After writing last week’s post, I remembered another Danish novel that I really liked: Prophets of Eternal Fjord by Kim Leine.

 

I wrote about it in German a few years ago here, after hearing the author read at Slawski, a bookshop in Buchholz, where I used to live.

 

This epic novel takes place in Greenland in the late 1700’s, where Morten Falck has come as a missionary from Copenhagen, even though he’s actually more interested in the natural sciences and other things than in theology. He preaches the ten commandments yet breaks most of them himself in this wild frozen land where the Danish culture clashes with that of the locals and where not everybody is prepared to accept colonial rule.

 

I see that my copy of the book is riddled with little sticky notes to mark passages I liked, and the author signed it with the following sentence:

 

At læse er at rejse både indad og udad.

(To read is to travel, both inward and outward.)

 

So true!