Reviews about Svend Åge Madsen

"The skill of this novel lies in seeing the bizarre in basic human nature. Its politico-socio-existential consciousness, its intellectually restrained fantasising and visionary imagination make it a rare thing in the past years", nay, this century´s Danish literature. Read it for the fun of it, for the excitement of it and for all of its strangeness and its lunacy. Read it as a great and original writer´s panorama of our time and its traumas."

Jens Kistrup in Berlingske Tidende 8.10.1976

"Århus in the seventies is a bubbling cauldron of tension, a teeming Dickensian, or Hugoesque, anthill of people restlessly in motion (...) While this is Madsen´s most contemporary and topical novel to date he still holds fast to his old principle of presenting the fiction as fiction. There is to be no deception here. The world of the book is not to be confused with the real world. It is an interpretation which, like everything else, emanates from the human consciousness. It does not want to compete with reality, but would, rather, compete through the perception of it. Thus it is, as much in actual writing style as in anything else, a novel about freedom or - in the spirit of the work itself - liberation."

Niels Barfoed in Politiken 8.10.1976

"The novel is absolutely unique, it is as if Garcia Marquez has settled down in Denmark and decided to write a modern version of "Crime and Punishment" ... This potent brew is as powerful as life itself, and you visualize the swarming, teeming life of the town of Århus in the mid seventies. The changes in each individual reflects the changes of the world we are living in ... Take a look into the darkness which Svend Åge Madsen illuminates. He does it in a way that will make "Virtue and Vice in the Middle Time" a principal work of contemporary European fiction."

Thomas Poval in Helsingborg Dagblad