Karen Fastrup

Hunger Heart, written by Karen Fastrup and translated by Marina Allemano, is a work of auto-fiction that lets the reader experience, as closely as possible, a breakdown and its consequences.

It took a few pages for me to get used to the flow of the writing, the disjointed feeling which, I imagine, accompanies being in a mental ward. Yet the writing also has a flow to it that helps the reader understand what is happening, both within Karen's mind and in the world around her. Once you find that flow the novel reads quite well.

I think I saw a quote from Fastrup that helped me understand, to a better degree, the distinction between auto-fiction and fiction influenced by a writer's life experiences (isn't it all?). I don't have the quote handy so I will try to paraphrase, which means this is more my understanding than specifically what she said. In other words, any confusion is on me, not her. Auto-fiction seems to be more specific in nature, in that it focuses or centers a specific event or period, with enough other information to make the story more understandable. The thing that makes it fiction is that there is not the need to make sure every incident or conversation has a one-to-one relation to something that actually happened. I believe she mentioned that in order to both move the story along and portray what she was feeling at the time she was living the story, she combined several incidents into a completely fictional incident which captured or retained the emotions and feelings even though that particular event never happened. So that immediately separates this from actual autobiography or memoir (at least how they should be). This entirely fictional event is situated in the midst of incidents that more closely resemble what really happened. In many autobiographical novels, by which I mean those influenced by a person's experiences, very few of the events are actual events, most are simply using experiences to make the fictional account that much more realistic. So the heavy use of actual events interspersed with fictional events versus almost entirely fictional, though influenced by actual, events is what I think of as the difference between auto-fiction and autobiographically influenced novels. Okay, maybe I didn't help much.

While the personal journey is what I will take with me from the book, I also found the glimpse into what passes for mental healthcare to be worth remembering as well. Misdiagnoses are not uncommon, especially for women, and sometimes the care seems to be missing just that very thing, caring. My comment isn't meant as an over-the-top attack on the field, but rather an acknowledgement that there is still a lot we don't know about our minds and what makes each of us the persons we are.

I would recommend this to readers who want to gain insight into the protagonists in the novels they read, and thus insight into ourselves.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (meer)