Suzanne Brogger

Suzanne Brogger's work is known in English through translations of her novels The Jade Cat (1997) and the sensational Deliver Us From Love (1976), which was recommended by Henry Miller as the most daring and courageous book since Rabelais. This volume contains her autobiographical meditation "A Fighting Pig's Too Tough to Eat", and a selection of essays from the past twenty years, showing her development from social rebel to iconoclast and visionary. Suzanne Brogger (b. 1944) has always been unconventional in her lifestyle and in her writing, in a way that has often prompted comparison with her fellow countrywoman Karen Blixen. She writes stories, poems, plays and essays, and many of her writings transgress genre boundaries. Her pronouncements and her activities have excited much controversy in Denmark, and her books have been translated into thirteen languages. Beginning as a polemicist, she has matured into a philosophical writer for whom the writing process is a continuous meditation on life, death and eros.

Beginning with the great-grandfather Isidor Levin and his emigration from Poland in the 19th century, his establishment of The Royal Danish Distillery - creators of the famous Danish snaps - and the family's successful assimilation in Denmark, the story follows the children and grandchildren, as they look for successes in Denmark and abroad, in business and within the arts. Suzanne Brogger's family saga takes us from Denmark to Riga and back, through two World Wars, to India and Afghanistan, to America as it was and as it is, and it takes us through boarding schools, mental hospitals, and almshouses for the poor. At the heart of the narrative is the grandmother, Katze, and her memories. She tells the story from her patrician apartment in Copenhagen's Gammel M-nt 14, where she has lived since the 1940s, and her story is a haunting portrait of the pride, conceitedness, grandness, and despair, that has followed the Levin family while the world outside the old apartment gradually fell apart. The family remains prey to drug addiction and suicide attempts. Some escape into sex, others into evangelical politics or religion. Regn becomes a UN diplomat in the Third World, his wife tries to kill their son, while their daughter serves her sexual apprenticeship in a Thai monastery-brothel and after a brief period of social acceptability, ends her days a bag lady in Copenhagen. As diverse and uncompromising as William Styron's Sophie's Choice and Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits. To have conjured up a cast of grotesques and rendered them sympathetic is a challenge that Suzanne Brogger has triumphantly brought off. .