The Endless Summer by Madame Nielsen is my literary discovery of the year. Sjón. A passionate love story about a Danish woman and a much younger Portuguese artist, The Endless Summer confronts ideas of time, sexuality, and tragedy in a style reminiscent of both Proust and Lars Von Trier. Emotional and visceral, the novel drifts through time and space, relating the lives, loves, and dissolutions of everyone who surrounds this unexpected couple, including the womans former husband who holds the family at gunpoint, her daughter and her lovers, who include a boy who finds himself and his true sexual identity in America, and the young boy who is perhaps a girl, but does not yet know it, who narrates it all.
Propelled by a captivating story, the real charm of the novel resides in its impeccable style and atmosphere, which gathers a sense of longing, a slight nostalgia for times that ache with possibility, while knowing that even the endless summer doesnt last forever.
