Doing Many Odd Things

Tags: Danish Me Review Science fiction

Review of Mange sære ting for (Doing Many Odd Things), by Svend Åge Madsen.

Outline: An atheist writer gets an assignment from God: write a defense of God. And right after Ã…rhus Festuge (Ã…rhus Festival) there's a body, dangling from the top of a church spire.

Is it SF? Well. There are some predecessors, clearly SF (Mnemosynes børn, Lad tiden gå), and looking-at-the-past machines and, indeed, playing havoc with time plays a certain part. But, I still have some doubts, though I can't quite say why.

Themes: The deceased, dangling from the church spire, was called Adam. With Holger and Hanumag, he was very much into a project where you could look at the Earth 2,000 years ago. Even more to the point: what did Jesus do exactly? But now Adam is dead, and Holger and Hanumag have disappeared. Their 3 students, Dja'far, Klaus and Devala respectively come to Ã…rhus, to figure out what happened. -- Felia is trying to solve the murder, that's already been committed, and a few more that happen later. -- A different project altogether is to find the truth about Jesus through DNA analysis. -- Here and there and everywhere there's foreboding, fun with time, destiny etc. -- The writing is full of half sentences, words tripping over each other etc.

Is it good? I have a clear sense that there's more to this book than I could wrestle from it. And I constantly tripped over words. But, I am left with a somewhat clear image of the plot (why and how did Adam die, etc.), and that's cool.

Note: The name of the book is from the Bible, Ecclesiastes 7:29, King James version: “Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.� By some freak of interpretation, in (old) Danish “sought out many inventions� becomes “doing many odd things�.

Created: 11 November, 2011 - Last changed: 11 November, 2011 - Comments (0)