Stangerup, Henrik
Description
Review Max Mollerup is a correspondent for a Danish newspaper. Max starts off on the wrong foot with Charles de Gaulle himself when he botches a press
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conference question on his first assignment. Taking his own measure, Mollerup feels victimized by his once bright past; by his overbearing mother, a fading movie star; by the insularity of the Danish expatriate community in Paris; and by the feeling that "he is condemned to be free". When Max's courtship of a stylish Italian lady turns sour and then falters, the cultural affairs journalist begins a Dostoyevskian slide. Often drunk, always obnoxious, Mollerup frequents brothels, stalks old girl friends, and has strange encounters in back alleys with putative spies. He also steals from another writer's work to complete a long overdue manuscript. In the skilled hands of author Henrik Strangerup, these encounters cohere to portray a life gone amok and a world genuinely spinning beyond control. Snake In The Heart is a literate novel descriptive of the dark side of the human soul. -- Midwest Book Review Product Description Max Mollerup is a Danish journalist, working for his newspaper in Paris during the turbulent sixties. He has a comfortable apartment, a car and all the other conveniences of modern urban life. However, he is also chronically insecure, incapable of doing or saying the right thing at the right time. In an age which exuded cool assurance and self-confidence, Mollerup is a loner who, unsuccessful with women, resorts to prostitutes. His one attempt at a serious relationship soon disappears beneath a slough of uninterest. To make matters worse, someone else wants his job, and his most successful book has just been exposed as a work of plagiarism. Then his mother comes to stay: an aging Danish film star from the 1930s, she is awful to him and he is in turn brutal to her. From Publishers Weekly Self-disgust is the snake of this dour novel's title, which was inspired by words Karl Marx penned as a student. Max Mollerup, dissipated correspondent for a Danish newspaper in Paris during the mid-1960s, is well acquainted with this particular viper. In taking the measure of his life, he feels victimized by his once-bright past; by his overbearing mother, a fading movie star; by the insularity of the Danish expatriate community in Paris; and by the feeling that he is "condemned to be free." When Max's courtship of a sleek Italian woman soars, then falters, his days begin a downward spiral that will end with his life seeming like "something he might have seen in a bad film." In short order, Max is frequenting brothels, dodging spies in back alleys, stalking old girlfriends, devoting days to the study of paper-airplane construction and unabashedly pilfering another writer's work. This latest Stangerup novel to cross the Atlantic (after Brother Jacob) is written deftly, with an appealingly elegiac tone. But it suffers from a protagonist who is harmed not by a noble flaw but by his own misanthropy-and as Moliere demonstrated, that's more aptly a subject for farce than tragedy. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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