Known primarily for her poetry, Inger Christensen (1935–2009) remains one of Denmark’s most distinguished and original authors. Part of a seven-writer project modeled after Boccaccio’s Decameron, Natalja’s Stories focuses on the shifting ground of meaning. It is a tale told to the narrator by her grandmother—about her mother, “abducted” from Copenhagen, taken to Russia, from where she must flee after the Revolution. She dies and her ashes are carried back to Denmark. The story is told and retold in marvelous ways, often hilariously, involving murders and absurd characters, with wonderful repeating motifs and passages. The Danish critic Marie Louise Kjølbye notes how relevant the novel is today: “Instead of a conventional heartbreaking story of loss and disaster, the book appears as a tantalizing account of a character seizing the moment, leaving the past behind, and becoming someone else—offering, in fact, a deconstruction of the usual take on the migrant’s fate as a tragic narrative.”
We would like to thank the Danish Arts Foundation for their generous support in the translation and publication of Natalja's Stories.
Her luminous prose confirms what was already evident in the poems: that Christensen was one of the eminent visionaries of the twentieth century.
— Los Angeles Review of Books
She whispers to me in my own writing, a brilliant, fierce literary mother whomI will read and reread again and again.
— Siri Hustvedt
A magnificent writer. I always hoped she would be given the Nobel Prize. When she died, I said: ‘Now they’ve let Inger die.’ I wouldn't have minded waiting. I could have received it later, or perhaps not at all.
— Herta Müller
Christensen’s probing, questioning, hopeful voice was an important one and is missed.
— Kirkus reviews
a spellbinding surrealist narrative of memory, destiny, and illusion in seven linked tales." "The slippage and echoing of the women’s identities serve as intriguing parallels to the elderly Natalja’s attempts to get her story straight. … This beautiful collection is a testament to the inexhaustible possibilities of storytelling.
