Beloved of My Twenty-Seven Senses

By Karen Fastrup

Taking its title from Kurt Schwitters's fanatical love poem "To Anna Blume," Beloved of My Twenty-seven Senses depicts a sensory realm so advanced that our six senses simply aren't enough to truly perceive the world. At the age of 71, geologist Clemens Carlsen has set out into the Libyan Desert. His wife Anna has gone after him. No one knows where they are or why they're there. A search party has been sent to look for them. In a hotel in a desert town in Egypt, their son Tore is waiting. As he sifts through his parents' old journals, photographs, and scientific notes, their lives unfold before him; he discovers where they are and why.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1897388209
• ISBN13: 9781897388204
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Book*hug Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Like burrowing your fingertips into an orange rind!

If I had to pick a book that Fastrup's Beloved of My 27 Senses most resembles, I would say, without a doubt, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. Both are set largely in Africa. Both involve love triangles. Both are told in snippets that gradually reveal the histories of the books' main characters. Both contain powerful mysteries. Both have profoundly non-linear narratives. And both explore their characters in surprising depth. That said, however, Fastrup has written a book that is very much its own thing. Fastrup's style is unique--more reminiscent of Helene Cixous than Ondaatje. Reading her book is like burrowing your fingertips into the rind of an orange. The physicality of the experience is almost overwhelming. Fastrup uses Kurt Schwitter's Dadaist, non-sensical 1919 German love poem "An Anne Blume [To Anna Blossom]" as a recurrent theme. Schwitter's poem of boundless, unconstrained, verging-on-crazy, sensual love is a perfect fit for this Danish novel. A young Danish man named Tore goes to Egypt, trying to find his parents who have disappeared. Turns out his parents (an archeologist and a doctor) had spent a great deal of time in the Libyan dessert when they were younger. Now Tore is trying to piece together snippets he remembers hearing with things his parents had written in diaries and notebooks to figure out where they are. Fastrup describes the desert as if it were the body of a lover, dwelling on topographical details with an erotic languor. Gradually through the book she sifts through the sands of the desert and of time, moving past formations of low outcroppings, through reddish-yellow clouds of dust with the crushing weight of the oppressive heat to the milky white salt crust on that forms a skin over the desert surface. As an archeologist digs through the layers of the Earth, this book digs through the layers of what makes a person who they are. Fastrup gets under your skin, creating a mystery that is sensual and exciting, occasionally repulsive, but always intriguing, a wild sensory experience, pungent, fulsome. A little like burrowing your fingertips into the rind of an orange. I highly recommend it. It's quite a reading experience.