When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl's Book
Finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature
Longlisted for the 2020 PEN Translation Award
An unflinchingly raw and lyrical exploration of a mother's grief and how it transforms her relationship to time, reality, and language.
In March 2015, Naja Marie Aidt's twenty-five-year-old son, Carl, died in a tragic accident. When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back chronicles the few first years after that devastating phone call. It is at once a sober account of life after losing a child and an exploration of the language of poetry, loss, and love. Intensely moving, When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back explores what it is to be a family, what it is to love and lose, and what it is to treasure life in spite of death's indomitable resolve.
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Naja Marie Aidt was born in Greenland and raised in Copenhagen. She is the author of eleven collections of poetry, a novel, and three short story collections, including Baboon, which won the 2008 Nordic Council Literature Prize. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages.
Denise Newman is a translator and poet who has published three collections of poetry. She has translated two books by Denmark's Inger Christensen. Her translation of Naja Marie Aidt's short-fiction collection Baboon won the 2015 PEN Translation Prize.
"This book is an alchemical feat, giving shape to the most profound sense of absence. A stirring, inventive masterpiece of heartbreak." --Kirkus, starred review
"A brutal but also beautiful meditation on death that combines family archives and a chorus of literary voices, and with them composes an indelible ode to life." --Valeria Luiselli, GQ
"When Death Takes Something from You Give it Back is a letter from a journey through a lake of fire. Aidt manages the emotionally impossible, sharing with the reader something of what it is to lose a child. A radiant book." --Rivka Galchen
"Extraordinary. It is about death, but I can think of few books which have such life. It shows us what love is." --Max Porter
"This remarkable memoir is easily one of the best of any kind published in the last decade. . . . Watching Aidt pull it off is akin to watching Philippe Petit walk a tight-rope between the Twin Towers." --Literary Hub
"This book does more than just plumb the depths of our emotions, it also serves as an affirmation: of family, of love, and of life." --Nylon
"An undoubtedly beautiful artistic achievement. . . . A triumph of honesty in self-expression, complete and unmitigated." --Ploughshares
"Aidt's collage. . . . is artful and is only seemingly frantic. Beneath the surface lies a highly controlled text that aims to bring her son to life on the page, and thus allow herself to move on with her own life." --Bookforum
"To read this book is to commune with Aidt and with suffering itself, a testament to Denise Newman's dedicated and emotive work in translating it from the original Danish." --World Literature Today
"A powerful and emotionally intense account of dealing with trauma, the struggle to find the right words to express the anguish of grief and finding the strength to move on after a tragic loss of a loved one." --Translated Lit
