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On
Random Encounters
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Stig Dalager is more than a craftsman. He can put a good story together, set the scene and create a good atmosphere. He has a virtuoso command of language. All this makes him into an author worth reading. But is he also a notable writer? Yes, insofar as he is an ethical author, and that he certainly is in his new book. In these short stories he touches on something fundamental. Let us call it fate and guilt.
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Preben Meulengracht in Jyllands-Posten, 25 September 1998
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On
A Travel in Blue - A Novel about H.C. Andersen
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If you have the energy for one more trip through Hans Christian Andersen’s life, Stig Dalager’s blue vehicle offers a dependable means of transport. The fairy tale writer is weak – and leaky – on his death bed with the Melchior family, dreaming feverishly back in time, to his childhood in Odense, his tribulations and triumphs in the capital of Copenhagen, his trips south to Italy’s blue mountains.
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John Chr. Jørgensen, EB 2004
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On
A Travel in Blue - A Novel about H.C. Andersen
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Dalager’s Andersen is a complete human being. Here is a writer who, in the midst of his greatest triumphs, must sit alone with his longings in a cold hotel room; a writer who arrives at the court of a German prince, suffering from feet swollen from boots much too small for him; a writer who is constantly tormented by financial woes. A fumbling person who only half-realized why the world had such an ambiguous relationship with him. Dalager brings Andersen to life, making his genius comprehensible at a human level. Dalager’s novel is great art about a great artist.
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Lars Ole Sauerberg, Jyllandsposten 2004
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On
A Travel in Blue - A Novel about H.C. Andersen
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We have heard most of it many times before. So, in the mountain of books on Hans Christian Andersen, you have to ask the persnickety question every time: what is Dalager adding and what is he taking away? Not much at the factual level. However, the novel achieves its rightful place in this year’s Andersen literature because of its unique voice. The story is told with wistfulness and evening air, brittle openness and reticent intimacy. With a nervous rawness that never becomes an exposé, even though it gets very close to the bone. Emphasized by a narrator who is presented in the third-person, where ”he” is more of a veil of modesty than a distance marker – a mediating pronoun between Dalager and Andersen.
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Liselotte Wiemer, Weekendavisen 2004
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On
Book of David
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By contrasting the executioner’s authoritarian worries about his own skin and his luxurious way of life with the sober portrayal of his victims’ last elementary manifestations of life and longing, Stig Dalager has written a moving historical novel of contemporary relevance, international in stature and appeal.
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Søren Vinterberg in Politiken, 1 September 1995
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On
The River under the House
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In this way a poetry rich in both words and suggestion emerges, for Stig Dalager has many words at his disposal, and he can use his senses and set them spinning, and his ability to create a tableau, an atmospheric image is beyond dispute (...) Further to his advantage is an ability to construct sentences so supple and effortless that the reader becomes quite alarmed, because the suggestive slips into the seductive, and one has to go easy on seductions...
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Ulrik Høy in Weekendavisen, 8 November 1991
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