The Brummstein

Peter Adolphsen's Brummstein is a peculiar little novella; the story of a weird, vibrating stone that's chipped off an ancient rock at the bottom of a Swiss cave in 1908, and its travels from hand to hand throughout the 20th century in Germany. It should be a drily humorous tall tale in the classic Scandinavian tradition (lately represented by Paasilinna, Jonasson etc), but it's ultra-condensed to 64 pages, with passages in allegedly untranslated German (Adolphsen is Danish), with long asides on tectonic plate theory and starting the story billions of years ago, both reducing and emphasising the changes of the last 100 years as just a blink of an eye in the larger scheme of things. And suddenly, the people who pass by become both show more completely inconsequential and completely alive, caught up in a whirlstorm of ideologies flashing by, all promising a revolution of political, spiritual, racial or artistic thought while the stone keeps humming with the same frequency it's done for millions of years. Weird. But I love it. show less

"All around them, chemistry carried out its destructive business...."

A strange but engaging novella presented more or less in the language of a monograph on a scientific peculiarity, though the putative author knows more than he would have for complete verisimilitude. A useful structural comparator is Brooks's [b:People of the Book|1379961|People of the Book|Geraldine Brooks|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1239820658s/1379961.jpg|3020568], though here the point seems to be that human concerns and history are ephemeral and trivial, perhaps the opposite of Brooks's theme.

Ligegyldig, kedelig fortælling, som hverken fangede mig undervejs i læsningen eller efter, og som hurtigt vil være glemt. Det er en anderledes tekst, som ikke følger de klassiske fortællermodeller og på postmodernistisk vis ikke giver nogen form for meningsanvisning til læseren. En dårlig læseoplevelse, men alligevel værd at læse for forfatterens forsøg på at finde nye måder at fortælle på.

A strange stone makes a noise by vibrating, and is passed from hand to hand in the twentieth century.

Fortættet historie om en klippebloks vandring fra person til person gennem et afsnit af Europas historie.