BLUE SUNSET

A novella about love and grief by London-based novelist and translator Hansen.

When a young woman from Copenhagen, Denmark, named Maja attends an academic conference somewhere in Europe, she’s drawn into a relationship with a successful writer, dubbed simply the Author. She calls herself “a criminal” because back home sits an urn she’s legally not supposed to have, filled with a child’s ashes. Hansen omits details and adds touches of mystery early on, carefully revealing as the novel progresses how violently Maja has been “jolted out of orbit” by grief. Maja and the Author spend several days in the Italian Riviera eating, watching sunsets, buying furniture, and hiking. The descriptions of food and landscape are intoxicating. The relationship seems to be a personal test of Maja’s ability to connect, live, and perhaps love while grieving. There is attraction between them, if not romance, exactly. “When they go to bed everything and nothing has changed, like a minute shift in the atmosphere.” Maja finds she must flee every now and then, by train, because to her, “without whims there would only be stifling passivity.” They travel separately to small towns but quickly end up back together. Maja is eventually drawn home to confront the urn, which has never left her mind, facing an anguish that “feels in a way she can only describe as the sound and friction of hair being pulled against long granite stones.” Hansen’s controlled, poetic prose shines brighter and brighter as Maja’s life and past come fully into view. The quiet but moving climax occurs in a gorgeous, wrenching scene set at the British Library, illuminating a series of parallel motifs and connections between herself and, surprisingly, Percy and Mary Shelley.

A lush, atmospheric novella brimming with poetry, pain, and desire.