Visions and Temptations

by Harald Voetmann, Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen (Translator)

Overview

In the eleventh century, in the city of Regensburg, Othlo of St. Emmeram lies on his sickbed and takes a journey through Heaven and Hell 

Spurning carnal desire and earthly temptations all his life, the mystic Othlo is now in the care of his brother monks including the odious and semen-filled Wolkbart. Despite the spare walls which surround him, he frolics with Holy Dionysius in the Garden of Head-bearers (each carries his own head for eternity), descends from the island of Heaven, visits a brothel patronized by fallen angels, and witnesses the souls of the once gluttoinous wealthy fighting over scraps of rotting crabmeat in a ditch in Hell.

The third and final book in a series about mankind’s desire to conquer nature, Visions and Temptations follows Awake and Sublunar. In each novel, a great if imperfect mind facesis failed by the inevitable demise of the body. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811229807
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	08/19/2025
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Nominated for the Nordic Council Prize, the Danish author Harald Voetmann (b. 1978) has written novels, short stories, poetry, and a monograph on the Roman poet Sulpicia. He also translates classical Latin literature, notably Petronius and Juvenal. Sublunar is the second in his series of three historical novels about mankind’s will to conquer nature. New Directions published the first novel, Awake, about Pliny the Elder, in 2021; the final instalment, following eleventh-century German mystic Othlo of St. Emmeram, will publish in 2024.

Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen is a Danish translator born in 1986. She currently lives in Copenhagen where she also works as an illustrator and literary editor.

Editorial Reviews

"“Reading Voetmann’s books makes me feel so alive. His voice is like no other, his hold on his material masterful.”"

Olga Ravn

"Voetmann ends his trilogy of historical lives on a high note with this hallucinatory chronicle of a Benedictine monk’s deathbed visions. Othlo’s Dantean journey teaches him that sorrow is fleeting and salvation a matter of perspective. A Boschian vision quest—this masterpiece of morbidity is not to be missed."

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"“Visceral and lyrical, entertaining and provoking, Voetmann evokes a dazzling world.”"

Sjón

"“Voetmann seems to work from the ground up. Although Awake and Sublunar might be called novels of ideas, Voetmann's intellectual concerns are not forcefully imposed upon fictional dramas arbitrarily designed to illustrate them, but rather arise from particulars that are irreducible. Each page of the books contains a richness of detail and a depth of attention that has all but vanished from the contemporary novel—or, for that matter, any other mass-produced object. The novels themselves—each scarcely more than a hundred pages—are miniatures that appear to have been less written than chiseled. Images glow in stark relief against the somber backdrops and recur with slight variations, as though guided by a Fibonacci sequence. Amid the guts and gore, there are moments of quiet splendor."

New York Review of Books - Meghan O’Gieblyn