The Invention of Ana: A Novel

by Mikkel Rosengaard

Overview

A New York Times Paperback Row Editor's Choice

Combining the infectious narration of Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl, the philosophical lyricism of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and the mesmerizing power of Anna North’s The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, a breathtaking debut, brimming with youthful brio and irresistible humor, that chronicles a young man’s friendship with a most peculiar artist.

On a rooftop in Brooklyn on a spring night, a young intern and would-be writer, newly arrived from Copenhagen, meets the intriguing Ana Ivan. Clever and funny, with an air of mystery and melancholia, Ana is a performance artist, a mathematician, and a self-proclaimed time traveler. She is also bad luck, she confesses; she is from a cursed Romanian lineage.

Before long, the intern finds himself seduced by Ana’s enthralling stories—of her unlucky countrymen; of her parents’ romance during the worst years of Nicolae Ceaucescu’s dictatorship; of a Daylight Savings switchover gone horribly wrong. Ana also introduces him to her latest artistic endeavor. Following the astronomical rather than the Gregorian calendar, she is trying to alter her sense of time—an experiment that will lead her to live in complete darkness for one month.

Descending into the blackness with Ana, the intern slowly loses touch with his own existence, entangling himself in the lives of Ana, her starry-eyed mother Maria, and her raging math-prodigy father Ciprian. Peeling back the layers of her past, he eventually discovers the perverse tragedy that has haunted Ana’s family for decades and shaped her journey from the streets of Bucharest to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and finally to New York City.

The Invention of Ana blurs the lines between narrative and memory, perception and reality, identity and authenticity. In his stunning debut novel, Mikkel Rosengaard illuminates the profound power of stories to alter the world around us—and the lives of the ones we love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062679086
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/13/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	798,368
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Mikkel Rosengaard’s first novel, The Invention of Ana, has been published in five languages. He is a two-time recipient of the Danish Arts Foundation’s Literary Fellowship, and his work has appeared in the Architectural Review, PBS’s Art21, Hyperallergic, and many other publications. He grew up in Elsinore, Denmark, and lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Mikkel Rosengaard’s intriguing first novel… weaves story upon story to explore … the bond between writer and muse.” — New York Times Book Review

“Surprising, suspenseful, and deeply affecting, written in prose as elegant and precise as a mathematical proof. A meditation on time, mortality, and politics, and a beautiful and enlarging read.” — Alena Graedon, author of The Word Exchange

“[Rosengaard] charts the emotional distance between Bucharest under Ceausescu’s despotic rule and present-day hipster Brooklyn, resulting in a striking, auspicious debut.” — Publishers Weekly

“[A] stirring debut.... Rosengaard’s novel is a swift and memorable meditation on how storytellers struggle to separate the tangible from the contrived.” — Booklist

“This strange story about strange stories, told with intelligence and humor, lingers in the mind like a dream.” — Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

[A] stirring debut.... Rosengaard’s novel is a swift and memorable meditation on how storytellers struggle to separate the tangible from the contrived.

Booklist

Surprising, suspenseful, and deeply affecting, written in prose as elegant and precise as a mathematical proof. A meditation on time, mortality, and politics, and a beautiful and enlarging read.

Alena Graedon

Mikkel Rosengaard’s intriguing first novel… weaves story upon story to explore … the bond between writer and muse.

New York Times Book Review

[A] stirring debut.... Rosengaard’s novel is a swift and memorable meditation on how storytellers struggle to separate the tangible from the contrived.

Booklist

12/11/2017
The spirit of Scheherazade is alive and well in Rosengaard’s debut novel about a woman named Ana Ivan, a survivor of Ceausescu’s Romania, who meets the unnamed Danish narrator on a Brooklyn rooftop and immediately launches into a story from her past. Right from the start, Ana captivates him with remarks about how she can travel in time or, as a child, was dead for two minutes, or how she is done with men. The narrator, it turns out, is a would-be writer, and Ana wants to use him to tell her stories, which, among other things, involve the suicide of her mathematician father and her investigation into his past to find out why he killed himself. The narrator’s Danish girlfriend, Laerke, arrives for a visit, but is surprised to find that he is distracted by Ana. The story culminates with Ana’s unusual art project, Timemachine, which the narrator becomes a part of. Ana makes for a maddening and beguiling presence throughout, as the author charts the emotional distance between Bucharest under Ceausescu’s despotic rule and present-day hipster Brooklyn, resulting in a striking, auspicious debut. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

2017-11-13
A would-be writer from Copenhagen meets a performance artist from Romania and becomes obsessed with her tragic, surreal life story.As the unnamed narrator explains in the first pages of this novel, already nominated for a "best debut" prize in the author's native Denmark, he met Ana Ivan shortly after he arrived in New York. He'd come over to work as an intern for his brother, a successful gallerist, and that night was helping out at a Brooklyn art festival. Anna immediately began telling him a story from her past, about a game she'd played with her father as a child during the endless, boring power cuts of the Ceau?escu regime. They made dots on a paper at random, then stared at the dots until a picture emerged. This is a metaphor for the novel as a whole, the dots being stories from Ana's life, this being the first of many. The next time he sees Ana, she tells him about a time she pretended she had a stomachache to avoid going to school and ended up dead for two minutes during an unnecessary appendectomy. "Why aren't you writing it down?" she asks impatiently. "It was only the first chapter." Her plan, it seems, is for him to become her amanuensis, writing "the whole true tale" of her life, a story she suggests may have bestseller potential. Though he finds the situation "implausible"—"how often, after all, do you meet a random woman and end up being asked to write her life story?"—he has no stories of his own. After all, he's "just an intern—white and middle-class and male to boot." And so, her story becomes his story. Much of it revolves around Ana's father, a math prodigy who committed suicide for reasons that were obscure until she herself became a mathematician and began to investigate her parents' past. The bizarre tragedy they suffered had many long-range consequences, including Ana's convictions that she is cursed and that she can travel through time.This strange story about strange stories, told with intelligence and humor, lingers in the mind like a dream.

Kirkus Reviews