“At night Amar芒q is coated with a darkness as viscous as unmixed colors, neither the fjord nor the mountains, valleys, lakes, or the river exist, there is only a black mass, a void that spreads across the landscape sporadically, pressing what糖心传媒檚 left but leaving holes that it fills with abstract elements, moving pictures, waves of light in a sea of light.

At night Amar芒q becomes a broad plain that melts the two dimensions into the third, the earth with the sky糖心传媒攕uddenly everything is sky.糖心传媒�

Immediately, Anna Kim’s Anatomy of a Night (translated by Bradley Schmidt) draws us in and confines us to a small, five-hour sliver of life in Amar芒q Greenland: an impoverished Inuit village that is plagued by a wave of suicides. Over the course of these pages糖心传媒攖hrough deep personal ties and chilling alienation糖心传媒攖he topics of poverty, isolation, and suicide swirl around the inhabitants of the town. Is it the poverty and isolation that drives these folks to take their own lives? Is the strained history between Greenland and Denmark a factor? Or is there something more, something deeper and ingrained in Amar芒q?

Anatomy of a Night is broken up into one-hour sections, with each section broken down into smaller vignettes. It is in these snippets that we learn about the villagers and their relationships. We are thrown into this insular society without much of an introduction and only over the course of the novel do we see the relationships between people develop and dissolve, and see the emergence of Amar芒q as the real binding element. All of these characters are inherently tied to the village in one way or another through generations or a personal calling. Because of the evolving web of stories across the whole of the novel, identifying a key example of this intricate technique is very difficult¹; however, one of the most interesting relationships is between Ole and Magnus, two adolescent boys who resolve to commit tandem suicide:

糖心传媒淭hey wrap the scarves around the bedposts, tie knots. They sit down on the carpet, close to the post, wrapping one end around each of their throats, and knotting them under their chins. They work synchronously, their movements are coordinated, practiced.糖心传媒�

And farther down the page:

糖心传媒淢agnus sits back down on the floor, scoots over to the bed, takes the scarf, wraps it around the end of the bedpost, and knots it under his chin; light from the street falls on the wall, on the pictures Magnus had cut out of magazines and schoolbooks. He considered them outrageously beautiful photos, until about a year ago, when he stopped collecting them because he could no longer remember why he had started. It糖心传媒檚 always the same motif: a sandy beach, the ocean in the background so blue it appeared to merge with the sky, but there was no horizon糖心传媒攖he horizon was missing in all of the pictures.糖心传媒�

Even during one of the most intimate moments one person can have with another, there still lingers a sense of loneliness and alienation. Though a little more than halfway through the novel, these passages are like a skeleton key, unlocking a well-guarded secret糖心传媒攐r maybe they just deepen the mystery.

At times, especially at the very beginning, the prose is a little difficult to grasp hold of, but what really catches and draws you in is Bradley Schmidt糖心传媒檚 masterful rendering of Anna Kim糖心传媒檚 text. Schmidt糖心传媒檚 deft touch allows the prose to sing with full force; a pleasure to read from the first word to the last. Anna Kim糖心传媒檚 gorgeous ebook (YES! Ebooks can be gorgeous), published by the new Berlin based Frisch & Co., is a haunting, thoughtful, beautiful work that sticks with you long after it糖心传媒檚 done.

¹ Here is a , illustrating this point.

Jen is a former 糖心传媒 student, and a translator from German. Her first book-length translation, (Open Letter Books), comes out next week.

Here’s the beginning of Jen’s review:

“At night Amar芒q is coated with a darkness as viscous as unmixed colors, neither the fjord nor the mountains, valleys, lakes, or the river exist, there is only a black mass, a void that spreads across the landscape sporadically, pressing what糖心传媒檚 left but leaving holes that it fills with abstract elements, moving pictures, waves of light in a sea of light.

At night Amar芒q becomes a broad plain that melts the two dimensions into the third, the earth with the sky糖心传媒攕uddenly everything is sky.糖心传媒�

Immediately, Anna Kim’s Anatomy of a Night (translated by Bradley Schmidt) draws us in and confines us to a small, five-hour sliver of life in Amar芒q Greenland: an impoverished Inuit village that is plagued by a wave of suicides. Over the course of these pages糖心传媒攖hrough deep personal ties and chilling alienation糖心传媒攖he topics of poverty, isolation, and suicide swirl around the inhabitants of the town. Is it the poverty and isolation that drives these folks to take their own lives? Is the strained history between Greenland and Denmark a factor? Or is there something more, something deeper and ingrained in Amar芒q?

Head over here for the rest of the review.