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WORK TITLE: Justine
WORK NOTES: trans by Kerri A. Pierce
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 9/26/1969
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Danish
http://www.ibenmondrup.dk/index.php/english/bio/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 26, 1969.
EDUCATION:Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, master’s degree, 2003.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Artist and writer.
AWARDS:DR Romanprisen, 2015, for Goldhavn; short list for PEN Translation Prize, 2017, for Justine.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Danish novelist Iben Mondrup began her career as a visual artist, but writing her master’s thesis led her to change paths and become a writer. Mondrup’s first novel to be published in English translation, Justine, features an eponymous heroine who is also a visual artist. The story opens with a catastrophic fire: The house where Justine grew up watching her grandfather paint, and where she has painted as an adult, has burnt to the ground with all of her paintings inside it. Justine’s work is destroyed just before she is scheduled to show it in an upcoming exhibition. In the fire’s aftermath, Justine desperately tries to create new pieces in time for the show. On top of that, Justine’s girlfriend, Vita, has left her, and Justine recovers by burning through a slew of new lovers. The narrative moves back and forth between Justine’s present circumstances and her past, touching on her memories of art school, her grandfather, and her lost relationship with Vita.
Discussing the novel in an interview for the Rumpus, Mondrup told contributors Brian Spears and Kerri Pierce: “I’d say the book is very much about what it means for the protagonist to deal very little with the actual, concrete world, for example having a child, interacting with normal people and the demands of normal life.” Mondrup then added: “I never in the book made any suggestion as to Justine being a whole or rational person. In that sense the novel is not a pedagogical work; she is bereft of direction. More instinct than intellect.” In a review in Booklist, Annie Bostrom similarly remarked: “It is in describing her fragmented, atmospheric novel’s artist characters’ work and milieu that Mondrup’s own craft is most fully on display.”
Offering a more mixed assessment, a Kirkus Reviews contributor observed: “The mystery of what happened on the night of the fire fails to satisfy; we already know she’s to blame for her own unhappiness.” The same reviewer summarized Justine as “a dark, ultimately frustrating tale of an enfant terrible wannabe.” On the other hand, Reviewer’s Bookwatch contributor Clint Travis gave the book a strong thumbs-up, calling it a “deftly crafted novel [that] veers between the erotic and the savage, resulting in a spellbinding read.” The writer of the Book Binder’s Daughter blog offered further praise: “Justine is another example of the cutting-edge, fascinating, and experimental writing that Open Letter seeks out and publishes from authors around the world. . . . But the ending of the book can only be described as ambiguous. Normally I would find this frustrating, but it is a fitting end for Justine whose own ambiguities abound throughout the novel.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 15, 2016, Annie Bostrom, review of Justine.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2016, review of Justine.
Reviewer’s Bookwatch, September, 2016, Clint Travis, review of Justine.
ONLINE
Book Binder’s Daughter, https://thebookbindersdaughter.com/ (January 12, 2017), review of Justine.
Iben Mondrup Home Page, http://www.ibenmondrup.dk/ (June 21, 2017).
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (December 22, 2016), Brian Spears and Kerri Pierce, author interview.*
Iben Mondrup
I am the author of five novels. My first novel Ved slusen was published in 2009 by Greenlandic Milik Publishing. In 2012 Gyldendal published my second novel Justine. The novel was published in the US in 2016 by Open Letter. The Book was shortlisted for PEN Translation Award 2017.
Gyldendal published my third novel, Store Malene, in 2013. In 2014, Gyldendal published my fourth novel GODHAVN. The novel was shortlisted for Læsernes Bogpris, Weekenavisens Litteraturpris and also DR Romanprisen, which it won. GODHAVN was sold for publishing in Holland and France.
My latest novel, KARENSMINDE, was out October 24th 2016
I am a trained visual artist from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, from which I graduated with my master’s degree in 2003. My background as a visual artist pervades my writing and I consciously work with the sensual aspects of language. One could say that in the past the human body, the floor and the camera were my materials and that words are my material in the present. Geographically I am likely to be located somewhere between Greenland and Denmark.
On this website, accounts and descriptions of my authorship and my work as an artist are available. Additionally my archive of newspaper articles and various other entries about post-colonial Greenland are to be found in the ‘Archiving the Arctic’-section.
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Iben Mondrup and Kerri Pierce
By The Rumpus Book Club
December 22nd, 2016
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Iben Mondrup and Kerri Pierce about the recently released translation of Justine, Mondrup’s 2012 Danish novel about a young artist and the world of art in Denmark, reverse appropriation, and the challenges of translation.
This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month The Rumpus Book Club hosts a discussion online with the book club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview. To become a member of the Rumpus Book Club, click here.
This Rumpus Book Club interview was edited by Brian Spears.
***
Brian S: Iben, I guess this book came out in Danish in 2012. What’s it like revisiting a book that you finished so long ago? And Kerri, how did you come to translate this book?
Kerri Pierce: A friend of Iben’s happened to mention the book to Kaija Straumanis, an editor at Open Letter, around the time that Open Letter was considering doing a Danish women’s series. (The percent of women in translation is significantly lower than men in translation.) Kaija asked me to do a sample of the book for them and I absolutely loved it. Obviously, they loved it, too, because they signed the book on.
Iben Mondrup: It’s an interesting experience as I’ve moved to a different place since the initial publication of the novel, but seeing the novel translated and transformed into another language has provided me with a great deal of pleasure. A new and fresh point of view on the book, sort of speak.
Brian S: About how long did it take to translate the book, and did you work with Iben at all on it?
Kerri Pierce: I can’t remember how long it took me to do the translation, to be honest. Translation for me goes through several stages: first, producing a rough draft, where I just basically put the Danish into English, trying to keep as close to the original is possible (which produces a rough English); then polishing the translation, where I go back and do a sentence-by-sentence comparison, even as I am firming up the English text. The next stage is going through the work again, this time with comments from the editor. At this point, the author also weighs in. Once everyone has gone through the book, the finished draft is produced. Whew! I suppose a year went by between the sample and the finished product, but like I said, I can’t quite remember.
kerri-pierce
Brian S: I’m fascinated by translation in part because I tried my hand at some when I did my MFA and I was really bad at it—I didn’t have enough command of French, and I was too arrogant to recognize it, and the result showed.
Kerri Pierce: Yes, Iben and I collaborated. She was a joy to work with and always responded very quickly to my comments. (A real relief to a translator in process.) We also managed to meet a couple of times face-to-face, once in Copenhagen and once here in Rochester.
Iben Mondrup: In fact I’ve come to love the book more than before, because I had to approach it in a different way, as something moreover founded in language, and this has been eye-opening to me, dealing with it from a distance.
Brian S: Iben, I’ve never read de Sade’s Justine, but am I correct in thinking there are some parallels between that and your novel? Or is that coincidence?
Iben Mondrup: If there’s any comparison, it’s all about opposites, the polar opposites of De Sade’s Justine and mine. My Justine is sexual subject, she’s the one who desires, where as De Sade’s Justine is an object of desire. She (my Justine), is aggressive, she’s going for what she wants as opposed to De Sade’s Justine, who is the target—and eventually the victim—of the desires of the world. She possesses no will.
Kerri Pierce: There’s a funny story, actually, about the graphic on the cover. One of my favorite parts of the book, and one of the editor, Kaija’s, favorite parts as well—which I also think speaks to Justine’s character—is when a one-night stand asks Justine if she’s a lesbian (and his tone is rather dismissive/incredulous) and she responds: “Wolf.”
Brian S: Kerri—I loved that moment in the book. That was brilliant.
Iben Mondrup: Exactly, she sees herself as a predator. A wolf, a lone she-wolf.
Brian S: You trained as a visual artist—how did you move into becoming a writer?
Iben Mondrup: I never really found my true voice and expression in the visual arts. It wasn’t until I wrote my thesis, even though this was a more or less non-artistic assignment, that I realized words are my true medium and material.
Brian S: Kerri, were there any parts of the book that gave you particular trouble? I know jokes are often the hardest things to translate.
Kerri Pierce: Part of what attracted me to Justine was the stylistic brilliance of it. Sharp, colorful, alone-standing, much like the protagonist. Many of the sentences begin one place and end up another, as Justine’s train of thought shifts, or feature strong visual imagery, which, because Justine is imagining it, leaves you (at least me) questioning if what I think the text says is actually what it says.
A passage that was particularly difficult for me, and which I consulted Iben about a couple of times, was the scene when Justine is remembering her mother setting herself on fire in bed.
Brian S: Another favorite moment was the scene between Justine and her grandfather talking about Ane’s video where she’s kicking the goat.
That’s fascinating, Iben—your thesis? What was the subject, if I might ask.
Iben Mondrup: Yes, Ane’s work in the novel, accurately represents the works at the time I was at the Academy of Arts. They displayed a high level of energy and immediacy, and energy which to outsiders may have seemed absurd. But to us it was very significant and laden with meaning.
Brian S: Right, I don’t have any first-hand experience in a visual arts academy—I’m just an observer, and not a super close one at that—but the projects didn’t seem unrealistic to me, perhaps because I see echoes of that in some corners of contemporary poetry.
Iben Mondrup: My subject had to do with different aspects of identity in Greenladic art; the questions were incendiary at the time, as they still are.
Kerri Pierce: One thing I really like about the book is just that portrayal of the art world. (Not that I am by any means all that knowledgeable about the art world.) One of the most unfortunate, but most realistic, turns of events that struck me as the moment Ane resolves to start babysitting to earn some money for a change.
Brian S: That moment hit close to home for me too, given the number and kinds of jobs I’ve held in the last fifteen years or so, some in academia, but some in retail as well.
Iben Mondrup: To answer Kerri’s question, I’d say the book is very much about what it means for the protagonist to deal very little with the actual, concrete world, for example having a child, interacting with normal people and the demands of normal life.
justine-cover
Brian S: Iben, is that where the descriptions of Justine’s Inngili project came from?
Iben Mondrup: Yes it is. Inngili is to Justine an attempt to bridge the gap between the world of normal people and the world of arts. It’s an attempt to get closer, to anchor herself in the Danish/Greenlandic colonial history.
Brian S: Because I don’t have any background knowledge on that history, I found myself reading it as a kind of appropriation, and that made me look a little aslant at Justine’s art. Is that a fair criticism of her, do you think?
Iben Mondrup: This history is to many Danish readers exotic and out of their grasp and reach.
Brian S: Kerri, how did you approach those sections in your translation? What was your understanding of Justine as an artist there?
Kerri Pierce: Just a passing thought, but it almost seemed to me a reverse appropriation. (Does that make any sense?) Justine having some characteristic artistic fun, and taking her audience’s stereotypes and preconceptions as part of her material.
Iben Mondrup: To most Danes the Danish/Greenlandic history is a sort of distant fairy tale, but to Justine it’s full of actuality, a sort of violence.
Kerri Pierce: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that Justine speaks to a larger concern on Iben’s part of exactly that tense meeting of Greenlandic and Danish culture. Her last two novels (which are stylistically and conceptually quite different than Justine) also deal with Greenland/Denmark.
Iben Mondrup: Kerri—I’m in total agreement with your perception of that particular part of the story.
Brian S: Okay, it sounds to me like a similar problem that many Americans have with the history of our treatment of Native Americans—we don’t like to actually think about the violence we visited and continue to visit on them, so we dress it up with stories about how they were in touch with the land and were noble savages and the like.
Now I want to read some more about this relationship between Denmark and Greenland!
Iben Mondrup: Brian: Spot on. What Justine is getting at, is that this particular part of history stinks like rotting fish.
Kerri Pierce: One question I had was whether to translate the name of the Greenlandic natives as “Eskimos” or “Inuits,” since Eskimos apparently has a belittling connotation. (Also the case in Danish, as I understand.) Justine does say in that section: “Having some fun among the Eskimos…” (Or something like that, not remembering the exact phase.) Anyway, that was a question for Iben.
Noble savages… or ridiculous cartoon characters. My five-year-old has been watching Disney’s Peter Pan lately. A total aside… but, yeah.
Brian S: Man, that movie has one of the more racist songs in the Disney canon, and that’s saying something. My daughters are still in love with Tangled for the moment, thank goodness.
Iben Mondrup: Kerri: Today, Greenlanders don’t really have a problem with the term ‘eskimo’, because they’ve gained their true mental independence over the years, as well as their practical independence. So, the sensitivity has faded some, ad become less significant.
Brian S: And now I need to reread the book with that sense of history in mind, because I was seeing Justine’s approach to art as kind of flimsy, tho that made me see her final turn as a moment of significant growth.
Kerri Pierce: Ah, interesting. Well, my in-depth knowledge on the subject came from searching the Internet to find an answer. Oh all-knowing Internet, lend me your… whatever.
Iben Mondrup: To many expat Greenlanders, the questions remain fresh and painful, where as to the Greenlanders presently living in Greenland identity seems to be more clarified and less of a concern.
Brian S: I also read the fire of her grandfather’s house as a blessing in disguise, as a sort of motivator to get into a new set of artistic practices.
Iben Mondrup: Brian: It is a blessing, a sort of birth. From the chains of conformity and dated modernism, into something a lot less banal and simple in its expression. She is set free by the fire.
Brian S: But just like anyone who’s been set free in a traumatic way—first the death of her grandfather and then the fire (not to mention the breakup with Vita)—she seems to be directionless for a while, ricocheting off whoever is around her.
Kerri Pierce: Except that she also accidentally killed her ex-girlfriend. So it’s a birth, certainly, but one with a price. Any birth, of course, exacts a flesh-and-blood price, but this is one is somewhat diabolical and truly makes the novel more complicated in a delicious, very human sort of way.
Brian S: So there’s a chance that the police in that final scene are coming to talk to her about some human remains?
Iben Mondrup: I never in the book made any suggestion as to Justine being a whole or rational person. In that sense the novel is not a pedagogical work; she is bereft of direction. More instinct than intellect.
Brian S: Are either of you working on new projects you’d be willing to give us a preview of?
Kerri Pierce: I still think, though, that Justine has something to teach. 🙂
Iben Mondrup: I have just published a short story titled “The Grouse Hunt” in World Literature Today, which I think very accurately shows the direction of my present work. Here. we find ourselves among real, living and breathing Greenlanders as opposed to imaginary ones and apparitions and symbolic manifestations. So one might say that my more recent work is a lot more face-to-face with actual life and all that it entails.
Kerri Pierce: Right now I’m finishing up on a translation of a Faroese book, also for Open Letter, that will be the first Faroese novel to have been translated into English. The book (by Jóanes Nielsen) is an epic (though often satirical, it must be said), hundred-year-plus history of the Faroe Islands. (Actually, the original title is: The Brahmadellas: A North Atlantic Chronical.)
I’m also “working on my first novel”… but aren’t we all? 🙂
Brian S: Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon/evening, and for such an interesting book.
Kerri Pierce: Thank you, Brian!
Iben Mondrup: Thank you both very much for having me; I enjoyed our little conversation immensely. I could have easily gone on for hours with the two of you.
Brian S: My pleasure, Iben and Kerri. Best of luck!
Justine
Annie Bostrom
113.6 (Nov. 15, 2016): p23.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Justine. By Iben Mondrup. Tr. by Kerri A. Pierce. Nov. 2016. 218p. Open Letter, paper, $14.95 (9781940953489).
Danish artist and writer Mondrup's second novel, her first to be translated into English, opens with a fire. Art student Justine can barely comprehend that the home burning before her eyes is her recently deceased grandfather's much-admired historic farmhouse, the one where she grew up watching Grandpa paint. Even before everything Justine had planned to exhibit in her upcoming show burned in that fire, things hadn't been going well; her girlfriend, Vita, doesn't want anything to do with her anymore. Justine's grip on reality loosens as she sees herself, her world, her own and others' art, through a sort of cheesecloth--and so, too, does the reader, as the book moves fluidly from past to present. Justine's observations are honest, funny, frightening, sad. Is she the only one who recognizes that her male professors' negative opinions of their female students' future success doesn't curtail their interest in sleeping with these young women? It is in describing her fragmented, atmospheric novel's artist characters' work and milieu that Mondrup's own craft is most fully on display.--Annie Bostrom
Bostrom, Annie
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Justine." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2016, p. 23. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473788197&it=r&asid=fffe5ec8f8054d951e56ec90e528d36f. Accessed 29 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473788197
Iben Mondrup, Kerri A. Pierce: JUSTINE
(Sept. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Iben Mondrup, Kerri A. Pierce JUSTINE Open Letter (Adult Fiction) 14.95 11, 15 ISBN: 978-1-940953-48-9
Danish author Mondrup (Godhavn, 2014) exposes the underbelly of the contemporary Danish art scene in this novel about a young artist in crisis.The eponymous narrator's house, inherited from her grandfather, burns down on the first page, destroying all the art she's prepared for an upcoming exhibition. Distraught, she seeks her friends, one a talented painter caught between her artistic potential and the demands of motherhood. Written in short, first-person chapters, the novel cuts between Justine's past—the grandfather she loved, her problematic parents, the girlfriend who no longer wants to see her—and the present-tense aftermath of the fire. The narrative is fractured, the voice confused: "I think I'm some other. Or how should I put it? I've become some other. That other hasn't become me, though. She didn't exist before the fire. Or did she? She's a new condition. At once definitive and boundless. I have no clue where we're off to now." Mondrup depicts the sexism and grittiness of the art world and the ambivalence of the artists convincingly. At the academy Justine and her friends attended, "It wasn't too long before the janitorial staff could no longer tell the difference between what was trash and what was important." But the increasingly unreliable narrator remains enigmatic, and her energetic self-destruction feels postured. "The me that is now is formless, not exactly dissipated, but flailing around, thrashing, reflecting off windows and surfaces." Justine does a great deal of flailing, drinking heavily, cheating on her girlfriend with a string of men she despises, and making stonerlike declarations: "I grope along a chain of Before Now and After. I lift my feet and head in that direction. That direction and not that direction. Now I draw away, now I pull closer." The mystery of what happened on the night of the fire fails to satisfy; we already know she's to blame for her own unhappiness. "You're not too bright," one of her sexual partners observes. A dark, ultimately frustrating tale of an enfant terrible wannabe.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Iben Mondrup, Kerri A. Pierce: JUSTINE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463216046&it=r&asid=81cfc1f0980215271ef996bf374aa090. Accessed 29 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463216046
Justine
Clint Travis
(Sept. 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Justine
Iben Mondrup, author
Kerri A. Pierce, translator
Open Letter Books
c/o University of Rochester
Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
www.openletterbooks.org
9781940953489, $14.95, PB, 218pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: "Justine" by Polish author Iben Mondrup is the story of a young female artist whose life is upended when her house burns down with all of the paintings for her upcoming exhibit inside. With little time left to recreate everything she's lost, Justine embarks on a series of sexual escapades with a sort of doomed intensity that foreshadows the novel's final, dark twist. Through flashbacks and fragmented memories, we see Justine as a student at the Art Academy first discovering the misogynistic order that rules the Danish art world, and later on as she constantly challenges its expectations--both in the studio and in bed. A personal meditation on artistic identity, the creative process, and the male-dominated art scene, this deftly crafted novel veers between the erotic and the savage, resulting in a spellbinding read from one of Denmark's edgiest contemporary feminist writers.
Critique: Ably translated into English by Kerri A. Pierce, "Justine" is a compelling read from beginning to end and unreservedly recommended for community and academic library Literary Fiction collections. For personal reading lists it should be noted that "Justine" is also available in a Kindle format ($9.99).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Travis, Clint. "Justine." Reviewer's Bookwatch, Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465810136&it=r&asid=0d43092513c657ac10b92ed4345733a5. Accessed 29 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465810136
January 12, 2017 · 1:47 pm
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Review: Justine by Iben Mondrup
My Review:
justine-front_frame_largeJustine is another example of the cutting-edge, fascinating, and experimental writing that Open Letter seeks out and publishes from authors around the world. Originally written and published in 2012 in Danish, it has taken a few years for Mondrup’s work to become available in English. It is just the type of creative, sensual, interesting book that was screaming out for Open Letter to translate and publish.
When the book opens, Justine’s house has just burned down and along with the house all of her artwork for an upcoming exhibition has gone up in flames. Justine inherited the house and her artist sensibilities from her grandfather. We are given some vague hints about what started the fire and whether or not Justine herself is to blame. Most of the book is taken up with Justine’s jumbled thoughts about her life past and present, about her experimentations with her art, about the sexist world of the Dutch art school, about her varied sexual relationships and about her disintegrating state of mind.
Sex is available to Justine no matter whom she encounters in art school; professors, graduates and students alike, male or female, will sleep with her. I can’t help but think that the author chose the name for her title and main character, Justine, as a literary nod to de Sade who also penned a book with this title. Justine is officially dating a woman named Vita, whom she appears to have genuine affection for: “I love her,” she writes, “I already loved her that New Year’s Eve when the light had long since departed, everyone had gone home, it was only us tough dogs left.” Notice the interesting mix of past and present tense—the polyptoton love and loved is especially fitting— even in this one short sentence spoken by Justine.
But despite her feelings for Vita, Justine keeps cheating on Vita with an interesting variety of men. It turns out that Vita has also been seeing another woman behind Justine’s back and Justine becomes extremely jealous when she finds out. Like the writing and some of the plot in the book, Justine’s sexual orientation is ambiguous. Her sexual encounters with men and women are, like her state of mind, frenzied, intense, dark and highly erotic. She describes a drunken escapade with a man named Bo she regularly meets for sex:
I can perch atop him and ride. In my hand he’s an animal I’m bringing down. I’ll ride him like he’s never been ridden, until he spurts until he dies. I unzip his pants. There’s softness in the warmth between the hairs. I ride him with my hand. I transform him to a fountain that shoots high in the air.
When her Grandfather and Ane, a good friend from art school, are described the narrative is more straightforward, more traditional. But when she tells us about her various erotic interludes the text becomes poetic, scattered, broken. Grandfather, who was himself a painter, discusses art, life and family history with Justine. Grandfather himself has not had an easy existence because his wife, Justine’s grandmother, suffered from a nervous breakdown after she gave birth to Justine’s mother. Justine’s mother is also mentally unstable and a drunk who accidentally burns herself to death. Mondrup subtly weaves patterns of images throughout Justine’s scattered narrative: fire, burning, passion and madness.
Another significant stylist detail to note about the book is that several of the pages of the text are very short, a paragraph or even a sentence in length. Since Justine jumps back and forth between past and present sometimes we are thrust into the midst of one of these short meditations and we aren’t sure if she is talking about past or present. Many of her thoughts are eerily foreboding:
Is it even possible to find a cut-off? An exact moment when it all went wrong? A point around which all events are distributed? Before and after? A crime scene? A weapon cast in a backyard? The road to murder is a slippery slope of things that are said and done. An eye that saw amiss. Something that should’ve remained hidden. Or something that didn’t happen. After the murder there’s the clean-up. The cover up. Someone must pay the penalty. Others must receive it.
Justine finally manages to pull enough of her art work together to have a successful showing at a local gallery. But the ending of the book can only be described as ambiguous. Normally I would find this frustrating, but it is a fitting end for Justine whose own ambiguities abound throughout the novel.
About the Author:
mondrupIben Mondrup is a trained visual artist from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts who is also the author of four novels, including Justine, its sequel, and Godhavn.
Read an conversation with Mondrup from The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2016/12/the-rumpus-book-club-chat-with-iben-mondrup-and-kerri-pierce/