Like most of the other books, songs, and albums called (The) Endless Summer, this novella takes its title from a group of young people spending a holiday somewhere nice with lots of sex, fresh air, sunshine, and no depressing thoughts about tomorrow. But Madame Nielsen treats the concept with more irony than most. The "endless summer" - always in scare-quotes - is something that ended a long time ago, time only flows forwards, the life-choices that were up for grabs then have all been used up, the promises have mostly not been fulfilled, and most of those extraordinary people have ended up with quite predictable and dismal lives. Or deaths.

But the language of the book seems to fight that depressing message - the long, swooping lines of the text circle delicately, often beautifully, about the drabness and squalor. They loop back and forth as though to undermine the monotony of time, they pin down the irrelevant and leave the important largely undefined and ambiguous. There is power in having had moments of beauty in our lives, the book seems to be telling us, and the futures we didn't exploit are still meaningful to us.

It's difficult to say whether this is a lovely, consoling piece of Proustian melancholy or a slightly banal triumph of style over substance. It probably depends on how cynical you are feeling when you read it. I quite enjoyed it, and it's apparently been a success in Denmark, but I don't think it's really something I'm going to come back to. ( )