Klage

A churchyard is the room in which all the texts of this book take place. Many of them are letters of complaint, addressed to the priest, the cemetery authorities and the parish council about the tangible details of death: the plot, the headstone, the coffin. Alongside the letter-writers speak the gravedigger, who tries in his own remarkable way to keep order between the living and the dead, and a priest whose diary shows a man barely keeping hold of his life. Mixing kinds of text and letting them play against one another, the book makes room for beauty, existential seriousness and absurd comedy, and for people’s helplessness before death and their effort to belong and to remain themselves, in life and after it.

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About the book

Form

Short stories

Length

126 pages in the original

First published

2001 by Gyldendal

Author's age

43 when first published

ISBN

9788205278738 (original)