Synopsis
Svend Age Madsen, born in 1939, stands today as one of Denmark's most important experimental novelists. Concerned with the unstable or illusory nature of reality, he is a master of the fantastic, skirting around realism, but never entirely realistic. For him, time, place, human nature are all indeterminate concepts, all tending to dissolve and re-emerge elsewhere in a different form.
In Days with Diam the manifold and complex nature of human personality results in the creation of a world in which the doppelganger motif is related to Mendel's laws of segregation: the narrator meets himself in various guises, even sees himself through the window writing an account which, when he finally gains access to it, turns out to be in his own handwriting. Who is this narrator? And what is this Diam who appears in an array of guises ranging from the prudish to the lascivious? A figment of the imagination, perhaps - but of whose imagination? And what is the implication of the character without a story? In one chapter, Svend Age Madsen explains the system behind the book - but is this the whole key to its understanding?
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Reviews
In this imaginative, cleverly constructed novel by a leading contemporary Danish writer, much is related to Mendel's work in heredity. Not that anything has scientific certainty: the work can turn absurd or more often hilarious at any moment. A person who disappears one instant, reappears as the ghost of his former self the next. The narrator, for instance, evolves into alternate selves with only one thing in common--an obsession with an ever-changing woman named Diam, who acts as a muse, lover, bitch-goddess and figment of the imagination. Madsen's thought-provoking story--``a kaleidoscopic picture of the possibilities I have felt within myself''--raises fascinating questions about the permeable border between reality and imagination, and about the ways we create and recreate ourselves in life and in fiction. The arrangement of chapters in the form of a genealogical tree seems baffling (what is this, some kind of genetic code? we cry), the writer explains that it is not his intention to make the letters signify anything and that the stories can be read in any order. One thing is certain: having finished Madsen's book, readers will look at fiction in a new light.
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