New Novel: Sær - ein fuglabók av gloymsku
Carl Jóhan Jensen celebrated his 60th birthday on 2 December 2017 by releasing his fifth novel: "Sær - Ein fuglabók av gloymsku" with publisher Sprotin. Having been living and writing in Brussels for the last 5 years, his novel is inspired in part by Belgian, Flemish and broader European historical and political realities. It is a modern European "mémoire fictive " that breaks new ground in Faroese literature. Do we choose to remember, or to forget? Do we edit our memories ourselves, or do circumstances conspire to determine our recollection? From the crisis in the Belgian Congo in the late 1950's, to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, to the mysterious death of a man on a fishing boat in the Faroe Islands, events in the novel bring together a Faroese woman's exploration of her own identity and memory, grounded in her childhood in Tórshavn, from which she breaks free, but to which she inevitably returns. Her quest for the meaning of life, death, and memory, portrayed with a rich ornithology of characters and their passions and obsessions, seen both from within and beyond the confines of her origins, gives this book universal resonance. It is delivered in the umcompromising and innovative literary style for which Carl Jóhan Jensen has become internationally renowned.
