Beloved of My Twenty-Seven Senses

Taking its title from Kurt Schwitter's hyper-sensory love poem "To Anna Blume" Beloved of my Twenty-seven Senses tells the hyper-sensory love story of Clemens and Anna as unraveled by their son Tore. Anna and Clemens, now elderly, have disppeared into the Lybian desert where they worked part of a geologist survey years ago. Tore has travelled to Egypt to sift through the layers of his parents' past to discover their whereabouts. But what he discovers is not what he expected -- part mystery, part love story, Fastrups's timeless novel is an excavation of love buried deep in the sands of time. In his Letters of Travels, Rudyard Kipling wrote: The weight of the Desert is on one, every day and every hour. Karen Fastrup's Beloved of My Twenty-seven Senses is a novelistic ellipse into the Desert, into the light and dark of desire, of love, of sensuality and sexuality, of the human body against the physicality of the Libyan dunes, and, perhaps most importantly, of words and how they can perform together. Beloved of My Twenty-seven Senses concerns the heart within the shiftiness of desert sands, and how what is unknowable about the desert mocks those who wish possession. In Fastrup's artful novel, a sandstorm, a transgression, a betrayal, and a murder accrete not disaster, but further yearning.

? 1/2 Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of The Nettle Spinner At its deepest level Karen Fastrup's timeless novel is about excavating love that is buries in the sands of time and bringing it back to the surface again.

? 1/2 Klaus Rothstein, Weekendavisen