Beloved of my 27 Senses
by Karen Fastrup, transl. Tara Chace
Toronto: Book Thug, 2008, ISBN 978-1-897388-20-4, 174 pp., $25 paper.

Reading Karen Fastrup's Beloved of My 27 Senses is like experiencing the layers of discovery in an archaeological dig. It is set in three time periods: the present, in which Tore tries to locate his parents, who mysteriously set out, one after another, into the desert looking for each other; the past, during which time Clemens, a geologist, and his wife Anna, a doctor, travel through the Libyan desert; and the farther past, when Clemens as a youth unwittingly seduced and was seduced by his high-school teacher, Ane Brandt. We observe Clemens betrayed by Ane when she also has an affair with his father, Thorkild, and later by Anna who, during the delirium caused by the heat and monotony of the desert journey, is seduced by the Sinatra-singing Leo, a member of the geological group headed by Clemens. Finally, Clemens's betrayal of Anna when he becomes the indirect cause of Leo's death jolts us with something like the heart of darkness that corrupts Clemens. Although we have seen him as a man of heroic proportions--a natural leader among the crew--who has been wronged, this final turn of events modifies our view and we realize that Clemens may be both victim and perpetrator. Accordingly, Tore's query about why his father never appeared like a jilted man but instead one full of remorse, is answered near the end of the novel (156).

Beloved of My 27 Senses is a gripping story, set in Denmark, Sudan, and New Zealand, among other locations, with the desert landscape in particular providing a natural metaphor for eroticism and a setting in which the self may lose its moral bearing under the hypnotic influence of the endless dunes.

In a revealing discussion, Leo remarks that Arab men are obsessed with women, while Clemens comments that the root of the obsession may lie with the practice of Arab women covering their bodies. Anna then playfully pokes fun at the men, claiming that they cannot be scientists if they cannot distinguish cause from effect in so simple a phenomenon. The discussion provides a paradigm for the novel's experience of seeking for answers amid the many strands that lie buried inside the whole cloth of the past:

"All we can do is observe things that happen," Clemens said. "When you get right down to it, we can't prove what the underlying cause was. Take geological processes, for example. We can never know for sure what happened every step of the way. All we can do is reason out what may have happened. Or perhaps it will simply come to us in a burst of inspiration. Like with Wegener and continental drift--after studying a map, he suddenly realized that the east coast of South America fits into the west coast of Africa. Just the way a woman who's lying on her side fits perfectly into a man's body when he's lying behind her." (5-6)

The association of the landscape with the fitting into each other of a woman's and a man's bodies extends to that of the undulating desert. Helga, Tore's true love after a dead marriage to Mette, describes her desire to "eat" the sand: "it's all the grooves," she remarks (167). Accordingly, the desert setting as an extension of the body, or a body with a will of its own, lures the characters on with its inherent sensuality.

Skin imagery becomes important, ranging from a medical discussion of the layers of dermis and corium etc. (120) to Leo's song "You get under my skin" to such colloquial asides as that Clemens will have to develop a "thick skin" while tolerating Leo's flirtations with Anna (170). Similarly, the repeated love triangles are presented almost as a mathematical theorem, with the female characters sharing a name-derivative: Clemens's first lover, Ane; his eventual wife, Anna, and the adulated figure of Anna Blossom in the Kurt Schwitter poem. Ane, seduced by a teenager, and the naively impulsive Anna are one and the same type, easily aligned with the literary ultra-sexual Anna Blossom ("you drippy beast") who, following the palindrome of her name, may be said to be the "same in front as from behind," i.e., a beautiful sexual object.

While the scenes are often cinematic with their sharp angles, choreographed movements and terse colloquial dialogue, bad writing, which I assume to be due to the translation, often gets in the way. The following paragraph contains all the ingredients of a charged scene, but it remains disappointingly flat:

Anna was sitting in the shade under the awning from the tent, pitting dates. Clemens was sitting at a table on the other side of their campsite with his back to her, studying some maps, and Leo was sitting in the sand a few metres off to the left of her, mending a torn backpack He was whistling Sinatra, as always. "I've Got You Under My Skin." Anna grasped one date after the next, and with a steady hand she made an incision down through its wrinkled skin. Now he was humming, Leo. His eyes on the faded backpack. Anna's shirt clung to her back, and she straightened up and peeled it loose from her skin before she huddled back over the dates in the metal bowl again." Now he was singing: "I've got you under my skin, I've got you deep in the heart of me, So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me." He didn't lift his eyes. Clemens turned his head slightly and shot him a quick look before flipping back to his maps some more. (71)

This shapeless paragraph continues without a break for the same length as the above excerpt, losing much of its impact, though it is a critical scene.

The beginning of the novel is frustrating, introducing many unanswered questions before we even care about the characters, but by the end I was taken in by them and their moral decisions. Although initially I had to turn back to distinguish the time breaks noted by dates at the head of entries rather than chapters, this unique feature proved a small impediment. My major criticism is with the translation, which often resorts to run-on sentences that, rather than having the effect of the dramatically varied and stylistically bright, appear stilted and choppy. Nonetheless, this novel offers a riveting read and, with the right translation, will take its place among the classics.

Gillian Harding-Russell lives, reviews, edits, teaches and writes in Regina. Her latest collection of poetry is I forgot to tell you (Thistledown Press, 2007).

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