Latest Review: Doghead

Larissa Kyzer’s look at Morten Ramslund’s Doghead is the latest addition to our review section.

Ramslund’s going to be in New York for the upcoming PEN World Voices Festival, and in fact, he’ll be participating in a Scandinavian reception with Jan Kjaerstad at Idlewild Books on May 2nd from 6-8pm.

Doghead sounds like a fun book—here’s how Larissa’s review begins:

When first published in Denmark in 2005, Morten Ramsland’s Doghead was a staggering success. Although Ramsland’s prior poetry collection and first novel had been largely overlooked, Doghead received widespread popular and critical acclaim, winning numerous national prizes, including the prestigious Danish Booksellers’ Golden Laurels Prize. Four years later, Doghead has now made it to the United States, and has already garnered its author the perhaps well-meaning, but dubious title, of “Denmark’s John Irving.”

A sprawling, dark-humored, frank, and stringently cynical novel, Doghead traces four generations of the Eriksson family, whose vividly offbeat members include wayward sailors, epic drunks, would-be painters, over-attentive mothers, adulterers, accomplished liars, orphans, and escapists. It’s a generally unhappy clan, a collection of almost-strangers who find themselves bound together not so much by blood ties or loyalty, as by common history.

Click here for the rest.