Reviews about Jens-Martin Eriksen

The début of this 30-year-old writer on the literary scene is so powerful and assured that the term promising is totally meaningless. Nani is, expressed in modern Danish slang, heavy. Though a mere 73 pages in length, this book is a heavyweight in modern Danish literature.

Ove Ancker in Weekendavisen, 2. 11. 1985

Jens-Martin Eriksen has written the kind of novel that clings to the reader like a dense, unpleasant fog. The book is at one moment frustrated by the narrative style and, at the next, roused by it. This must be what one calls an anti-novel. At least, there is an anti-hero. The book hits home. It is a masterpiece.

Ingolf Thomsen in Fyns Amts Avis, 16. 8. 1989

Jens-Martin Eriksen has presented a sterling little masterpiece in which language and composition encapsulate the theme well. Jens-Martin Eriksen has written a convincing, beautiful book. It is not long, but it has the necessary length. Or has it? At any rate, one can be annoyed that Jens-Martin Eriksen does not think on a slightly larger scale. His ability to depict a world of minute differences, his feeling for the phenomenological, his adept changes between levels and points of view, and most of all, his ability to make the voice that is speaking so alive that we can still hear it after we have finished reading the book. These qualities can sustain a book of considerable length.

Poul Erik Tøjner in Weekendavisen, 25. 8. 1989

This is a nerve-racking book – so beautifully and intensely written that the reader is unable to let go of its tragedy. (…) Jens-Martin Eriksen does it in a simple refined prose that is never tiring, but, on the contrary, holds the reader’s expectations until the final agonizing thought has been thought, a prose that in the climatic moments is tightened to breathless images of things that are nearly impossible to imagine, but which even so are described here. (…) In this way Jens-Martin Eriksen also shows in this novel how a reality presented as suppressed and regained memory is expressed in writing. It is supremely done.

Preben Meulengracht in Jyllands-Posten, 22. 8. 1990

Winter at Dawn is a study in the horror of war, in the anatomy of death, the anatomy of killing, in fear and the spirit of authoritarianism ( ... ) This novel signifies a formidable - an artistic - victory for Jens-Martin Eriksen, who has finally come up with a story and a universe capable of bringing together all of this writer´s many preoccupations and talents - those of the aesthete, the socially committed individual, the polemicist, the cultural analyst ( ... ) I cannot recall ever having read a modern war story as grim and compelling as "Winter at Dawn", nor any modern novel that depicts the disintegration of the bedrock of civilization, of human integrity, with such nerve-wracking clarity ( ... ) There is no doubt in my mind: Jens-Martin Eriksen´s Winter at Dawn is a superb novel.

Erik Svendsen in Jyllands-Posten, 19 September 1997