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In the Company of Angels

Thomas E. Kennedy

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Jan 18, 2011 Greer rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011-books, first-reads

I received this book for free via the Goodreads First Reads giveaway. Thomas E. Kennedy is an American writer who has lived for many years in Denmark. His work has been published and well-received outside of the U.S., but this is the first of his novels published here. It is the third of four stand-alone novels that make up his "Copenhagen Quartet".

Kennedy spent time working as a translator and editor for the Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims in Copenhagen. He tackles that tough subject I received this book for free via the Goodreads First Reads giveaway. Thomas E. Kennedy is an American writer who has lived for many years in Denmark. His work has been published and well-received outside of the U.S., but this is the first of his novels published here. It is the third of four stand-alone novels that make up his "Copenhagen Quartet".

Kennedy spent time working as a translator and editor for the Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims in Copenhagen. He tackles that tough subject here with restraint.

The book is set in Copenhagen and interweaves the stories of multiple characters: Nardo Greene, former poetry teacher and victim of torture under the Pinochet regime in Chile, now under the care of the Rehabiliation Center; Dr. Thorkild Kristensen, his frustrated psychiatrist; Michela Ibsen, a survivor of domestic abuse haunted by the suicide of her teenage daughter; Michela's callow and potentially dangerous young lover Voss; and Michela's father Mikhail, a domineering and selfish man enduring his own form of torture as he lies dying of cancer in a nursing home.

The story mainly focuses on two victims/survivors - Nardo and Michela, who lifts his broken spirit with her "eyes of blue light." Kennedy explores man's inhumanity to man -- how once one witnesses the terrible things people are capable of, they cannot be unknown, but only somehow transcended through faith and love. He uses his characters to explore the maxim that violence does not equate with strength. He's a talented enough writer to grapple with these themes without being melodramatic or trite.

The strength of the book is more in the characterizations and themes than with the prose itself. While it is poetic and evocative at times, there are passages that sorely could have benefited from a "less is more" approach:

"He did not know exactly what he meant. He felt a voice filling his mouth without connection to his consciousness, and he hoped she might know what he was moving toward and might help him to know or to preserve this thing that was visiting him that he could not quite grasp or be certain whether it had any real meaning at all."

Or the following: "This blithe vacancy, this ceaseless humming about the great love that never was -- or had been and was never revealed and was now lost in the vanishing mind of the fading light that once was a woman in love, or almost a woman in love, or a woman who had imagined a love never known."

Do we really need both the "vanishing mind" and the "fading light"? Passages like these were distractors, pulling me back from what is overall a compelling novel. For this reason, this was a very good book, but not an amazing book. However, it is definitely worth reading and I would recommend it. ...more

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