The invention of idleness

A different and personal novel about not walking the straight path, but getting lost and being alive. About going out into the world and into the strange. The first part is the story of disappearing, focusing on the father's early death. After its dramatic ending, the author tries not only to rediscover, but rather to invent the father who disappeared from the author's world at a young age. In the search for his father's, and thus his own 'identity', the author comes on the trail of a grief that initiates a journey into the Wunderkammer of childhood and youth. A chess set made of clay, a mask, an old book, a theater scene, a painting, a diary entry – you depend on things to be able to tell your story.

In the second part of the book, the book changes perspective to the author's reflections on the work, the nature of the writing process, the day-to-day and the dizzying unreliability of memory. In a mixture of narrative, travelogue, letter exchanges and novel drafts, the story of 'life in the withdrawal zone' is told. The meetings form the framework for the author's own course towards the only real transformation in his life. Before it, it was just a word. When it hits him, it's like a judgment he has to take on himself. During his travels in and around Copenhagen, Lund, Athens and the Greek islands, he holds conversations with friends, writers and artists such as Defoe, LéviStrauss, Pessoa, Benjamin, Genet, Breughel, Musil, Coetzee, Giacometti and Rimbaud.