Aidt Naja Marie: Carlova knjiga

Naja Marie Aidt: Carl's book

"I raise a glass and toast with my eldest son. His pregnant wife and their daughter sleep upstairs. It's a March night outside, cold and clear. "Cheers!" I say at the moment when our glasses clink, with that sharp, refined sound. My mother is saying something to the dog. Then the phone rings. We don't answer. Who would call us so late on a Saturday night?' And one call changes everything. In March 2015, the twenty-five-year-old son of Naja Marie Aidt, Carl Emil, dies in a tragic accident. Carl's book - When death takes something from you, give it back is the author's intimate diary and poetic notes about the first months and years after the terrible news of the loss of a child. Sadness and pain are there to try to understand what cannot be understood, and the author communicates on this personal journey of comfort with the experience of other artists who have gone through such a sudden loss of a loved one (Joan Didion, Nick Cave, Stéphane Mallarmé, C.S. Lewis, Anne Carson, Jacques Roubaud...) Is there comfort in the fact that life simply stops and how to put your life back together broken into a thousand pieces? What are the limits of language after the death of a loved one and how to find salvation, with friends and family, in memories, in literature, in poetry? ""When death takes something from you give it back give it back what the dead man gave you when the dead man was alive when he was dead give it back to a rose, a continent, a winter's day, a boy watching you from the darkness under a hood" """When death takes something from you give it back give it back what the dead man gave you when you were in the rain in the snow in the sun and the dead man was alive and turned his face towards you as if he wanted to ask you something you don't remember what and he doesn't remember and that's now eternity eternity from now on"" Naja Marie Aidt (1963, Greenland) is the author of a series of books of various genres, and published her first book of poetry in 1991. In 2017, she published Carl's book, for which, as the first Danish writer up to that time, she was nominated for the prestigious 2019 National Book Award for translated literature. She is the winner of, among others, the Beatrice Award (2004), the annual prize of Danish literary critics (2007), and in 2008 the Nordic Council Literature Award, for the collection of stories Pavijan, published in Croatian translation by Đurđica Žlebačić Sørensen and published by Sandorf in 2020. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages.