By Vestergaard’s standards of the time, That’s My Mother’s Name! is a fairly conventional novel, from its clear prose, to its familiar settings (for its first half, Copenhagen in the 1970s, and for its second London in the 1980s), to the structural arrangement of the chapters, which mirrors the architecture not of the author’s preceding book, Inner Stranger, but of his earlier breakthrough, Rainbow Boys, alternating a present that progresses in a straightforward linear manner with disarranged flashbacking. But this structural solidity cannot conceal the shifting quicksand at the project's foundation. Vestergaard’s narrator is at least ambivalent about whoever might be reading him, and maybe even hostile. Resigned when it describes diurnal minutiae, disturbing when it attempts to capture the texture of late nights and dreams (“The flesh in his hand was not his own, he wrongly thought”), the novel is constantly in the business of eating itself and getting sick in the process.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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