Description

Copenhagen is a collection of 11 short stories that map the city of K?benhavn through their own subtle intertextuality. Each story is takes place in a different location within the urban landscape, and these sites become part of a structural network through which its citizens move. Their lives brush up against each other but without ever connecting: parents neglect their children in the face of everyday chores, husbands cheat on their wives with little gratification; hit-and-run drivers go home and make tomato soup. The characters in these pages move about the city on foot, on bicycles, in buses and in cars, even across the book's shifting montage of consciousness from one story to another. They encounter one another in random fateful collisions: a car crash, a knife thrust, a cheerless sexual encounter. At first glance, these criss-crossing narratives might appear like moral criticism, yet such an outcome is continually thwarted for an exploration of the trails and byways of the text and the city, leading us to unexpected places and even to a place where a form of consciousness, both social and poetic, becomes the city and the text, both isolated and connected, both orchestrated and restless. Guldager's tales exude what was for Goethe the core of the short story: "the unheard-of event."