My Dead Man
Lygre, Arne: Min døde mannNominated for the 2009 Youth Critics' Prize
MY DEAD MAN centers on the meeting and brief, secret relationship between the nameless narrator, who has a wife and children, and another man, Aksel. After meeting on the internet, they spend little more than a few hours together at Aksel’s desolate house by the coast, before a chance meeting brings an adventurous boy into the equation. Soon after the narrator learns that Aksel has fallen to his death from a nearby cliff. To the narrator Aksel’s death echoes stories of other men who have died, particularly that of his first male lover.
Beautifully written and elegantly composed, Arne Lygre’s elegiac, powerful novel MY DEAD MAN captures the loneliness of the individual, distances between us that cannot be covered, but also unexpected intimacy and sudden passion. The novel tackles essential elements of our existence: unrest, pressures, drives - and longing for something beyond one’s reach. It’s about one man’s meetings with other men and himself, and about love that cannot be controlled.
Praise for My Dead Man:
”A unique, engaging and serious novel that is difficult to forget (…) After several attempts at encirling this uniqueness, I am left with the impression of a writer who employs a distanced, almost formal and impersonal style to create literature with a piercing and insisting gravity towards which it’s impossible to remain indifferent.”
(Aftenposten)
"[Lygre's] language is poetic, full of Fosse-sque repetitions creating a characteristic rhythm and intensity (...) My Dead Man is an agonizing story, beautifully told. In short, an important book both in its writing and motifs."
(Dagbladet)
"The sentences hang like an axe ready to strike. And keep hanging. My Dead Man is compact, told with a characteristic style and a flowing sense of time (...) The feeling of being stuck between outmanoevering or being outmanoevered is masterfully depicted, in My Dead Man as well as in several of Lygre's previous books. His writing is close to something very fundamental: a Darwinistic need to keep on living, some biological, basic urges, which in the end seem to slip away and disappear cunningly in the flow of the story."
(Klassekampen)
"Perhaps it is Lygre's experience with writing for the stage that enables him to fill an everyday object with meaning, making it shine like a beacon in the novel wasteland."
(Moss Avis)
First published: 2009, Aschehoug Fiction
Arne Lygre: Biography and bibliography
