Reviews about Peer Hultberg
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On
Requiem
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"Requiem is a crystal clear book, and it is only on account of its incredible variety that it is difficult to cope with. Imagine a snapshot of a huge crowd of people. Hultberg provides each individual in this picture with a voice in a short monologue, 537 voices, 537 "pain spots". This novel is music in the grand style, as is the case with Joyce and Hermann Broch. All these characters are shown in witty and terrifying monologues; they are isolated, but they are together in the book, in the writing. Peer Hultberg presents Danish literature with an amazingly sumptuous feast."
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Poul Borum in Ekstra Bladet, 18 October 1985
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On
Beaten Tracks
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"Now Hultberg is back with a collection of stories. Again a book unlike any other we have seen before in Danish prose writing. Another book that confirms Peer Hultberg´s quite unique position in Danish literature: At once both highly elitist and marginal in relation to contemporary Danish mainstream prose, but on the other hand closely related to a great European tradition; and then at the same time he is one of the greatest linguistic virtuosi in Danish. No one else in recent years has been able to raise the language of prose writing to such heights of expression. Entirely without affectation, but stubbornly insisting that the words must be used as artistic raw material, he modulates his Danish language into long, rhythmical, melodious passages which can really most fittingly be compared with the best in modern poetry. But Hultberg is precisely not a lyric poet - and that is the point. His texts are not prose poems. For behind what he himself calls "the eternal melody" that is language in its harmonious and thematic progression, lies the story of life´s own, existential progression as it unfolds before the personal, interior mirror of the individual consciousness."
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Thorkild Nyholm in Litteraturmagasinet Standart, no. 2, 1998
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On
Preludes
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"Præludier combines the ample flow of words and the musicality of the syntagma we know from Requiem with the compositional musicality of Slagne veje. Præludier is the crescendo, a brilliant composition, which with the help of simple but sophisticated means puts an end to the inferno of the mass for the dead. And which, where the author allows his own personality to express itself, slowly lets him assimilate the language and thereby the world. This does not happen to the swell of the organ or the accompaniment of shimmering violins, but in Hultberg´s familiar cadences - but there is the world of a difference.
Præludier is to Peer Hultberg´s oeuvre what De Dødes Rige (The Realm of the Dead) was to Henrik Pontoppidan´s: a sophisticated composition in which the labour of years resounds as one in a confusion of distinct tones. So obvious, so inconceivable."
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Thomas Thurah in Litteraturmagasinet Standart, no.5, 1990
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On
The City and the World
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"In Byen og Verden, the reader meets them all: man and woman, old and young, rich and poor, spread like a fan - right from the fanatically normal to the power-hungry and rabidly perverse. It is often difficult to distinguish between them, for irrespective of the kind of human fate dealt with, Hultberg"s omniscient narrator retains the same elegance and coolness. Without the slightest trembling of the voice, the town tells with a sad smile of suicide, murder and sudden illness, of hushed-up scandals and grandiose breakdowns, but also of tiny, insignificant lives that for all their inconsequence are still extraordinary.
We have no hesitation in recommending everyone to take the book and savour its individual portions like choice dates, like Swiss chocolate pralines, like tiny sips of fine old cognac. On top of that experience readers can look forward to the delightful labour of reading the other books, including the very early ones."
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Erik Skyum-Nielsen in Information, 3.2.1993
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