A girl is struck down by polio during the terrifying epidemic of
the early 1950s. Paralysed and unable to breathe on her own,
she is committed to hospital in Copenhagen and placed in
an iron lung. Forty years earlier, near Budapest, a child grows up in an
orphanage for boys. The child goes by the
name of 'Boy' but is not like the others, as their body seems to
transcend the categories of boy or girl. Between these two
young people, there is a powerful, enigmatic bond that
stretches across time and space.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
'Reading Iron Lung felt like remembering a past life, at once so foreign and familiar. With her lucid, pulsating sentences, as poetic as they are precise, Kirstine Reffstrup pierces a little hole in history and pulls a thin, but shining thread through it: a vital and very moving connection between two distant young children living at the edges of time and normality. The result is a wonderfully singular novel that is both historically rooted and full of queer fabulation, both violent and brimming with a desire for embodiment and connection.' - Jonas Eika, author of After the Sun
'What if bodies were not told as pathologies or perversions but rather as stories of spiders, rivers, eggs, and laboured breaths? With sensuous sensitivity, Iron Lung imagines the queer twinnings that arise between bodies cast aside by the twentieth century.' - Selby Wynn Schwartz, author of After Sappho
'A wonderful book: writing which is so vital and so visual coupled with a story which is strange, psychedelic, precise and filled with melancholy. Virtuosic work.' - Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork
'As saturated with colours, sounds, scents,
tactile sensations and fantastic imagery as
hardly anything else I've read ... Reffstrup's
prose is like a magic carpet, delicately woven
with the finest threads. 5/6 star.' - Politiken
'A magical story of living in two worlds ...
Iron Lung lives and breathes precisely through
Reffstrup's sense of style and painterly ability
to create literary images. With this novel, she
shows her powerful, poetic voice. A writer
who isn't afraid to plunge into bold fantasies.' - Dagsavisen
'If you're a good enough writer, you can
persuade the reader to accept the most
incredible things ... Iron Lung takes us to
strange places, exploring different aspects of
humanity in poetic, hypnotic, sensuous prose
that makes the familiar unfamiliar and brings
the eerie close to us.'
- NRK
Sprache
Verlagsort
Maße
Höhe: 195 mm
Breite: 124 mm
Dicke: 24 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-916806-04-7 (9781916806047)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Kirstine Reffstrup was born in Denmark and lives in Norway. Her first novel, I, Unica, was published to great acclaim in 2016 and was nominated for literary prizes in both Norway and Denmark. Her second novel, Iron Lung, was first published in 2023 and was nominated for the prestigious Politiken Literature Prize. The same year she was awarded Stig Saeterbakken's Memorial Prize.
