Tales Of Protection - Softcover

Hansen, Erik Fosnes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0436210037 ISBN 13: 9780436210037

Publisher: Secker, 2002

Synopsis

Tales of Protection is a novel about people in different places in different epochs - contemporary Norway, nineteenth-century Sweden, and Renaissance Italy - whose stories are bound together by the author's original and searching enquiry into why things happen the way they do. As the book opens, a dead man lies in his coffin reflecting on the past. Bolt was an eccentric scientist who devoted his old age to a vast research undertaking - collecting random incidents from the history of the species and finding the underlying pattern that connects them. This kind of hindsight, after all, must be a kind of heaven - or a kind of hell. His reveries lead him to tell two other tales - one of a doomed lighthouse keeper on a Swedish island and another of rivalry among Renassiance artists - and finally to tell a startling tale from his own early manhood. All of the tales, in his exquisitely suspenseful narration, demonstrate his theory of 'seriality', which is the opposite of causality. Erik Fosnes Hansen's Psalm at Journey's End was acclaimed as one of the most original works yet about the sinking of the Titanic. In Norway, Tales of Protection has been called a 'Blixenesque' masterpiece; it is a major new work of world literature, and a great leap forward for this gifted young writer.

About this title

Review:

"A breathtaking journey from a nineteenth-century lighthouse community in the Swedish Baltic, besieged by shipwreck and sickness, to a group of scheming artists in Renaissance Rome...Superbly intricate plots" (Guardian)

"His prose is both clear and poetic, and Nadia Christiensen's does full justice to his style, leaving the reader pondering on nothing less than the nature of existence itself" (Kirkus Reviews)

"For readers of Michael Ondaatje and Isak Dinesen, Erik Fosnes Hansen's imaginative narration brings an original and searching inquiry into why things happen the way they do and suggests a theory of 'seriality' -a half-science about the power of human connections" (www.goodreads.com)

From the Publisher:

'Hansen is a writer of genuine depth of feeling and width of interest' Independent

About this edition

• Publisher: Secker
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0436210037
• ISBN 13: 9780436210037
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 512