Har døden taget noget fra dig så giv det tilbage, Carls bog

"In 2015, Naja Marie Aidt, one of Denmark’s finest writers, lost her son Carl in a horrible accident. For a while Naja thought she’d never be able to write again. Literature seemed pointless, but slowly the attempt to describe the extreme sorrow and trauma that she and her family were living through called for literature. Language came to the rescue. The result is one of the best books ever written about sorrow in Danish literary history, if you ask me. It’s heartbreaking in its description of horror, trauma and loss, but it’s also beautiful, courageous, poetic, and unforgettable. It kept me awake for a couple of nights, made me think of the ones I love, and made me think of survival and of literature as a temple where we try to heal our hurt. Naja Marie Aidt’s writing is very intense, persistent and vocal. It’s dark and fluid, it’s repetitive and daring. She gets under your skin, into your thoughts. She’s a damn good writer. To me she’s just a dark, edgy and intense writer. If anything I see more of a Nordic vølve in her—a ‘vølve’ is a female poet, a seer and witch, i.e. the intense teller of truths. I hadn’t read Baboon when I wrote Karate Chop so if there’s a resemblance it must come from the language we share, Danish. “She gets under your skin, into your thoughts. She’s a damn good writer” I think they both circle around the darker sides of relationships, but most good fiction does that, doesn’t it? I think we’re both very much our own writers with mutual respect for each other’s instrumentation of the narrative and the language. In short: a novel is like an opera—many scenes, many characters, a lot of words. A short story is more like a lied —one strong voice, one theme, carried out as intense and targeted as possible to the very end. I like both forms."