“She could drive the car into a tree. Wonderful, wonderful: Danish married couple killed against a jacaranda near Karen Blixen’s coffee farm; tragic destiny after visit to destiny storyteller’s museum; No trace of brakes in the dusty African dirt. But isn’t it only … “
Kenya. There are claims that the Karen Blixen Museum is haunted. A Danish journalist is on her way with her husband, the couple driving through the outskirts of Nairobi in the blazing heat. She can’t forget her first husband, Albert, a Kenyan civil rights activist killed in 1992, and her new husband doesn’t understand nor is interested in her deep connection to Africa, rather he is taken with the luscious mouth of the young wife of the Museum director. A poetically written novella taking place in the Eastern Africa that Janne Teller for years lived and lost her heart in.
…….
“Janne Teller has written a short intense, shimmering and stuttering novella about returning to Africa’s heart of darkness. [Her] new book is sharp and precise … told with vital nerve and eerie unease … Janne Teller is at her very best when she is clearcut and sparse with her words as in her masterpiece Nothing, and when she is breathtakingly sparse as on these African Roads.” – Lars Bukdahl, Weekendavisen, Denmark
”… brutal and finely chiseled. African Roads is a dense tale about encapsulated grief. …. A tight and forceful story from the roads around Karen – the neighbourhood in Nairobi named after another Danish teller of destinies.” – Jyllandsposten, Denmark
”The tale is beautful and brutal, poetic and rhythmic, sensual and ethereal. Even for a non-Africa-connaisseur, the descriptions materialize into the reader’s own body.” – Fyns Stiftstidende, Denmark
“While we turn and twist along the African roads, Janne Teller takes us rhythmically deep into the shadows of the past and today’s far too pale sun” – Kristeligt dagblad, Denmark
“A refreshing breath amongst the African tales written since Karen Blixen … I thank Karen Blixen for being taken to Africa. And I thank Janne Teller for a different variation of African Roads than the stereotypical ones that have been seen countless of times.” – ULANDSNYT, Denmark
”Janne Teller’s condensed novella mirrors Karen Blixen’s longing for Denys Finch Hatton and reminds us of the capacity of art to recapture the past … creating a whole new language… Coupling the hard-won insights with a sensual experimental style, the reader is drawn closer and closer into the mind of the female journalist, vibrating on the border between the conscious and unconscious. … The novella is unveiled in a captivating juxtaposition between memory and the events of the present.” – Berlingske Tidende
Published in, ia: Denmark, Germany
