When death takes something from you give it back : Carl's book

by Naja Marie Aidt

Other authorsDenise J. Newman (Translator.)
Hardcover, 2019

Status

Available

Tags

Publication

Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2019.

Description

"In March 2015, Naja Marie Aidt's son Carl died at twenty-five years old in a tragic accident. When Death Takes Something from You, Give It Back describes the first year after that devastating phone call, until the shock slowly wears off. It is at once a sober account of life after losing a child--showing how grief transforms your relationship to reality, your loved ones, and time--and a book about the language of poetry, loss, and love. How do you approach the impossible to write about your deceased child? The book's complex form enacts the rupture and process of assembling the pieces. There are short prose sections addressed to Carl and intense lyric passages. There are fragments from the present that merge with flashbacks and journal entries from the past. Quotes appear throughout from an array of literary voices, woven together with Naja Marie Aidt's own voice. This multifarious book defies genre or any singular description"--… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member whitreidtan
Losing a child is every parent's worst nightmare. When you have a baby, you do everything in your power to keep them happy and healthy, never imagining that you'll outlive them, this beautiful gift the world bestowed on you and you on it. And yet parents face the devastation of losing children
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everyday, whether through disease or accident or some other tragedy, and their entire existence is changed by their horrible loss. When Naja Marie Aidt lost her 25 year old son Carl, she wrote this slim book to keep him alive, to mourn his death, and to process his unthinkable absence.

This memoir is a primal scream and a whispered sob. It is choppy and fragmented and broken, just as Aidt is by her loss. Interlayering quotes from others who have written about the death of a child, poetry, a repeated refrain, one that slowly builds in each repetition, about the night that they got the devastating call, and classical Greek and Roman writings on loss, this is a heartbreaking and moving account of the gaping hole that Carl's death left in Aidt's life. A lament in poetic snippets, this is not elegiac or depressing but a truthful and loving examination of the insurmountable fact of death by a mother adrift and longing. It is unconventionally written, a little chaotic, and non-linear and won't be for everyone but it holds emotion and truth, pain and understanding, absence and life in its pages.
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Awards

National Book Award (Longlist — Translated Literature — 2019)
Kirkus Prize (Finalist — Nonfiction — 2019)
PEN Translation Prize (Longlist — 2020)

Language

Original language

Danish

Barcode

11948
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