108th book of 2022.

Never a bad thing when the most fun I had with this book was on page 3 when the narrator of the first story takes the metro to Kongens Nytorv. And this was only fun because of the happy recognition of the metro stop. Last month when I was in Copenhagen, I took the metro every morning from Norreport to Kongens Nytorv. Sadly, my fun with this Danish novelist ended with the first story (which, on the whole, I thought was OK). The rest? Quite honestly, when I put the book down, I had no idea what I'd read. Two of the stories are both titled the same and deal with beach boys helping clients. As with the other stories though, there's a lot of surrealism and abstraction. There are paragraphs like,

In the pentagon around the hole, we plant five parasols upside down in the sand, twist them down into the viscous layers. The last three inches of the shafts sticking out of the sand we grease with after-sun before getting on our knees and letting our arseholes slide slowly down around them.

And,

Then it's night and he pushes me headfirst into the pool in front of the bench in the changing room. Seawater steams orange, comes up to the middle of my thighs. It's thick and living with the jellyfish blobs we've been filling it up with day after day; they've fused with each other and the salt: little, veined whitish eggs bulging in clusters. I'm on all fours in front of Manu, who's on his knees, feeding me the living water, shovelling it into my ass with his hand. The sun is inside me now because the sun sets in the ocean. Then he shows me a transparent, hollow shrimp shell he found on the beach, sticks his hand into his swim trunks and pulls out his long, thin dick. 'Do you want to?' he asks, nodding, and I nod too, and he twists the head off the shell and softens the rest in the living water. It fits snug around his dick except for the legs dangling from its base. I let myself float in the pool with my back arched and my ass in the air, let myself relax inside and feel him slide in: a ribbed and prickling sensation in the slime and cold. Through the hole in the wall, the sun makes a column of light in the water. He moves inside me, my spine turns to jelly. I can feel the eggs inside it: we're throbbing at the base of the spine, wandering slowly through the abdomen. Squirt of thick white juice, first Manu inside me and then me with eggs in the sun lands on the sandy ground. We make the best of what we've got.

And frankly I don't understand it at all.

2/10

There was one short story in the middle regarding marriage and power dynamics that I really enjoyed. The rest was confusing, and I am not sure what the author was trying to convey. It seemed like snapshots of people’s lives with no beginning or ending. While I am not opposed to this, the writing style did not work for me. That said, it is definitely experimental, and I am glad to have witnessed it.

I was so looking forward to reading this collection of short stories but when it came to it, it left me feeling bland and without colour or excitement.

After the Sun is a collection that is supposed to push boundaries but somehow it doesn’t end up doing that. I wouldn’t call leaving the reader unsettled as pushing boundaries.

There is another story “Alvin” which perhaps was the highlight of the book for me – surreal and a parody of sorts about commodity trading. “Me, Rory, and Aurora” was another one that worked for me about a homeless girl named Casey and her being in a three-way relationship with Rory and Aurora, exploring their lives lived in a run-down flat.

The rest of the stories just didn’t work for me. The writing sparkles in places, but leaves you wanting so much more that you don’t want it after a point. The translation was on point as always, but once again if the source material read so absurdly, then you really cannot say much about the translation.

After the Sun just did not work for me on so many levels – there was nothing to it, and it also did not make me go back and perhaps reconsider what I thought of it earlier.

I’m in shock, don’t read this unless you want to be disturbed