A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN: Rudy G. & the Scent of Corruption

by Thomas E. Kennedy

Recently I was surprised to receive an email from a Newsweek journalist, saying she wanted to phone me in Copenhagen to interview me for an article about one of my high school classmates, Rudy Giuliani. I had no idea that Giuliani had been in my class.

So I mailed back to the journalist saying that to the best of my knowledge I had not known Rudy, never even knew that he existed other than as the Mayor of New York. But she still wanted to talk to me to get some background about life at Bishop Loughlin High School, 1957-61. She mentioned that she had read an article I wrote about Loughlin in those years, that she found it "fascinating" and hoped I would be available to speak with her. We made an appointment for her to telephone me next evening.

I spent some time trying to prepare myself by thinking back on my time in Loughlin. They had not been particularly happy years. The atmosphere had been oppressive, anti-intellectual, jingoistic, and brutal. The only truth was Catholic truth. Questions were not encouraged, but memorization was, and sex – in general – was wrong. I recall our religion teacher telling us that once we were married we could do whatever we wanted with our wives as long as the seed found the womb, but that we shouldn't be pigs about it. Everything was dictated – from the length of our hair to the cut of our pants. Ties and jackets were mandatory. As for violence, one Brother told us that any boy who had not had five good fistfights by the age of 15 was on the wrong track; he liked to threaten to crack our jaws. So much for Christian love.

As I waited for the phone call, I got to thinking that my article on Loughlin that the journalist referred to contained an account of a senior year student- president election that had what I remembered as a certain scent of corruption. I learned years later that the father of the winning candidate – who had seemed to come out of nowhere and to have the support of everybody, including the school administration – had raised a very large sum of money for a building project for the order of brothers who ran the school.

Possibly I was mistaken about all this, but at the least a case could be made for it. And it occurred to me to wonder whether the Newsweek journalist suspected that Giuliani might have been involved.

I googled Rudy Giuliani and Loughlin 1961, and a good deal of information came up. It seems that there were in fact three parties in that high school election, and that Rudy Giuliani served as campaign manager for one of the candidates. Could it be? I dug deeper for the smoking gun. But there was neither smoke nor a gun. Rudy's candidate in that election lost. Quite possibly Rudy didn't even know about the fix – if indeed there really had been a fix. But when you consider that a slush fund of a million dollars was enough to undo the President of the United States in 1972-73, how much could that equivalent contribution to a building fund have done to help win a student-president election in a Brooklyn high school in 1961?

It occurred to me that the Newsweek journalist might have been following that scent of corruption, possibly had not realized that Rudy had not been on the possibly corrupt side in that high school election.

I waited for her call, curious to see if I might learn something from her, but she didn't call. At the last moment, she emailed an apology; she was stuck in a meeting and asked if she could call the next day, but no further calls or emails came until several days later when she let me know she'd spoken with a couple of others and got the background information she needed and politely noted that since I hadn't actually known Giuliani and lived so many time zones away and her deadline was close upon her….

I emailed saying that was fine, but wondering with whom she had spoken. She told the names of three persons – two classmates I vaguely remember as being prominent in the school and the Vice Principal, now in his 80s. I remember that Vice Principal as sarcastic and cold. The journalist told me it was fun speaking with them, that they were "very nice."

And it occurred to me that there might be people who go through high school happily, go on to happy college years, good foundations for happy lives. It took me ten years to get over my Catholic school experiences, the whole oppressing effect of 12 years of stunted men and women having authority over me.
Perhaps I have a strain of conspiracy-nut in me -- it is also tempting to suspect that the journalist made the same discovery I had about that possibly corrupt election. If that distant, 45-year-old high school election really had been tainted, the taint had NOT been on Rudy G. He was cleared. Which, presumably, might make this bit of gossip journalistically less interesting.

However, in the course of all this, I discovered that I did remember Rudy from back then. At least I think I did. A google source reminded me that he had been the guy who started the Opera Club – a pudgy guy who wore dark suits, white shirts, gleaming black shoes.

Among the members of the Opera Club was as close friend of Rudy Giuliani's, a boy named Alan Placa, whom I don't remember either. However, some readers may be familiar with the name of Alan Placa; he would become a wealthy Long Island Monsignor and would later be accused in a Grand Jury hearing of the sexual abuse of adolescent boys and of protecting priests who were guilty of such abuse and ultimately relieved by the Church of all priestly duties and deprived of the right to administer the sacraments – whereupon Rudy Giuliani hired him in his law firm.

According to a New York Times article from February 2003, Msgr. Placa denied the allegations and remembered the adolescent he was alleged to have molested "as a 'troubled boy' who was always 'singling himself out.'" Perhaps that is another way of saying that the boy was unreliable, hungry for attention. Such a boy, no doubt, would be easy prey. Msgr. Placa also pointed out, able lawyer that he is, that the statute of limitations had already been exceeded on all the allegations.

This past weekend the Newsweek article appeared in print and on-line. The portrait of my school was of "a fortress-like high school run with an iron hand by the Christian Brothers." But I was surprised to find that Alan Placa was mentioned only with a fleeting reference – that allegations of sexual abuse had been made, that he had denied them, and was never formally charged. There was no mention of the fact that he had also been accused of protecting other priests against whom such allegations had been made and of concealing his law degree in dealing with boys who had spoken out about having been abused. Nor were the facts mentioned that Alan Placa had been relieved by the Church of all priestly duties or that Rudy Giuliani hired Placa to work for his law firm afterwards.

I sent an email to the journalist congratulating her on having captured the atmosphere of the school, but wondering about the Placa omissions. Was the press distancing itself from this connection in deference to the Republican candidate in a much higher-level election? Her response was forthcoming: "Thanks for writing - we should have included that about Placa. I appreciate you reading the story. All best…"Actually, although I did not have a very good time in high school, maybe others did – Rudy and Alan, for example.

Greetings from this ancient capital!
Thomas E. Kennedy
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See also http://www.copenhagenquartet.com/ for information on four independent novels about the souls and seasons of Copenhagen, each written in a different style and set in a different season and which can be read independently of one another or together in any order desired: Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story, which is a novel disguised as a guide to the bars of Copenhagen, each chapter unfolding in a different serving house; Bluett's Blue Hours, a noir tale about the deep dark of Copenhagen winter and the seamier sides of life in this beautiful capital; Greene's Summer, about a Chilean torture survivor who comes to Copenhagen to be treated in a torture rehabilitation center and meets a Danish woman who has herself survived a violent marriage; and Danish Fall, a satire about 12 people connected to a Danish firm which is being downsized.

A Shout from Copenhagen: Silence Was My Song. Two mistakes were made that day

by Thomas E. Kennedy

Suddenly I heard a quivering voice whisper, 'Sister, do you think we're going to die?'
'Yes, I whispered back. 'Yes, I think we are going to die.'
'Do you think it will take long?' she asked.
'Maybe,' I replied. 'Maybe. I don't know.'
-from Silence Was My Song: The Bombing of the French School, by Alice Maud Guldbrandsen


On March 21st, 1945, the Royal Airforce sent a fleet of mosquito bombers toward Copenhagen on a precision bombing mission: to take out the Gestapo headquarters in German-occupied Denmark.

Admirably, under difficult conditions, the RAF managed to destroy Gestapo HQ without killing the Danish resistance prisoners on the top floor of the building, which the Gestapo was using as a human shield. However, as too often happens in such "precision" undertakings, there was "collateral damage." One of the planes hit a light mast and went down beside a school; the smoke that rose from the exploding plane misled those coming just after into mistake the school for their target. Before the mistake was discovered, the school building had been bombed.

The school – the so-called French School – was in session at the time, and many children and teachers were buried beneath the building. Some of the children were boiled alive in the water from burst pipes heated by the fires caused by the bombs. Others drowned in that water. Still others were simply crushed beneath beams and chunks of walls and staircases.

In all, over 100 civilians were killed, 86 of them children. 394 children and 34 adults were rescued – and had to live with the memory of what they went through and witnessed that day.

One five-year-old girl, Alice Maud Guldbrandsen, was buried beneath the rubble, but managed to claw herself halfway out and was saved by heroic rescue workers who risked their own lives to get the children and nuns who were still alive to safety before the building collapsed totally. Alice Guldbrandsen was brought to a hospital in the Frederiksberg section of the city and was told to join a line of children before a desk where a nurse sat writing down their names. When she got to the head of the line, the nurse asked her name, but Alice was unable to speak, so she was sent to the back of the line, but when she got to the desk again, she still could not speak. Finally she was placed under a blanket in a bed in one of the over-filled wards where, finally, after many hours of frantic searching, her father recognized a lock of her blond hair peeking out from beneath the blanket and brought her home.

Then another mistake was made. The parents of the surviving children were told that it would be unhealthy for them to discuss what had happened with the children. If the children tried to speak about it, they should change the subject, or say, "We'll just forget about that now and put it all behind us." But such things can not be forgotten or suppressed. They come back in dreams, in the form of anguish and fear – fear of elevators, of basements, of airplanes, of dust and plaster, a haunting sense of loss… They linger and fester in the forced silence.

Nearly sixty years later, Alice Guldbrandsen decided finally it was time to break that silence. She contacted some of the girls who had been in the school with her – neither had the children who experienced the catastrophe discussed it with one another – and invited them to her home to talk about what had happened to them that day and the after-effects in their lives since then, through the years.

At last the silence was broken, and Alice Guldbrandsen asked the women who had joined her that evening to write down their memories of the day – or she interviewed them and wrote down their recollections. She contacted others – the nuns, some of whom were still alive, up in their 90s, those still living parents of the children who had survived and some who have since died, rescue workers, doctors, nurses, firemen, a photographer. She even got hold of one of the RAF airmen, a navigator, now in his 80s, who wrote his description of the day and told her that the disaster had haunted him for all those years.

Alice Maud Guldbrandsen says, "In the course of time, during my research for the book, I scrutinized very many reports from the period of the war but didn't come upon a single book that told the whole story about that disaster. At most it is dealt with in a single short sentence or two, summed up in a quick phrase – 'The French School in Copenhagen was by a fatal mistake bombed…' So there was still reason for me to put words to this apparently 'forgotten' event."

Out of the thirty-five accounts that she gathered, including her own, the key report, Alice Maud Guldbrandsen put together a mosaic of what occurred that day, creating a record that would for all time defy the silence that had been imposed upon the children who survived those dreadful events. And she discovered that on that very day, in the very hospital to which she had been brought, unable to speak, one of Denmark's most celebrated contemporary poets was born and years later had written a poem about the bombing, which begins, "Like most people, I was born during a war…" Alice Maud Guldbrandsen used that poem as an epigraph to the book she wrote and published in Danish in 2005, entitled (in English translation), Silence Was My Song: The Bombardment of the French School in 1945.

At this writing, I am nearly finished translating the book into English. A major excerpt from the translation was published in The Literary Review (Vol. 49, No. 2, Winter 2006, pages 23-48), including the poem by Henrik Nordbrandt. The book sold well in Danish, its hardcover edition sold out and a paperback version was issued in 2007. The English version is now ready to be offered on the English-language market.

Alice Maud Guldbrandsen tells that her reason for writing this book was not merely to give words to the dark silent song within her, but to put a face on human catastrophes of this sort, including those that occur now, everywhere in the world. So that when one reads in the newspapers and sees on television, as one does weekly, daily even, about civilian collateral damage during military conflicts, terrorism, torture, persecution and other violent abuses – the bombing of a school, a hospital, a refugee camp – that it will not be seen as one undifferentiated lump of a mistake. But as a series of individual human beings and their families and their friends who suffer the loss of their lives, whose bodies are damaged, their minds and spirits hurt for all time.

"Fortunately there were many who survived," says Ms Guldbrandsen, "but most of them have since then carried the burden of that experience in their bodies and minds – some of which might have been avoided if they had not been met by silence in response to their inner suffering. That was the only 'crisis help' offered in those days – when the best advice given to the shocked parents of the shocked children was, 'Don't talk about it – they'll forget.' But none of them forgot."

Reading and translating this profoundly moving book, I was struck by the fact that each of the 35 stories of this same event had its own distinct character – even when recounting the same or similar details and responses to it, the individual personality of each of the girls – now women – shone through and demonstrated unforgettably how this was not a single tragedy but more than 100 tragedies – more, it was a tragedy for those lost as well as for all of those who were deprived of all those loved ones and for all of the children who survived as well and the adults who witnessed the terrible sight of children broken and dying because of the predictable imprecision of a so-called "precision" bombing..

Of course, the Second World War was different than most wars. Perhaps it was inevitable. There was an honorable cause. But what about all the wars which could be avoided, which are pure and unadulterated stupidity? What about all the victims of those wars?

Personally, after reading this book, I will never feel the same about any catastrophe I read about in the newspapers. It will never be a plane that went down or a hospital or school or bus that was bombed; it will be a plane full of people, a school full of children, a hospital or bus full of human beings.

I know Alice Maud Guldbrandsen personally. She is a beautiful, kind and loving human being. And her beauty and compassion are reflected through her book. One can be thankful she survived that tragedy as well as the silence that followed it, that she lived to find the words for this darkly beautiful song – a song of sorrow but also of hope.

If any readers are interested in more information or if publishers are interested in seeing the manuscript of the translation for possible publication or if magazines are interested in publishing excerpts from the book or in interviewing the author, please do not hesitate to contact me through this blog or through my website (http://www.thomasekennedy.com/).

Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy

See also http://www.copenhagenquartet.com/ for information on four independent novels about the souls and seasons of Copenhagen, each written in a different style and set in a different season and which can be read independently of one another or together in any order desired: Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story (2002), which is a novel disguised as a guide to the bars of Copenhagen, each chapter unfolding in a different serving house; Bluett's Blue Hours (2003), a noir tale about the deep dark of Copenhagen winter and the seamier sides of life in this beautiful capital; Greene's Summer (2004), about a Chilean torture survivor who comes to Copenhagen to be treated in a torture rehabilitation center and meets a Danish woman who has herself survived a violent marriage; and Danish Fall (2005), a satire about 12 people connected to a Danish firm which is being downsized. Also available, free of charge while they last, is a 29-minute DVD documentary about these books: "The Making of Thomas E. Kennedy's Copenhagen Quartet." Preview film-clips of the DVD can be accessed on http://www.copenhagenquartet.com/

A Shout from Copenhagen: The Meeting with Evil

“Now more than ever, the world needs to be told about the extent to which men, women and children are being subjected to torture. Thomas Larsen’s book about Inge Genefke’s Meeting with Evil and her 30-year fight against it bears that witness”
-Tim Robbins, Star of The Secret Life of Words

“Fifty years ago, the Nobel Laureate Albert Camus said, ‘For every man tortured, ten terrorists are born.’ Inge Genefke and the organizations she founded are working to help the victims and stop the torture. What better way to wage the war on terrorism?”
-Julie Christie, Actress. Played Inge Genefke in The Secret Life of Words

“As Thomas Larsen says in his introduction to The Meeting with Evil, torture victims are the loneliest people in the world. Their tormentors inflict upon them excruciatingly painful abuse which they are helpless to defend themselves against and which can permanently damage or completely destroy their bodies and spirit. As the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to the United States Congress, and one who has personally experienced a concentration camp during the Second World War, I feel compelled to ask, Who will speak out for these unfortunate human beings in their loneliness and suffering? It is a comfort and reassurance to know that there is at least one human being who has dedicated the major force of her adult life to doing so. That extraordinary woman is the subject of Mr. Larsen’s book – Dr Inge Genefke, a Danish physician, an outstanding humanitarian, and a distinguished medical doctor who uses her training and compassion to bring healing to those who have endured the pain of torture.”
-Tom Lantos, United States Congressman (in his foreword to The Meeting with Evil)


I just dotted the last ‘i’ on the translation of a book which was at one and the same time terribly distressing and enormously heartening to work with. Translating it into English made the horrific things described in it seem to be unfolding in slow motion and the courageous fight against these things, also related in the book, awesomely heroic.

In English, the book – which is currently in search of a publisher – will be titled, The Meeting with Evil, and subtitled Inge Genefke’s Fight against Torture. The book was written in Danish by the distinguished political journalist, Thomas Larsen and published in Copenhagen in 2005. Its subject is a Danish physician by the name of Inge Genefke.

The book includes a foreword by Tom Lantos, United States Congressman (http://www.lantos.house.gov/) , himself the survivor of a camp during the Second World War, as well as endorsements by Isabel Coixet who directed a heartbreaking and hopeful film dealing, in large part, with the work of Inge Genefke, and Tim Robbins and Sarah Pally who starred in that film, The Secret Life of Words (2006), as well as Julie Christie, who portrayed Inge Genefke in the film.

Inge Genefke has devoted the past half of her 68 years fighting against torture and struggling to ensure that the world is aware of the terrifying extent to which torture is being employed throughout the world as well as to see to it that care is provided for those whose lives have been broken by these crimes against humanity and to fight against the continuing existence of this inhumanity.

Her efforts and those of her colleagues have resulted in a situation where undeniable evidence now exists to disprove the lies of those political and military regimes who seek to deny the fact that torture of the most heinous sort not only exists but is being widely employed. Employed – as Inge Genefke states – not to obtain information really, but to eradicate the personalities of courageous individuals taking a stand in society. “Torture,” she says, “does not produce reliable information. Under torture, a person will say anything to make the torture stop, will confess to crimes he knows nothing about, will sign blank pages to make the pain stop.”

Inge Genefke’s efforts and those of her colleagues have resulted in the establishment of two centers for rehabilitation and research against torture in Copenhagen which formed the model for scores of other centers throughout the world, providing treatment for hundreds of thousands of victims and gathering research for the treatment of the victims as well as evidence which can be used to prove that torture is in use and produced in court against those responsible.

The pages of Thomas Larsen’s book are filled with equal parts of horror and hope and contain a portrait of the woman who has had the courage and tenacity to fight for all these years against this ugliness. Inge Genefke provides the hope. It is encouraging to know that there exists a force in the world willing to confront this evil -- she and her husband, Dr. Bent Sørensen, and all her colleagues at Copenhagen’s Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims (http://www.rct.dk/) and the International Council for the Rehabilitation of Torture Victims (http://www.irct.org/) and those throughout the world who have been trained and aided by them in their own fight against torture and struggle to help its victims.

Inge Genefke has received many awards and distinctions from many countries throughout the world for her efforts and has been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Her struggle is not political, but humanistic, apolitical. Her aim is to stop the torturers and help the tortured.

Thanks to the United Nations Convention against Torture – which is also analyzed in Thomas Larsen’s book – torture, for all signatory countries, is a crime without a statute of limitations and one which can be tried anywhere, not only in the country where it has been committed. And the effects of this have already been seen. Torturers like Augusto Pinochet are no longer safe to travel freely in the world, enjoying the profits they have reaped from their activities. There is no more immunity for such people. Torturers, from the top on down through the hierarchy, are no longer safe in their misdeeds. A soldier or military policeman or “special adviser” is no longer free to claim that he was only following orders. The UN Convention makes it clear that such orders are unlawful and that it is unlawful to obey them.

The distinguished, 70-year-old literary magazine, New Letters (http://www.newletters.org/),
published by the University of Missouri Kansas City and edited by Robert Stewart, beginning with its Autumn 2007 issue, will publish a series of articles with excerpts from Thomas Larsen’s book about Inge Genefke. For a preview of what will appear in the book, readers are invited to read those issues of New Letters. At the same time, a forthcoming on-line publication, Exploring Globalization, co-edited by Walter Cummins (who also edits The Literary Review, currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, http://www.theliteraryreview.org/) will include in its inaugural number an interview with Inge Genefke and Bent Sørensen. That interview is now accessible at http://www.gig.org/eg/

Readers with questions about this important topic, publishers who are interested in acquiring the English translation of this book and periodicals interested in articles or interviews are invited to contact me via this blog or my website (www.thomasekennedy.com).

Greetings from this ancient kingdom! Thomas E. Kennedy
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See also http://www.copenhagenquartet.com/ for information on four independent novels about the souls and seasons of Copenhagen, each written in a different style and set in a different season and which can be read independently of one another or together in any order desired: Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story (2002), which is a novel disguised as a guide to the bars of Copenhagen, each chapter unfolding in a different serving house; Bluett's Blue Hours (2003), a noir tale about the deep dark of Copenhagen winter and the seamier sides of life in this beautiful capital; Greene's Summer (2004), about a Chilean torture survivor who comes to Copenhagen to be treated in a torture rehabilitation center and meets a Danish woman who has herself survived a violent marriage; and Danish Fall (2005), a satire about 12 people connected to a Danish firm which is being downsized. Also available, free of charge while they last, is a 29-minute DVD documentary about these books: “The Making of Thomas E. Kennedy’s Copenhagen Quartet.” Preview film-clips of the DVD can be accessed on http://www.copenhagenquartet.com/

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A Shout from Copenhagen: Bookshops of Copenhagen

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

A SHOUT FROM COPENHAGEN: The Bookshops of Copenhagen


One of many things I love about Copenhagen is its wealth of small bookshops. Most book-lovers in the United States mourn the continuing disappearance of the cozy neighborhood bookshop with an owner you knew by name and who knew your tastes in reading and was quick to tell you, “Say we’ve just got something in I think you might like…” The voracious goliaths have taken over the scene with their plethora of discouraging sloppy tables overflowing with remaindered hardbacks, making life difficult for independent publishers and writers. I don’t know how many reports I’ve received from people who tried to buy one of my books in one of those giant emporiums only to be told that I was out of print – which in Borders or B&N lingo means that my book was not distributed by their distributor so I might as well be dead and why don’t you join me in kicking the corpse? Maybe that sounds bitter. I’m not bitter; I live in Copenhagen.

Here there are plenty of small to medium-sized independent bookshops. Those that sell new books and the so-called antiquarians. Even the few shops that could not be classified as small – I’m thinking of Arnold Busck on Købermagergade, near the Round Tower, which has a café and readings on its 2nd floor, and Politikens Boghal on the Town Hall Square, both of which stock a fine supply of English language books. There is the wonderful Paludan’s Book Café on the cobblestoned Fiolstræde, just across from the ancient university Library – a big, roomy shop with tall windows which features a greate series of Thursday readings, excellent draft beer and red wine and a sandwich of Italian cheese and prosciuto ham to die for; and let us not forget that in the basement antiquarian sector of the shop there is an eerie exhibition of modern sculpture nestled in its shadowy recesses, haunting forms. And a stone’s throw from there, on Nørregade, just to the right of Our Lady Cathedral, is Atheneum International Book Dealer, whose English section is run by the elegant Sidsel Brun who is passionate about stocking books that matter; here you’ll find the esoteric English books you cannot find elsewhere.

Then there is Chester’s Book Café at Strandgade 26 in the charming city neighborhood known as Christianshavn (which is also home to the so-called Free State, “Christiania,” an abandoned military encampment taken over by squatters nearly 40 years ago though which, sadly, is currently under assault by the current less than liberal government; a visit to Christiania is rather like a visit to the wild west in the middle of a civilized city). Chester’s Book Café is in a semi-basement, just down the street and across the avenue from the Danish Writers Union and features Wednesday evening readings by some of the best of contemporary Danish and international writers. Tranquebar Book Café (on Borgergade – just across the street from the Torture Rehabilitation Center – which will be subject of a later entry in this blog series) is a sprawling place named for the only colony Denmark ever had in India and modelled after the travel bookshop in the film “Notting Hill,” though this one is considerably more elegant and roomy. Its stock includes not only travel books but the literature of the countries you are considering travelling to as well as products from those countries – textiles, objets d’art, knickknacks, beer and wine! You can sit in one of its many chairs sipping a glass of red wine and reading for hours, undisturbed.

All these shops are personally welcoming with friendly and helpful personnel you might also bump into when roaming the old serving houses of this ancient capital. I regularly run into book-sellers in bars like The Fiver (Femmeren) on Classensgade or at Rosengaards Bodega just off the Coal Square or at the Café Under the Clock on Silver Square. Although not strictly a bookshop, I would also like to mention The Jazz Cellar on Skindergade because, although it specializes in jazz CDs and DVDs (I recently purchased a copy of the great restored DVD version of “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” a film I had seen in 1960 and which made me understand I could love both jazz and rock and roll – it featured numbers by Chuck Berry as well as Anita O’Day…) But the Jazz Cellar – so named because it started out in a cellar on Grey Friar’s Square, although it is now in larger mezzanine quarters on Skindergade – also stocks books about jazz and was even so kind as to extend its concept to stocking my four novels about Copenhagen because of their taste for jazz as well; they sponsored an event once during which I read selections of each of the four books while my lady, Alice, womanned the DVD player, providing just the right background music mentioned in the novels at just the right time – Coltrane, Davis, Getz, Adderley, Lady Day…

I have saved for the last the bookshop in which I spend many a happy hour, alternately perusing the stock and chatting and sipping red wine with its owner – himself a writer and publisher – Lars Rasmussen about whom many have remarked his close resemblance to Feodor Dostoyevsky (see “Dostoevsky on Skinnner Street on www.WebDelSol.com, click enter, then in the upper right quadrant, click “The Literary Explorer” and scroll down to the desired title.) His shop, a broad expanse of plate window in a semi-basement, is called The Booktrader (www.booktrader.dk).



See also www.copenhagenquartet.com for information on four independent novels about the souls and seasons of Copenhagen, each written in a different style and set in a different season and which can be read independently of one another or together in any order desired: Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story, which is a novel disguised as a guide to the bars of Copenhagen, each chapter unfolding in a different serving house; Bluett's Blue Hours, a noir tale about the deep dark of Copenhagen winter and the seamier sides of life in this beautiful capital; Greene's Summer, about a Chilean torture survivor who comes to Copenhagen to be treated in a torture rehabilitation center and meets a Danish woman who has herself survived a violent marriage; and Danish Fall, a satire about 12 people connected to a Danish firm which is being downsized.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy (www.thomasekennedy.com)