Terrence Kerrigan is beginning the second half of his life with little consolation, as he travels to Denmark to pour himself into his two remaining loves--drinking and research. So begins Kerrigan in Copenhagen: A Love Story, the third work in Thomas E. Kennedy's Copenhagen Quartet (after In the Company of Angels and Falling Sideways). Kerrigan's sole ambition is to write a guidebook to the Danish capital's bars, but the charm of a sharp, green-eyed research assistant adds an element of longing and sliver of possibility to his quest.
Lovers of Scandinavia and philosophy will both find joy in this meticulously detailed novel. It gives one the sense of wandering through another person's mind--and Kerrigan's mind is a crowded hall of quotations, music, poetry and, in what scarce space is left over, personal nostalgia. Through a lens of colloquial inebriation, he draws connections between such seemingly unconnected figures as Kierkegaard and Duke Ellington. As these observations reappear in new ways and are anachronistically connected, we can eventually see the faint outline of a brilliant analytical web.
Coursing below the noise of Kerrigan's endless internal narrative is his awareness that his true needs are painfully simple. He may have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and Danish history, but he would give anything for a second chance with his ex-wife or the affection of his research assistant. These desires are as urgent and elusive as the sense that some "ultimate existential conclusion" lies at the heart of modern theory. --Annie Atherton, intern at Shelf Awareness