Description
Book SynopsisRecently unearthed from the ground, Marble leaves her new lover in Copenhagen and travels to Athens. The city is overflowing with colour, steam and fragrance, cats cry like babies at night, the economic crisis is raging. In this volatile landscape, Marble grasps the world by exploring its immediate surfaces. Capturing specks of colour on ancient sculptures in the Acropolis Museum with an infrared camera, she simultaneously traces the pioneering sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, who spent several months in the same place 110 years earlier. Far away from her husband and children, Carl-Nielsen showed that Archaic sculptures were originally painted in bright colours - a feat which meant defying Victorian gender roles and jeopardising her marriage. Sensuous and electric, yet admirably forensic in its approach to mineral life, Marble is a galvanizing novel about the materials life is made of, about korai and sponge diving, about looking and looking again, written in a spare and pellucid style.
Trade Review"Everything connects. In that Ali Smith/Isabel Waidner way, Amalie Smith manages to stuff a lot of topics in an economic way... Enriching and rewarding." - The Bobsphere; "A resolute novel that, by virtue of its mix of literary suggestion, aesthetic experience and art historical insight, makes something that is simultaneously straightforwardly concrete and almost incomprehensibly abstract come alive." - Jon Helt Haarder, Jyllands-Posten; "Marble is not reminiscent of much else, but that does not make it odd. Just beautifully its own. It is made of the stuff art and literature is made of. In excess." - Soren Kassebeer, Berlingske; "Amalie Smith brings marble to life." - Ask Hansen, Politiken; "Candescently cool." - Weekendavisen; "Admirably vivid." - Information
