The Curse!

Peter Tudvad is has yet another book on Kierkegaard scheduled to appear this coming Tuesday, April 16th, 2013. I’d been hoping  his next book would be a biography. This book isn’t a biography though, it’s a biographical novel entitled Forbandelsen (i.e., the curse). The blurb on the back of the book says that it’s a

“dramatic portrayal of [the life of] Søren Kierkegaard, the brilliant, and at times mad, intellectual giant who revolutionized philosophy and shook theology with his emphasis on ‘the individual’ and ‘discipleship.’

“In the tradition of Dostojevski and Kafka, The Curse situates the protagonist in a universe where crime and punishment, sin and grace shift continuously between actuality and illusion, so that the reader is pulled into Kierkegaard’s thoughts and takes part in his existential battle with both God and humanity.

“The Curse is thus a theological novel and precisely as such provides a psychological portrait of a man who, with tragic pathos, sets heaven and earth in motion in an attempt to find a truth for which he can live and die.

“Kierkegaard’s antagonists, Bishop Mynster and Professor Martensen, his unhappy love, Regine, his brother Peter and friend Emil, along with many other figures, all appear in this grand story of piety and perversion, of death and perjury, of the Church’s distortion of the Gospels–and of a shepherd boy’s fateful cursing of God”

The book, from Tudvad’s usual publisher Politiken, is 494 pages and costs 350 kroner (that’s about $60). It hasn’t been reviewed yet, but I’ll fill you in on the reviews when they begin to appear. In the meantime, if you would like a little “smagsprøve,” as the Danes say, of the book you can actually print out an entire chapter (unfortunately, not the first chapter) here.

Rumor has it that Joakim Garff also has a book scheduled to appear soon. This will be the first book Garff has published since his biography of Kierkegaard back in 2000. You can bet he hasn’t been idle though, my sources say he has been laboring diligently and that this book is only one of several projects he has in the works.