The Royal Physician's Visit
Per Olov Enquist, [Enquist, Per Olov]Overthrown by a cabal led by the puritanical professor-turned-bureaucrat Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Struensee was publicly executed in 1772. The queen was divorced and exiled, and Guldberg became Christian's manager and Denmark's prime minister. Enquist explosively expands this parenthesis in Danish history into an ironized romantic tragedy of a very high order, one that fills the reader with horror and pity on every page.
The Swedish novelist's method is to begin 10 years after Struensee's fall, then retrace the "Struensee era," as it came to be called, by probing the characters of four principal players--Christian, Guldberg, Struensee, and Queen Caroline Mathilde--each of whose perspectives, even the king's, he makes intelligible and occasionally even sympathetic. A towering achievement. Ray Olson
Review
The Wall Street JournalThe Royal Physician's Visit is a masterpiece.
The New York Times Book Review Enquist's principal characters are realized with a vividness and subtlety that place the book in the front ranks of contemporary literary fiction...
Time magazine Enquist...turns [an] actual historical incident into an enthralling fable of the temptations of power -- and a surprisingly poignant love story.