Death Sentence Read Online Free PDF

even though the size and the location were at the top end.
    My mother especially worried a great deal, but I think my father was so confident I would regret my decision and find my way into journalism eventually that he talked my mother into indulging my ‘fad’. The compromise we reached was that I would start a degree in literature, primarily to become eligible for a modest state-funded student grant. However, it didn’t quite cover our expenses, so my flatmates and I had to take whatever casual jobs we could get in order to pay the rent. In this respect we weren ’t picky at all and we delivered letters, worked in shops and washed bottles at Carlsberg Brewery.
    Much of our income was spent on cigarettes and whisky, which we believed fuelled our creativity. We often drank ourselves senseless during writing sessions lasting well into the early hours of the morning.
    My two partners in crime were Bjarne and Morten. Bjarne was a huge, even-tempered bear of a man who wrote poems about nature and more spiritual subjects. He was impossible to provoke and often acted as a lightning conductor for the other two of us, whose tempers were more volatile. Bjarne and I had plenty of nicknames, but Morten was only ever known as Mortis because he was tall and pale and the subject of his writing was inevitably death in some form or other. His writing style was uncompromising and he was very sensitive to criticism. If we said anything negative about his work, he might not speak to us for days.
    For my part, I experimented with different types of writing, but most of my output had strong sexual undertones. In this way we had, in our own opinion, covered the three most important subjects: life, sex and death.
    When we weren’t writing, working or pretending to be studying, we partied.
    Our parties were always popular and five or ten new faces would show up every time. This was quite all right with us, as long as they behaved themselves and brought a crate of beer, a bottle of spirits or something stronger. I don’t think our neighbours liked us all that much, but they never complained.
    The most memorable party, for many reasons, was the Angle party, which we held three years after moving in. We had all tried to get our work published, but apart from Bjarne, who had managed to get a selection of his poetry published in an underground literature magazine – for no payment, of course – our efforts had been in vain. I had had ‘pretentious and lacking in structure’ thrown in my face after my first attempt at a novel, and Mortis was told that his texts were banal, naive and riddled with linguistic errors and clichés. It didn’t worry us or, more accurately, we refused to show our disappointment, and we reassured one another that we would never compromise our integrity.
    The turning point for me came with In the Dead Angle , a genre study of a crime novel, in which I describe a murder from every possible angle, hence the title. Even though it was fairly flimsy and experimental, the publishing house, ZeitSign, liked it and offered to publish it. To this day I can’t imagine what the editor, Finn Gelf, saw in it, and I gather he was rather isolated in his view that it was any good, but at the time I was bursting with pride and delirious with success. I had cut a notch in the pistol handle of art, knocked my dent in the bonnet of literature and I felt close to immortal.
    The critics slated In the Dead Angle and it barely sold two hundred copies, but when we held the Angle party, the publication date was still months away. I was thus blissfully ignorant of the reception the book would later get and simply wanted to throw the greatest party ever. There would be more guests, more alcohol and more drugs than ever before; plenty of girls and live music. Everyone was invited. And everyone came. The flat was swarming with people, of whom I knew only half.
    That morning I had been to Nyhavn and had the book’s ISBN number tattooed round my