Being, Entangled, and Re‘turn'ed in Naja Marie Aidt's When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl's Book

Abstract

When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl's Book (2017) is Danish writer and poet Naja Marie Aidt's autofictional novel of grief related to her son Carl's death, and the site this chapter takes to explore being as an entangled phenomenon. Drawing resonant insights from feminist, queer and anticolonial anti-separatism my reading focuses primarily on Aidt's insistence that Carl continues to be after death and the silence that surrounds it in the original reception of Carl's Book in Danish media and literary reviews. My reading begins with what I call Aidt's anti-essentialist formulation of Carl's being, to emphasise how his being re'turn's the embodied knowledge that a 'self' is entangled, and in this manner cobecomes through others. Expanding my use of entanglement as philosophical alternative to essentialism, I then examine how Aidt's resilient and repeated formulation remains so unrecognised, indeed, unrecognisable to Danish reviewers and journalists, and I end by proposing that the 'problem' of silence that surrounds Carl's continued being is not separate from Aidt's style of expression.