Naja Marie Aidt's stories have a feel all their own. Though they are built around the common themes of sex, love, desire, and gender, Aidt pushes them into her own desperate, frantic realm

Naja Marie Aidt, Baboon, Trans. by Denise Newman, Two Lines Press, 2014.


excerpt: Conference


Excerpt in World Literature Today


/www.najamarieaidt.com/engbavian.php


Beginning in the middle of crisis, then accelerating through plots that grow stranger by the page, Naja Marie Aidt’s stories have a feel all their own. Though they are built around the common themes of sex, love, desire, and gender, Aidt pushes them into her own desperate, frantic realm. In one, a whore shows up unannounced at a man’s apartment, roosts in his living room, and then violently threatens him when he tries to make her leave. In another, a wife takes her husband to a city where it is women, not men, who are the dominant sex—but was it all a hallucination when she finds herself tied to a board and dragged back to his car? And in the unforgettable “Blackcurrant,” two young women who have turned away from men and toward lesbianism abscond to a farm, where they discover that their neighbor’s son is experimenting with his own kind of sexuality. The first book from the widely lauded Aidt to reach the English language, Baboon delivers audacious writing that careens toward bizarre, yet utterly truthful, realizations


Bavian consists of 15 short stories about modern life and all of its affluence, individualism, stress, boredom, dreams, infidelity, everyday life and joint custody and about how little it takes before the inner baboon shows its red and blue backside and venture to show its face underneath the civilized human being’s well-groomed appearance.
Example 1: a family shopping trip is transformed into a nightmare, when a couple forgets to put a bag of sweets on the supermarket conveyer belt, and is charged with theft.
Example 2: a husband acts on a satanically desire to tell about his affair with his wife’s sister, just as their six-year-old son is injured in a bike accident.


an interview with translator Denise Newman


“[P]recise and evocative, often inspiring a strange balance between curiosity and anxiety in the reader. . . . [Aidt] inspires readers to read between the lines.” — Publishers Weekly


“Overflowing with a mad passion, sudden rage, and quiet depression.” — Lars Bukdah


“Best news of the year: Naja Marie Aidt’s Baboon, recognized in Scandinavia and beyond as a chiaroscuro tour de force, is finally available in English. This miraculous translation by American poet Denise Newman showcases Aidt’s uncanny eye for light in all its nuances, as well as her unerring ear for the many forms of language. Newman captures the tantalizing, evocative undertones of Aidt’s originals, allowing English-speaking readers to meet this award-winning Danish author at her quirky best.” — Susanna Nied

Naja Marie Aidt’s recent collection of short stories Baboon is characterized by tackling somewhat uneasy issues such as adultery, divorce, violence, disease, sexuality, and physical attraction. Notice, however, that this interest in repression, pent-up feelings, affection, aggression, and fear is presented without any form of sentimentality, which makes the volume quite remarkable. . . . Add to this the unusual, laconic language and the extraordinary plots and you are faced with a universe that unmistakably is that of Naja Marie Aidt. — World Literature Today

“The emotions unleashed in this tale couldn’t be contained in any nice little talk. They are painfully universal. Yet you know exactly where in the universe you are. This is the hallmark of great short stories, from Chekhov’s portraits of discontented Russians to Joyce’s struggling Dubliners to Jhumpa Lahiri’s uprooted Bengalis.” — Radhika Jones


Talking with Naja Marie Aidt about her short story collection 'Baboon'


Eric M. B. Becker in conversation with the author of Baboon