The Jade Cat
by Suzanne Brøgger
Overlook Press, 2009
416 pages / $26.95 buy from Overlook or Amazon
Rating: 8.5

“All families are something something, lick your knees.” – Count Tolstoy

“The same phenomenon that makes the family so intolerable when you are young is precisely what makes it so fascinating when you are old: that concentraion of karma, old memory, and skeletons in the cupboard”– Suzanne Brøgger, The Jade Cat

The Jade Cat, by Danish author Suzanne Brøgger, follows the fortunes of the Løvin family (cosmopolitan Danish Jews) through the course of the 20th century.

Brøgger trades in melancholia, that old reliable bread and butter of Modernist anxiety. And like many great Émigré writers (Nabokov, Dolatov, Mukherjee, Gallant), she populates the novel with fetishes and talismen. Émigré literature trends towards interiors, landscapes of symbolic expression, in an attempt to recreate homeland or conjure the physicality of a lost homeland, and Brøgger nails the inventories of a family trying to hold onto something tangible. READ MORE >