az- Machine: Peter Adolphsen,translated fr Danish by Charlotte Barslund
Macadam Cage Pub (April 25, 2008). galley thin white w brown-orange blot
reminds of Being Dead by Jim Crace. descriptive report of happenings: person on the hillside, bacteria reproducing, body decomposing.
I do like this more: horses. (...Out Stealing Horses. the lovely civilization of the horses that Gulliver travelled to. Deadwood: wild stallion through the town. I break horses - I don't end to them. ...)

p1
At 7:59pm on the 23rd of June, 1975, on 1st South St. in Austin, Texas, a drop of gasoline combusted in a car engine. Chance would have it that the burning of this drop of fuel formed the point of intersection for the stories of the two passengers in the car as well as that of the drop itself which had once more changed state, this time into exhaust fumes.


Machine | Peter Adolphsen | Review by The Spectator: brisk, incisive yes prose. the narrative consists of complex mechanistic chains that zoom from macro to micro, with technical detail more usually found in textbooks. odd, in such a short book 85 pgs, to find that one can skip three-quarters of the text without any significant loss. yes. relentless detail about the mechanisms working on the characters. must be conceded that he presents the world in a surprising way. And in the consistency and elegance yes of his construct there may be found a chilly beauty that might offer some redemption from the single value-free dimension of his vision. grandeur in his disdain of time, where eons and nanoseconds have equal value as mere processes. yes his shifts in time and narrative tense disconcerting,

as here , p80 -81:

The hand on the balcony door belonged to Clarissa and the scream, which echoed through the tree trunks on the sloped a moment later, came from her throat. Its piercing sound stopped me in my tracks as I was playing on the balcony of the neighboring apartment; I was nine years old at the time. ..Afterward she gasped for air and, apart from her panting, the breeze in the trees was the only sound to be heard. At that moment of near silence Clarissa's fate was sealed as the soot particles of the ex-heart of the horse were caught by one of her forceful inhalations and sucked into the darkness of her lungs.
Cancer is both a slow and a fast-moving diseases. The second the carcinogenic agent penetrates the healthy cell, it launches a frenzied attack on the double helix of the hereditary genes, but decades can pass before external symptoms manifest themselves. In Clarissa's case less than one minute passed from when the soot particles hit the inner surface of the bronchiole to when benzapyrene, the carcinogenic agent, buried itself in a specific epithelium cell where it programmed the death of the cell, apoptosis, thus rendering the cell immortal--that is, transforming it into a cancer cell. However, thirty whole years would pass until she was diagnosed with "metastasized adenocarcinoma (stage III)."
What happened was that she had knocked on my door for the first time after having been my neighbor for all these years. ..I did know who she was though. Miss Sanders, laboratory technician at the Department of Biology; after all we had had adjacent balconies for more than thirty years. Through the peephole I could see that she was holding her hand over her mouth. I opened the door.

"What happened was that she had knocked on my door" - this is the crux: why not continue in simple past tense: What happened was that she knocked on my door.
why the move further back? she was on the balcony, I was playing next door, I was nine years old, she breathed in the particles, it would be thirty years before she was diagnosed, at that time she had knocked on my door.
whoa. it's as if the knock on the door happened further back than the breathing in on the balcony, for the narrator.
could be due to the translation, but I suppose the translator is preserving the tenses in the original: past, and then past perfect. she breathed. she had knocked.

and to say "it would be thirty years" places the present rather steadily on the moment of the breathing in, and thirty years later is still very much viewed as the future. even more so by saying "would be thirty years until" rather than before. the narration looks forward, until she is diagnosed. not back from the point to the time before the now of the diagnosis.

I do not think this is carelessness. I do like the precision of the writing here.
eg re earlier 'somehow' p56:
Epistemologically a random sequence of events may be determined by a cause; however these elude scientific recognition. At the same time these sequences are evidence that all sequences of events are subject to the law of coincidence, given that every single one of the countless events in the universe originates from the very first coincidence, which ripped the nothingness prior to the Big Bang out of its original stability. Or what?
Please would you, dear reader, at this point, be so good as to turn back to the beginning and find the word "somehow" in the second line of the second paragraph?
[Time and space once curled together to the extent that neither of them existed, but nevertheless, suddenly, somehow, a bubble appeared, an explosion occured simultaneously everywhere and every single particle of matter separated as the void dispersed them all. As the universe continued to expand, the temperature fell sufficiently for the first elements to be formed, which they swiftly were, and thus set off a chain of metamorphoses, which has continued ever since. ..The tiny element of matter which concerns us has, like everything else, existed since the Big Bang, as it is known; however, the point in time when this drop of gasoline existed in its highest degree of concentration, when it entered into its most refined structure, was here on this planet fifty-five million years ago, during the early Eocene when its constituents still formed the rapidly beating heart of a small prehistoric horse. After combusting on the 23rd of June, 1975, the drop acquired its most unstructured state in the form of exhaust fumes, yet managed nevertheless in this state, twenty-four hours later, to bring about a structure both complex and chaotic: cancer. I know this because I was eavesdropping from the neighboring balcony as she inhaled the particles which triggered the pathological cell division. However, we are getting ahead of ourselves now; let us begin with the prehistoric horse.*]
This diffuse adverb carries .. not just the aforementioned coincidence, but also a last hideout for none other than God himself. Because how did this bubble come about? Why was this curled together space time unstable? Why is there now something rather than nothing? ..

*see next post (or save as draft?) for coming pages about the small prehistoric horse with this eleent of matter forming its beating heart...
this is the part I like most, of course. the horse at the lake, the fright, the run, the fall, cradled by roots of an upturned tree, the dirt loosening, then -
reminds me of Giraffe, of which I have only read the beginning because while lovely it feels so sad.

from here on Machine less lovely, no horses only persons, Jimmy and then Clarissa and finally the closing pages about the narrator, who, when Clarissa knocks on his door requesting (& then receiving) a ride to the hospital, is

p82 -5
seven months into a depression caused by the realization of man's total and inescapable selfishness..
Around that time I had started to frequent a health center in the Appalachian Mountains whose facilities included and Indian sweat hut. It is possible that I had entertained a naive belief that I could force my depression out through the pores of my skin and I had therefore decided to participate in a modified version of a Native American sweat hut ritual.
Including the master of ceremony, we were seven people in total going into the hut that day. Inside darkness and silence reigned .. faint, dark red light from the hot stones .. The master of ceremony threw a cup of water on the stones, which resulted in a whiplash sound and a wave of steam that smashed against our bodies. We sat in silence in the hot darkness for what I was told afterward was forty-five minutes.
No book in the world is big enough to contain all the thoughts you can think in that period of time. My brain exploded with images, feelings, and words .. but slowly my inner monologue acquired a sence of direction and headed for the horizon. My mental state grew denser, and I had started to wonder if I had actually fainted when I cam across a creature, which I immediately recognized as my totem animal.
It was a horse, quite a small one, the size of a smallish dog, with gray and brown flecked fur and paws rather than hooves. It was visible in the darkness, not luminous, it was just there. The horse opened its mouth and started talking there is a giraffe weeping and they have been here all along with you Menagerie and I understood everything, even though it wasn't speaking in English or any other human language. The language of the horse was one modulated sound with myriad meanings, associations, and overlapping images. In my cleansed and possibly unconscious state , I understood that it was telling me the story of the fate of its heart.
Over the past year I have tried to reconstruct and translate this wordless equine language, and these pages are the outcome of my efforts. It has been a laborious task, filled with frustration at my many inadequacies, but it has occupied me to such an extent that I, I now realize, have entirely forgotten to be depressed.
Now I will go for a walk by the river.


I wonder why Peter Adolphsen sets this story (mostly) in the States.

Peter Adolphsen was born in 1972 and attended the Danish Writers School from 1993-95. At 25, he made his debut as an author with a collection of short prose entitled Small Stories, followed in 2000 by Small Stories 2. In 2003, he published Brummstein, which can be placed as a genre somewhere between a long short story and a short novel.
Brummstein - by Peter Adolphsen | complete-review :
An odd and perhaps not entirely satisfying tale, the hum of the rock echoing on but not entirely satisfactorily explained (even as the book comes full-circle).
Still, Adolphsen's command is striking enough to make the (very short) book worthwhile, even as that makes it read almost like an exercise in writing, rather than a full-fledged book. But it is solid and haunting enough -- worth a look.

yes that is about how I feel toward Machine. (though perhaps the complete-review will like Machine more? or less)