and a high-spirited literary dissection
of, Woolf's book [The Waves] ... Companions, translated with care
and elan 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
'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, starred review
'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
'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
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