His many trips to Latin America, China, Tibet and other places, have often provided the starting point for Ib Michael's fantastical novels and poems and have inspired their mythical and magical elements. Ib Michael successfully integrates the global and the local, i.e. the individual, personal story and the greater reality which surrounds it.
One of the two storylines in the novel Kilroy, Kilroy (Kilroy, Kilroy 1989) concerns the identity-less Kilroy's search for an identity. The other trail is that of a Danish womans journey in China and Tibet. The two tracks meet as conflicting thoughts, an encounter in which Ib Michael provides his reader with a sense of reality beyond that of our everyday experience. Kilroy is an archetype seen through the literary lens - a myth whose lack of identity is a basic condition for present-day life.
Myth plays a central role in Ib Michael's tales, just as his universe typically contains a transcendental world in which well-cemented categories begin to shift. Concepts such as space and time prove to be of fickle dimension, as we learn, for example, when following Mashiants thousands-of-years-long and world-encompassing life in Kejserfortllingen (Tigers Tale 1981). In Mashiant, Ib Michael introduced a mythological figure to be found in nearly every aspect of his work: the immortal soldier. The soldier is representative of universal and timeless primitive instincts.
In the trilogy Vanillepigen (The Vanilla Girl 1991), Den tolvte Rytter (The Midnight Soldier 1993) and Brev til Manen (Letter to the Moon 1995) the narrator appropriates his own story through a process of recollection and experience. The novels are a journey undertaken by the narrator down through his familys and his own exotic past. The soldier motif is present in the Mexican soldiers singular story in Denmark in The Midnight Soldier. In the final volume of the trilogy, past and present merge and the narrator can blend into his destiny and thus step into character and contemplate history as cyclical, cutting across the chronology.
Ib Michael's latest novel Prins (Prince 1997) is about twelve-year-old Malte and his constant attendant - the spirit of a dead sailor. As in the other novels, time and space are not demarcated so as to constitute a here and now. Reality is extended and amplified. It is this expanded version of reality that Ib Michael endeavours to project through his magical novels.
Ib Michael"s latest book is Atkinsons biograf (Atkinson's cinema), a collection of interconnected short stories, from 1998.
http://www.litteraturnet.dk/danvalg/frameit.asp?dest=http://www.litteraturnet.dk/danvalg/f_portraet.asp!fid=50 (bilingual, has numerous links, including excerpts in english and danish)
REVIEWS
On Kilroy Kilroy
"Two of the major figures of modern Danish literature - J.V. Jensen and Tom Kristensen - showed how, in one's own generation, it is possible to rediscover the contemporary soul in ancient China. Ib Michael, with at least as much artistic dexterity, shows how this encounter works today. How history creates new people, how it is possible to talk about a soul in modern times."
Erik Svendsen , Politiken, August 11 1989
On The Vanilla Girl
"The family has its skeleton in the cupboard and just under the surface there is - maybe - a dead man lying in wait. But the family also has adventure coursing through its veins and love in its bones, and these dynamic powers are set free when the time is right. Like here and now, so many years later, in this book with its sweet aroma of vanilla. Ib Michael has written an absolutely wonderful fantasy reminiscence, loyal to the family bond, the childhood home and his own mellow prose."
Henrik Wivel, Berlingske Tidende, October 15 1991
On The Midnight Soldier
"It is effected by a disconcertingly accurate portrayal of adolescence which, as a kind of inversion of the finale to Klaus Rifbjerg's classic Den kroniske uskyld (Chronic Innocence), gives the narrator the opportunity to put his whole weight behind the name which he had previously, in Vanillepigen (The Vanilla Girl), pinned to his father: Willy! It's here, right here, that the hunt for the family's hidden treasure troves comes to an end. The naked truth can only be found concealed in the completely personal traumas of childhood and adolescence. And it has no voice, just silence. But it also provides a beginning. A source for all of Ib Michael's books, and this one too. It is from this point that the author can dispatch the novel's twelve horsemen along the escape route of the fantasy. Open up retrospective perspectives and the family's collective memory, and dream, dream in Ib Michael's unique voice and with his awe-inspiring linguistic vitality. This is a fine book, moving in its substance, entertaining in its particulars."
Henrik Wivel, Berlingske Tidende, April 2 1993
On Letter to the Moon
"He waited until he was fifty to write these deeply personal and yet tremendously all-embracing books. In Per Hojholt's words, an author begins to "take from the top table" when he visits the original scenes of his life and work, and such is the case with this trilogy. The wise author waits, waits and waits again before taking from the top table. When Ib Michael finally did it, the result was a masterpiece. A water-born and wonderful letter to the moon, written by Pierrot - who did not utter a word until he could say what he wanted to say."
Bjorn Bredal, Politiken, October 1 1995
On Letter to the Moon
"Achieved with a mature and sensitive breadth of perspective, in which a personal reminiscence is connected to the current-carrying fantasies of an epoch in such a way that the two are vividly, persuasively narrated and entwined one with the other, as is always the case with time and people. In this novel Torsleff's vanilla girl is finally revealed to be a man, not only to the reader who has known it all along, but also to the narrator who has told the story whilst unaware of many things. The realm of childhood is no more. As reality, but not as the painful and craving basis for everything. This good book included."
Henrik Wivel, Berlingske Tidende, October 1 1995