At the same time, Kaaberbol and Friis take the migration theme in a fresh, feminist-inflected direction. They don't revel in the usual stereotypes — you know, vulgar Russian gangsters with diamond-studded teeth or tragic, long-legged prostitutes. Instead, books like Death of a Nightingale focus on the most powerless, and thus the most endangered, of migrant newcomers: women and, especially, children. Working with victims, not criminals, Nina encounters kids threatened with all manner of ghastliness and the desperate mothers who'll do anything to save them. We understand why Nina's driven to get involved.
Yet her boundless sympathy with the dispossessed, born of childhood trauma, also makes her a real pain. She's both heroic and frustrating, the kind of person who judges other people for not caring enough — even as she forgets to care about her own family. She routinely fails in simple maternal duties, like picking up the kids from school, because she's so busy helping somebody else's children. She's on "a one-woman crusade to save the world," complains her estranged husband, Morten, a crusade that sucks their own children into what he calls her personal "war zone."
Still, even as Nina knows that she goes too far — often putting herself in harm's way — she can't rein herself in. And as Death of a Nightingale makes clear, the world of Red Cross work doesn't help her out. Like Gombrowicz on the beach, she keeps coming across suffering beings who need to be rescued. But unlike him, she keeps on rescuing. For Nina, compassion fatigue isn't a real syndrome. It's merely an excuse.
Read an excerpt of Death of a Nightingale