Justine

September 15, 2016
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.

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Starred review from October 1, 2016

In this propulsive new novel from award-winning Danish author Mondrup, Justine, a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (as the author herself once was), is readying a major exhibition when her house burns down. There go all the works she was planning to exhibit, but she seems more upset by her recent break up with imperious Vita. Even as she considers how she'll quickly pull together new works, she chronicles relationships past and present that reveal the hierarchy and misogyny of the art scene in Denmark (and, no doubt, elsewhere). Readers leave the book with a powerful sense of artists not locked away in their studios but embedded in life, and Mondrup's observational prose imparts how they think and work. Justine's always on the edge, but one ferocious act tilts the novel in a scary new direction. VERDICT Smart and absorbing reading for a wide audience.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2016
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 cheeseclothand 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)