It's Copenhagen, 1968. Lise, a children's book writer and married mother of three, is becoming increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and taunting voices. Convinced that her housekeeper and husband are plotting against her, she descends into a terrifying world of sickness, pills and institutionalisation. But is sanity in fact a kind of sickness? And might mental illness itself lead to enlightenment?

Brief, intense and haunting, Ditlevsen's novel recreates the experience of madness from the inside, with all the vividness of lived experience.

Everyone loves my brother, and I often think his childhood suits him better than mine suits me. He has a custom-made childhood that expands in tune with his growth, while mine is made for a completely different girl.

I always dream about meeting some mysterious person who will listen to me and understand me. I know from books that such people exist, but you can’t find any of them on my childhood street.

Being young is itself temporary, fragile, and ephemeral. You have to get through it – it has no other meaning.

No price was too high to be able to keep away intolerable real life.

Solenoid is an intellectual dark comedy exuding the aura both of a postmodernistic dystopia and an absurdist horror tale…

The narrator has lice… And the novel begins with a nauseous ode to lice…

The other side of pain is pain.

"It’s not men who oppress women, Noenka. It’s not whites who oppress blacks. It’s the centuries-long hunt for gold.”
“I am gold,” I said spitefully.

Noble and naked, I wanted to lead my own life. I would lead that life of my own, even if there was no one else to tend to my wounds. I would not allow myself to be preyed upon every hour of the day and night. I would watch over my body. Keep vigil, the way priests watch over their temple. And if I granted him entrance, it would only be to bring me offerings.

“Sometimes, you’re my mood,” I said, enchanted.
“It’s my despair that’s reflected in you,” she replied calmly.

The heroine of this story (described only as "I") is compelled to visit a mysterious uncle who turns out to be a black magician who lords over a kind of Prospero's Island that exists out of time and space. Startled by his bizarre behavior and odd nocturnal movements, she eventually learns that he is searching for the philosopher's stone.

When his sinister attentions fall upon the priceless jewel heirloom in her possession, bewilderment turns into stark terror and she realizes she must find a way off the island. An esoteric dreamworld fantasy composed of uncorrelated scenes and imagery mostly derived from medieval occult sources, Goose of Hermogenes might be described as a gothic novel, an occult picaresque, or a surrealist fantasy.

However one wants to approach this obscure tale, it remains today as vividly unforgettable and disturbing as when it was first published by Peter Owen in 1961.

As if doing a little harm could do you a little good, not because it gave you some unspeakable thrill—certainly not—but because it instilled a certain gravity in you, whereby you began to resemble the rest of the world, the ones who live, who somehow manage to live.

Basically, the Narrator said to himself, the idea we form of others comes solely from their relationship with ourselves. Seen through their relationship with someone else, they are necessarily slightly different. And should we catch a glimpse of them in the privacy of their own self (which is impossible without spying on them or rummaging through their papers) they are someone of whom we know strictly nothing.

No price was too high to be able to keep away intolerable real life.