In a hypothetical future where the government denies human emotion, Torben, a former novelist, murders his wife, but is unable to get the state to admit his guilt."

Max Mollerup is a Danish journalist, working for his newspaper in Paris during the turbulent sixties. He has a comfortable apartment, a car and all the other conveniences of modern urban life. However, he is also chronically insecure, incapable of doing or saying the right thing at the right time. In an age which exuded cool assurance and self-confidence, Mollerup is a loner who, unsuccessful with women, resorts to prostitutes. His one attempt at a serious relationship soon disappears beneath a slough of uninterest. To make matters worse, someone else wants his job, and his most successful book has just been exposed as a work of plagiarism. Then his mother comes to stay: an aging Danish film star from the 1930s, she is awful to him and he is in turn brutal to her.

Here is an engaging and enjoyable alternative to the more solemn introductions to Soren Kierkegaard that are currently available:"The Laughter is on My Side" entices us into Kierkegaard's way of looking at the world. Skillfully clearing a path to the heart of Kierkegaard's writings for those who may be unfamiliar with the great Danish thinker, Roger Poole and Henrik Stangerup rearrange some of his most pleasurable and most readable passages to form an entertaining "text-narrative"--not a selection in the ordinary sense but an innovating presentation that tells a new story. The book replaces the inaccessible Kierkegaard of philosophical legend with an ironic, witty, shrewdly observant writer, writing for the amusement of writing, and not for the grimmer satisfactions of instructing or upbraiding. Above all, the Kierkegaard revealed by Poole and Stangerup becomes, in the deepest sense, our contemporary.

Taking its title from the young Kierkegaard's nickname, "The Fork," the first section of the work is full of urbane and erotic materials and has much to say about his famous broken engagement to Regine Olsen. A section called "Women" will be of special interest to feminists, particularly the three discourses from the Symposium section of "Stages on Life's Way." "The Midnight Hour" presents Kierkegaard's most anguished and existential passages: "Do you not know there comes a midnight when everyone has to throw off his mask? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this?" Lastly, "1848:1984 presents Kierkegaarde as an incisive and relevant political thinker in a way that has never been attempted before.