Martin Aitken is a full-time translator of Scandinavian literature. His translation of Josefine Klougart’s One of Us Is Sleeping is published by Open Letter. He is currently translating the sixth book of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle from Norwegian with Don Bartlett.
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 180 pages.
IT’S HARD NOT to become hooked by Ida Jessen’s stubbornness; her refusal to tidy things up for us. This sixty-year-old Danish author harbors no...
New York. Penguin. 2021. 666 pages.
“FIRSTLY THERE WAS no plot, and secondly there was no sequence of events, and no coherence, everything came at you higgledy-piggledy.” So Karl Ove...
New York. Archipelago Books. 2021. 350 pages.
IN HIS NEW COLLECTION of essays, In the Land of the Cyclops,Karl OveKnausgaard continues to use writing as a...
New York. Archipelago. 2018. 1,164 pages.
Karl Ove Knausgaard has been crowned “the ideal writer of the present moment.” His six-part novel, My Struggle, sold half a million copies in Norway,...
Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2017. 312 pages.
It is difficult to find the right genre to capture Klougart’s sixth publication, Of Darkness (WLT, Jan. 2017, 53–55). Perhaps people have...
Photo: Michael Pereckas
Of Darkness is a book about love and death. These seem to me to be the only things worth writing about. When you write about love and death, the beauty in this world’s fa...
Rochester, NY. Open Letter. 2016. 260 pages.
If one of us is sleeping, is the other one awake? Might Danish author Josefine Klougart’s English-language debut be a luminous waking dream? The cryptic...
New York. Liveright (W.W. Norton, distr.). 2015. 562 pages.
Kim Leine struck literary gold with his fourth novel, The Prophets of Eternal Fjord. It is a big book and a great one too: disturb...