Reviews about Peter Seeberg
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On
Minor Characters
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They are grey, the people we meet in this book. But, as the colourless grey of a film can incorporate a wealth of nuance which is more expressive than an abundance of colour, Peter Seeberg has from the gloom of an overcast day produced a succession of contrasting faces which are drawn with an unusual degree of empathy for a first book.
How does the author manage to give this distinctive and not very accessible realm of experience an outer form? There is no plot to Minor Characters. Neither, as a rule, is there to life, and certainly not for the walk-on roles. The novel is made up of reports, usually very brief, which are, as it were, never annotated. Again, an almost ´cinematic´ approach, in sharp and doubtless wholly conscious contrast with the symbolism of the ´40s. One can feel that the author´s intention was to relate to his characters in an uncompromisingly objective and detached way, to make his novel purely documentary or, as it says on the back of the cover, simply ´to make the material available to the reader´. In other words, we are witnessing the rare case of an author who, in order to portray a reality in dissolution, chooses a method which demands of this self same author the greatest breadth of outlook in terms of a precise and incontrovertible representation of reality.
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Thorkild Hansen, Information, 14.11.56
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On
Half the night
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"In terms of genre, Seeberg´s pieces contrast with the classic concept of the novella and the short story by not being too caught up with the event, but with the absence of notable incidents. Where there is an incident, light is more likely to be shed on the emptiness before or after the event, in the existential vacuum that resembles everyday life´s odd inevitability of language and oblique remarks, of ordinary decisions that put life into relief, of that less than remarkable thing that you are perhaps proud of anyway."
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Torben Brostrøm in Information 15/16.11.1997
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On
Half the night
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"(The text is made up of) eight not immediately connected fragments of conversations/incidents (...) the value and point of which are achieved through their underplayed, everyday-language pithiness, you could call them constructions, in both senses of the word, little ripples of language which signal little ripples of life, crucial to the author´s and the characters´ meticulous, delicate use of language. It is around such constructions that Seeberg´s realistic tales are built, as tiny little load-bearing structures or perhaps rather as tiny little devastating cracks. Thus, in Borges-esque fashion, there is simply a whole collection of short stories ... condensed to the absolute essential, constructions."
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Lars Bukdahl in Weekendavisen 21.-27.11.1997
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