Natalja's Stories

6 June 2025

Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

Inger Christensen (Author), Denise Newman (Translator)

Description

A brilliant, elegant, and playful novella newly in English by “one of Denmark’s most honored poets” (Publishers Weekly)

Known primarily for her poetry, Inger Christensen (1935-2009) remains one of Denmark’s most distinguished and original authors. Natalja’s Stories, modeled after Boccaccio’s Decameron, takes an usual approach to the theme of migration by focusing on the shifting ground of meaning itself. It is a tale told to the narrator by her grandmother—about her mother, "abducted" by a Russian from Copenhagen: taken to Russia, she tries to flee the Revolution; she dies and her ashes are carried back to Denmark. But the story is told and retold in marvelous ways, digressing playfully (often hilariously), and involving murders and absurd characters, with wonderful repeating motifs and passages. Natalja’s Stories springs surprise after surprise, and as one Danish critic put it: “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 migrant fate as a tragic narrative.”

Reviews

"Her luminous prose confirms what was already evident in the poems: that Christensen was one of the eminent visionaries of the 20th century." — Los Angeles Review of Books

"She whispers to me in my own writing, a brilliant, fierce literary mother whom I will read and reread again and again." — Siri Hustvedt

"Inger Christensen is a formalist who makes her own rules, then turns the game around with another rule." — Eliot Weinberger

"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 (Nobel Prize winner 2009)

"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." — Publishers Weekly

Paperback

9780811239462

114 x 185 mm • 96 pages

£10.99

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Standalone Ebook

9780811239479

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