Kirsten Thorup’s Baby introduces us to strangers, the outsiders: misfits, deviants, losers, the powerless, those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They are the other side of the coin, the failures.
The novel opens in the Mexicana, a cheap nightclub in the Vesterbro district of Copenhagen, where several acquaintances are gathered together in a meaningless, hand-to-mouth companionship. When the club closes, they go their own ways, never to return to the club again a dispersion that gives the book its basic pattern of wandering and aimlessness and no neatly rounded closing of the circle.
Their tracts zigzag through the city. We follow Mark―the untalented auto salesman with the Orson Welles profile who is heavily in debt and does not know how to get out―home to his money-grubbing wife who get household income by selling herself to the loan shark who has Mark in his clutches. We follow Suzie on a drunken spree in Sweden with a couple of delinquents. We visit Leni, who has never written the book she wants to write because she has had to support herself by translating porno magazines. We go with her to the home of her former husband, Eddy, who once owned the run-down apartment where Karla, a single mother with two children, now lives. Eddy is the central to the story. He is the spider; his money―and its power―are the poison.
Permeating the everyday lives of these characters is an experience that perhaps a woman best can formulate: the experience of being a thing, an object rather than a subject, a receiver―of bribery, of blows and bruises, of caresses, or persuasive words. And perhaps a woman’s sensitivity is also particularly suited to describing this state with the unsentimental tenderness that Kirsten Thorup manifests in Baby.
Baby deals with people who have been pushed out into the darkness. They are the children of darkness and some of them do dark deeds. But Thorup has said that if she had to choose an epigraph for the novel, it would be a line from Hugo: “Not those who do dark deeds, but those who create the darkness are the truly guilty ones.”

Baby: A Novel (Pegasus Prize for Literature)

Literature & Fiction

Thorup, Kirsten

Contemporary

LSU Press

No markings. Binding is tight, covers and spine fully intact. All edges are clean. Very clean, crisp, and tight copy. Not Ex-Library. All books offered from DSB are stocked at our store in Fayetteville, AR. Save on shipping by ordering multiple titles. 59pp. Softcover Very Good Condition Size: 6" x 9" English Text

Love from Trieste

Curbstone Press

Focuses on the relationship between Ana, a high-flying Danish career woman whose work is her life, and the young teenager Mariama. Ana first meets Mariama selling snacks on a beach in Gambia, and the girl gradually becomes a substitute for the family she never had. Ana brings Mariama to Europe to be educated; the girl finds the cultural shock and living with Ana intensely difficult, whilst Ana's obsession with her leads to her own carefully controlled life descending into chaos. The scene moves from colorful depictions of life in a luxury hotel in Africa, cheek by jowl with desperate poverty, to elite designer flats in Copenhagen, and finally the bustling multicultural community on the streets of London. ""Culture shock, an intense fixation by the Danish woman toward her charge, the struggle for learning, and a dependence on chance all combine with rich imagery into a story about two women and their search for meaning.""--World Literature Today, March/April 15

The God of Chance (Norvik Press Series B: English Translations of Scandinavian Literature)

Literary

Norvik Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Thorup, Kirsten. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Thorup, Kirsten