Thomas E. Kennedy, Kerrigan's Copenhagen - Editor's Choices - Book Review

Literary Review, Wntr, 2004 by Linda Lappin

Galway, Ireland: Wynkin de Worde Publishers, 2002.

Get out your walking shoes and a map of Copenhagen. In his new novel, Kerrigan's Copenhagen, Thomas E. Kennedy takes his readers on a tour of this great cultural capital of the North. The novel tells the story of expat American writer, Kerrigan, who is writing a book about the bars and eateries of Copenhagen, his new home. As he traipses from cafe to kiosk, sausage wagon to wine bar in the company of his fascinating if elusive Danish research assistant, Kerrigan explores Copenhagen's history, geography, and culinary delights. Rambling from the Mermaid statue to the hippy zone of Christiana, tasting the snaps and smoked eel from the local bars, Kerrigan muses upon the cultural heroes of this city: Soren Kierkegaarde, Hans Christian Andersen, Karen Blixen, and Lars Von Trier, while meditating on his own significance in the vast stream of European culture. He also acquaints the reader with contemporary Danish poetry and fiction, the origins of the toast "skal," the literary history of absinthe, the relationship between Denmark and Dublin (founded by the Danes), and the Finnish word for orgasm.

Each chapter is connected to a bar or eating place, for which addresses are provided in the chapter headings, in case readers would like to check out these locales in person. This guidebook style is more than just clever device used by the author for organizing his material--it hearkens back to the origins of the novel form, when novelists imitated real documents such as ship logs or letters to give a sense of veracity to their writing. The means adopted by writers to create a semblance of real life is a topic clear to Kennedy, who discusses this subject from a technical point of view in the essays collected in Realism and Other Illusions. He pushes the point even further in Kerrigan's Copenhagen, by probing, on many levels, the relationship of art to life.

With its metafictional reflections Kerrigan's Copenhagen may be defined as a post-modernist novel. It treads a fine line between autobiography and fiction, weaving in other genres--snatches of poetry, expository prose, and literary criticism, while real people mingle with its fictional characters in settings the reader is encouraged to visit personally. As we follow the narrator on his quest for "material"--historical information provided by his assistant and the erotic, aesthetic, and gastronomic adventures he shares with her, we discover--along with Kerrigan--how the stuff of life is transformed into fiction and poetry.

In this portrait of a city viewed through a writer's eyes, Kennedy pays homage to James Joyce, while elevating Copenhagen to the status of Joyce's Dublin. As in Joyce's Ulysses, the underpinnings of Kerrigan's Copenhagen are fixed deep in the realm of mythology, in the myths of Gilgamesh, the Sumerian god-hero who sought immortality and renewal, and of Kali, Hindu death-mother destroyer with whom Kerrigan has a personal account to settle, for in an attack of madness, Kerrigan's own mother murdered her son's wife and children. After the devastation of his past, Kerrigan must confront Kali in order to start life anew, and examine the many roles women have played in his life.

Kerrigan's Copenhagen is the first volume of the author's Copenhagen Quartet, an ambitious project investigating the lives of the mature and spiritually dispossessed of Copenhagen--victims of cancer, divorce, crime, and even political torture, who struggle to distinguish hunger from love, and who strive to reach a stark and simple faith in life enabling them to carry on. These four novels unfold against the background of the four seasons as they are experienced in this northern latitude, each season distinct and wholly itself, with moments of richness and loss.

Kerrigan's Copenhagen is also the story of a seduction and a search, as Kerrigan and his Research Associate make love, fall in love, and, as autumnal lovers, awaken to new life while around them Copenhagen awakens with the spring. The result is buoyant and rich--sensuous and cerebral, full of wit and joy, like Copenhagen itself, the pulsing heart of this delightful novel.

Linda Lappin is an American writer and translator who lives in Rome.