Natalja’s Stories by Inger Christensen

Known primarily for her poetry, Inger Christensen (1935–2009) remains one of Denmark’s most distinguished and original authors. Part of a seven-writer project modeled after Boccaccio’s Decameron, Natalja’s Stories focuses on the shifting ground of meaning. It is a tale told to the narrator by her grandmother—about her mother, “abducted” from Copenhagen, taken to Russia, from where she must flee after the Revolution. She dies and her ashes are carried back to Denmark. The story is told and retold in marvelous ways, often hilariously, involving murders and absurd characters, with wonderful repeating motifs and passages. The Danish critic Marie Louise Kjølbye notes how relevant the novel is today: “Instead of a conventional heartbreaking story of loss and disaster, the book appears as a tantalizing account of a character seizing the moment, leaving the past behind, and becoming someone else—offering, in fact, a deconstruction of the usual take on the migrant’s fate as a tragic narrative.”