Natalja's Stories

From one of Denmark’s most revered authors, a startlingly original novel about a migrant’s fate, told across several generations of women

This is the story of a young woman who is spirited away to St. Petersburg from Copenhagen by a lovestruck admirer. When she dies after the Russian Revolution, her ashes are carried back to Denmark, igniting a chain reaction of further stories, told and retold by the women in her family against a shifting ground of meaning. We meet murderers and fable-like characters, such as the hilarious and unsettling Viktor Blanke, who manages to seduce not one but three generations of mothers and daughters. Natalja, we discover, cannot be held in one place. Rather than giving in to the tragedy that befalls her, she wills herself to become someone else, reinventing her family’s narrative one irresistible tale at a time.

Tantalizing and full of wit, this remarkable, shape-shifting novel is available in English for the first time.

Author Biography

Inger Christensen (1935-2009) was one of Scandinavia’s most powerful literary voices. Her ingeniously crafted poetry and prose have been variously called naturalist, experimental, formalist, and structuralist; essentially, her work defies labels. Each of her books resembles nothing else, yet each is imbued with her characteristic visionary clarity and human sensibility. Christensen won numerous major European literary awards, including the Grand Prix des Biennales Internationales de Poesie, the Nordic Prize of the Swedish Academy, and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. During her final decade, she was consistently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, including by Herta M ller.

Denise Newman is a poet and translator. She is the author of three collections of poems, The New Make Believe, Wild Goods, and Human Forest. Her poems, collaborations, and translations have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Volt, Fence, New American Writing, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere.