Blue Notes by Ann Cathrine Bomann, translated by Caroline Waight

A drug almost ready to be released to market, with slightly shady results; the difficulty of academia and working on dissertations; dead parents and children; tender portrayals of obsessive-compulsive disorder; and oh yeah, a murder attempt! Blue Notes by Ann Cathrine Bomann, translated from the original Danish by Caroline Waight, is a literary thriller with broad appeal: crime junkies? Those who like complicated moral positions? Character works? Blue Notes crams a fast-paced, heavily layered story into 242 pages. I was glued to it from the start. The cast of characters around the story of Callocain, a fictional drug produced by Danish Pharma, have layered motivations and reasons for how they interact with the drug trial — and their clashing perspectives play out in a high-stakes, yet all-too-real series of events that ultimately leaves Callocain shrouded in greyness.

Blue Notes explores the question of grief from multiple perspectives. There’s Thorsten, a psychologist at the university tasked with studying Callocain, who has been working with the test patients. There’s Anna, one of his grad students, who’s opposed to the idea of the drug, and is also suffering from her own grief: the recent death of her mother. There’s Shadi, another of Thorsten’s grad students, who manages OCD and anxiety, and deals with deep heartbreak during their investigation. And lastly, there’s Elizabeth, a chemist for Danish Pharma whose own experience years earlier with the death of her five-year-old son Winter and her lasting, all-consuming grief, leads her to develop Callocain.

The characters alternate leading chapters, with Elizabeth’s starting with the death of her son to the present-day study of Callocain, and the other telling the story of their investigation of the drug in real time. While structured very episodically, the novel spends much more time on smaller moments than the big moments of reveal or truth. Blue Notes is a fascinating treatise on grief, and what it means to grieve. As well, it’s a critical look at what we mean by things like “prolonged grief disorder.” Is it a disorder? Is it simply too inconvenient for our Western society? What would a grief pill do? What would the effects be of trying to blot out that pain? I was not surprised to read that Bomann is a psychologist – Blue Notes is clearly written by someone who has knowledge of the field, and it’s carefully thought out and measured.

Blue Notes is a gripping read. It’s thoughtful and philosophical … and it hasn’t let go of me very easily since I finished reading it.

Blue Notes is a gripping read. It’s thoughtful and philosophical, demanding you spend time with the concept of grief and think about the ways we do and don’t hold space for it, but it also doesn’t leave you with a tidy sense of closure. It’s challenging in the best way, and it hasn’t let go of me very easily since I finished reading it.

Anne Cathrine Bomann lives in Copenhagen dividing her time between writing and working as a psychologist. She also played table tennis for Denmark and won the national championship twelve times. She is also the author of two poetry collections and the debut novel, Agatha, which became a word-of-mouth success following publication in Denmark and has now been translated into twenty-three languages.

Caroline Waight is an award-winning literary translator working from Danish, German, and Norwegian. She has translated a wide range of fiction and non-fiction, with recent publications including The Lobster’s Shell by Caroline Albertine Minor (Granta, 2022), Agatha by Anne Cathrine Bomann (Book*hug Press, 2021), Island by Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen (Pushkin Press, 2021) and The Chief Witness by Sayragul Sauytbay and Alexandra Cavelius (Scribe, 2021). She grew up travelling around the world, living in eight different countries. Having first studied music at Cambridge, Oxford, and Cornell, she worked in publishing before transitioning into full-time literary translation. She now lives and works near London.

Publisher: Book*Hug Press (Feb 22, 2024)
Paperback 5.25″ x 8″ | 242 pages
ISBN: 9781771668675

Alison Manley

Website

Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.