Anna (I) Anna

by Klaus Rifbjerg

A thirty-five-year-old Danish woman struggles to confront and overcome devastating bouts of depression.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0915306301
• ISBN13: 9780915306305
• Release Date: July 1995
• Publisher: Curbstone Press
• Length: 251 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The high price of selling out for cheap.

Anna is the bourgeoise wife of a Danish diplomat stationed in Karachi, when for untold reasons, she suffers a nervous breakdown and is sent back to her homeland in Copenhagen for treatment. While on the plane, she decides to bolt, and takes off with a prisoner who faces certain incarceration. Thus Anna is catapulted into her personal and pyschological journey to discover who she is while risking it all in a desperate and often humerous adventure. This novel was originally written for radio in Denmark, and each chapter has the feel of a weekly installment. It has the pace of a radio play, full of both personal insight and thrilling action, and each chapter ends with a sometimes breathtaking cliffhanger. It is also a picaresque novel; the story takes Anna and her outlaw through Europe, being harbored by a variety of strange and interesting characters in exotic locales, including a traveling circus. Through these adventures she is constantly aware of the impossibility of this new existence, and the encroaching fact that people are looking for her. But it's on the road where Anna is desperate to discover the reasons behind her psychological breakdown; she must counter the repellent and repeated impulse she had to murder her beloved daughter Minna. Anna's journey is one which many can relate to, in the choices we make that can sometimes go against our spirits, and the consequences of leading a life untrue to one's heart. Not many of us have the chance to cash in our moral core for seductive prizes such as the superstardom of musicians or celebrities. This is the very ordinary tale of the everyday sell-out, the person who bargains her true self for an unexceptional and moreoften, ponderous prize. Anna's story comes to a dazzling close, one that will bring you, immediately with her, to the brink of desperation and discovery. And the realization of the bravery and upheaval which are necessary if one is to undo the heavy trappings of a false life.