Kerrigan in Copenhagen
By Thomas E Kennedy. Bloomsbury. $19.99.
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Terrence Kerrigan has been commissioned to write a book on 100 Copenhagen places where alcohol is served: bars, cafes, hotels, bistros, alehouses. He is not a good choice for the task because he has a number of problems: his much younger wife has left him, possibly because she is pregnant to someone else; he is in a semi-permanent state of tumescence, incapable of seeing a female without wondering what she would be like without her clothes; and most significantly for the assignment he has taken on, he is an alcoholic.
His PhD thesis was on verisimilitude in literature, which he explains as "how writers of fiction seem to create reality". It would be easy to read this as a backhander at American literary studies, a notion that is enhanced by his many references to James Joyce; he keeps an unread copy of Finnegans Wake in his satchel, a book that forms the basis of much academic gobbledygook, especially in the United States.
There is a suspicion that Kerrigan is an aging idiot savant, his mind a kind of Wikipedia crib that has him unable to mention a name or a year without expanding on it. When he is told that one of the pubs they visit was opened in 1886, for example, he tells us that this was "the year after the birth of Ezra Pound in the US and Francois Mauriac in France, seven years before the birth of Tom Kristensen, who was born a year before Dorothy Parker in 1894, fifteen years before the birth, in 1909, of Kerrigan's father".
This flood of information is accompanied by resumes of stories from Hans Christian Andersen and other Danish authors; we hear about their relationships with writers such as Proust, Dumas, Hugo, Dickens, Goethe, Hemingway and, of course, Joyce. Jazz music and its American and European stars constitute another theme of his discourse.
When he finally manages female intimacy, his reaction is to immediately flee to Dublin. He visits some of that city's better known pubs, giving a brief history of each. As he walks through Merrion Square, he notes that it is "the birthplace of Oscar Wilde at number 1, who died in 1900, same year Nietzsche died and Thomas Wolfe was born, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim appeared and Joyce's first piece of writing was published".
The Keats poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci – source of some of Paul Keating's more memorable put-downs – is a constant presence in the text, because Kerrigan sees it as the story of his relationship with his wife. He is also much enamoured of the melancholy in Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, though the reason here is less clear.
There cannot be many sculptures or public monuments in Copenhagen that are not mentioned in the book. The same goes for every famous Dane from Hans Christian Andersen, Karen Blixen and Kierkegaard to scientists such as Tycho Brahe and Oersted, although there is no mention of the Bohr family, the greatest of them all.
Here then is a love story wrapped in a travel book that uses a pub crawl as its central theme. Though erudite and polished, it requires considerable patience.