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"A passionate love story about a Danish woman and a much younger Portuguese artist, The Endless Summer confronts ideas of time, sexuality, and tragedy in a style reminiscent of both Proust and Lars Von Trier. Emotional and visceral, the novel drifts through time and space, relating the lives, loves, and dissolutions of everyone who surrounds this unexpected couple, including the woman's former husband who holds the family at gunpoint, her daughter and her lovers, who include a boy who finds himself and his true sexual identity in America, and the young boy who "is perhaps a girl, but does not yet know it," who narrates it all. Propelled by a captivating story, the real charm of the novel resides in its impeccable style and atmosphere, which gathers a sense of longing, a slight nostalgia for times that ache with possibility, while knowing that even the endless summer doesn't last forever"--… (more)
User reviews
But the language of the book seems to fight that depressing message - the long, swooping lines of the text circle delicately, often beautifully, about the drabness and squalor. They loop back and forth as though to undermine the monotony of time, they pin down the irrelevant and leave the important largely undefined and ambiguous. There is power in having had moments of beauty in our lives, the book seems to be telling us, and the futures we didn't exploit are still meaningful to us.
It's difficult to say whether this is a lovely, consoling piece of Proustian melancholy or a slightly banal triumph of style over substance. It probably depends on how cynical you are feeling when you read it. I quite enjoyed it, and it's apparently been a success in Denmark, but I don't think it's really something I'm going to come back to.