Prince: A Novel [Paperback]

Ib Michael (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 7, 2001

For lovers of Howard Norman's The Bird Artist, Prince is an evocative, richly imagined novel about a defining season in the life of a young outcast. In 1912 at a provinical Danish seaside hotel, twelve-year-old Malte, a charity case from the city, revels in the freedom of summer. Largely a solitary boy, Malte spends his days on the beach, transfixed by the sea. When a coffin containing a young sailor drifts ashore, Malte is soon absorbed in the sailor's tragic love story and dramatic death, and their fates become dangerously intertwined.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Ib Michael's Prince is the story of a poor, illiterate child from the city sent to the Danish coast to be a "summer boy" at a seaside resort. Masterfully translated from the Danish by Barbara Haveland, this is a subtly bewitching novel in which everything pulses with the promise of enchantment. On the beach, 12-year-old Malte entertains himself for hours, as only a deeply neglected child can:

He lays starfish in the bottom of the jar and holds them up to the sky. Slowly he turns in a circle, leaving a wreath of sunflower petals in the sand with the soles of his feet, puts his eye to the bottom, and uses the jelly jar as a stargazer. Dissolved in light, he watches the galaxies whirling through space.

Malte dreams of ships, glaciers, long trips down the Amazon where dolphins live in the trees. He has a guardian angel who narrates much of the story, but whose existence is so tentative there is no question that he is powerless over the boy's fate, unable to intervene when the boy stumbles into dangerous circumstances.

As the tale of an orphan, Prince evokes that free-floating homesickness that beautiful places can evoke in rootless people. It brings to mind Hubert Fichte's The Orphanage, a little known but equally memorable book. Both are novels of childhood in which the child is abandoned, waiting on the shore of history for a wave to wash him out to sea. Born into harsh circumstances, these children have already realized that the world is a merciless place. As characters, they are free of the naiveté that so many childhood novels are rotten with. It is up to Malte to make sense of the world, to see a dead man and realize that "the living take their color from the blood." That's childlike wisdom in the best possible sense. --Emily White --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

By turns solemn and whimsical, Danish novelist Michael's American debut brings together a young boy and a dead 19th-century sea captain's restless spirit, in a luminous exploration of identity and youth. Malte is a 12-year-old abandoned city boy, a charity boarder at the rustic Sea View guest house in a Danish fishing village during the summer of 1912. When he finds a coffin on the beach, nobody can identify the corpse of the sailor it contains. But Aviaja, the enfeebled, reclusive old woman who lives at Crow Towers, exhibits a cryptic concern for the deceased. When she dies later that summer, she bequeaths her fortune to the local parish on the condition that a requiem be performed to commemorate the dead seaman. His mysterious identity and his relationship to Aviaja are questions throughout the novel, while Malte's boyish make-believe, his wildly imaginative and mischievous exploits, occupy the story's foreground. The sailor's shape-shifter spirit befriends Malte and fancies himself the boy's guardian angel, intent on preserving the sanctity of youth ("To be let loose in the wonderland of childhoodAthat is what it means to be born a prince") and thereby reclaiming his own. The mysteries unravel during the final third of the bookAnot in the puzzle-piece mode of conventional mystery plots, but via straightforward confessionAand the dark, hallowed mood of this section contrasts sharply with the more frolicsome tone describing Malte's carefree adventures. With a supernatural flourish, the subplot of Flaubertian romance between the Sea View's chambermaid and a French impostor converges with the drama of the mysterious corpse, and in the end Malte's newfound literacy divines the seaman's identity in an ironic, essentially tensionless moment. The wholesome, folkloric tenor of this adult fairy tale creates an old-fashioned sensibility and includes the occasional grandiose pronouncement, but the novel endears with its glorious seascapes and its portrayal of the wonders of youth. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (April 7, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312273258
• ISBN-13: 978-0312273255
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,707,555 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Small-town life and the seven seas, January 14, 2001

By 

Louise (Denmark) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Prince (Hardcover)

An amazing novel, that combines tragedy and comedy, myth and realism, the childhood novel and the great love story, a small, incredibly Danish society, and the dream of the adventures of the wide world... A beautiful story, beautifully written, even in translation. Despite the complex structure and "difficult" language, it is hard not to get caught by Ib Michael's writing - This is, in my opinion, his best book so far.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Amazing Love Story, November 17, 2000

By 

E. Thurston (Cottage Grove, OR United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Prince (Hardcover)

This is an amazing love story. A young boy plays host to the ostensible narrator of the tale, a 'guardian angel' who turns out to be one of the parties in the story of a love lost and finally found again. It ranks as one of the most beautifully written stories I have ever read.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The wonderful world of Ib Michael, October 22, 2007

By 

Inge Detlefsen "Veronique" (Aarhus, Denmark) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Prince: A Novel (Paperback)

A devoted Ib Michael reader, Danish by birth, I read Prince as soon as it was published, and as always with Michael's book, I swallowed the book, and actually had to read it again to get all the subtelties I missed in the first reading. Since Prince, Michael has published several books in Denmark, and I love them unconditionally. That man paints with words and is also at times extremely humerous, and I wish more would be translated so that I could share them with my friends abroad. Ib Michael is a remarkable writer, not only novels but poems and travel descriptions of his trips all around the world. My fullest recommendation. Inge Detlefsen