Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

| Coulsong

University of Iowa law professor Marc Linder's translation of a classic Danish novel

5x 8; 150pp.
0-9673899-4-1
$7.50 Softcover
September 2000

Classic Danish adventure novel, translated into nine languages, now available to the English -speaking world

Set in 1679 on a Spanish galleon carrying a huge cargo of gold from the New World colonies to Spain, The Slave embeds a philosophical allegory about power and its impact on its subjects and objects in a plot with "features of a bloody and violent sen-sational film."

This historical novel in the ship-of-fools genre and in the tradition of Melville, Conrad, and Traven is populated by a full spectrum of social types ranging from senior Spanish colonial administrative, military, and judicial officials, a Catholic inquisitor, aristocratic estate and slave owners, an immensely rich female capitalist, and an English puritan merchant-capitalist to sailors, cannoneers, and black and Indian slaves.

Hans Kirk (1898-1962) wrote The Slave in 1941-42 while imprisoned by the Danish government at the demand of the Nazi occupying powers. In the aftermath of his escape from a detention camp in 1943, the Germans destroyed the manuscript and all of Kirk's research materials.

Starting from scratch, Kirk reconstructed the novel after the war because he was persuaded that its theme--the recurring modern question of how to respond to tyranny--was still important and topical. First published in 1948 and still in print in Denmark's most popular and prestigious paperback series of literary classics, The Slave was translated into eight languages before at last appearing in English.

Also by Hans Kirk: The Fishermen--the best-selling Danish novel of all time, translated to English by Marc Linder.

Both books are available at Northside Book Market, Prairie Lights (Tel. 800-295-2665), Iowa Book & Supply, and the University of Iowa Bookstore in Iowa City.

Note: If your library does not yet have this title, ask your librarian to order it.

Comments: Grace@karenblixen.com