Beloved of My Twenty-seven Senses by Karen Fastrup, Translated by Tara Chace

Taking its title from Kurt Schwitters’s fanatical love poem “To Anna Blume,” Beloved of My Twenty-seven Senses depicts a sensory realm so advanced that our six senses simply aren’t enough to truly perceive the world. At the age of 71, geologist Clemens Carlsen has set out into the Libyan Desert. His wife Anna has gone after him. No one knows where they are or why they’re there. A search party has been sent to look for them. In a hotel in a desert town in Egypt, their son Tore is waiting. As he sifts through his parents’ old journals, photographs, and scientific notes, their lives unfold before him; he discovers where they are and why.

Praise for Beloved of My Twenty-seven Senses:

“In his Letters of Travels, Rudyard Kipling wrote: ‘The weight of the Desert is on one, every day and every hour.’ Karen Fastrup’s Beloved of My Twenty-seven Senses is a novelistic ellipse into the Desert, into the light and dark of desire, of love, of sensuality and sexuality, of the human body against the physicality of the Libyan dunes, and, perhaps most importantly, of words and how they can perform together. Beloved of My Twenty-seven Senses concerns the heart within the shiftiness of desert sands, and how what is unknowable about the desert mocks those who wish possession. In Fastrup’s artful novel, a sandstorm, a transgression, a betrayal, and a murder accrete not disaster, but further yearning.” —Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of The Nettle Spinner

“At its deepest level Karen Fastrup’s timeless novel is about excavating love that is buried in the sands of time and bringing it back to the surface again.” —Klaus Rothstein, Weekendavisen

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Karen Fastrup was born in 1967 and lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. She made her authorial debut in 2000 with the novel Brønden (The Well).