Helga Flatland

I loved Flatland’s novel One Last Time (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2021/10/review-of-one-last-time-by-helga.html) so was excited to read her most recent offering. I was not disappointed.

Mathilde is forced to leave her teaching position in Oslo after her relationship with an 18-year-old student is discovered. To escape her tarnished reputation and Covid restrictions, she decides to leave the city and rent a cottage in the countryside. The cottage is on a dairy farm run by two brothers, Johs and Andres, whose family has owned the farm for several generations. Mathilde’s arrival disturbs the peaceful life on the farm.

There are two first-person narrators: Mathilde and Johs. Their perspectives reveal their inner lives and also emphasize their differences. Mathilde is very much the modern woman whereas Johs’ life, despite the farm’s modernizations, is very much rooted in the traditions of the past.

Mathilde was raised by her aunt after the deaths of her parents. She describes herself as “rootless” with no personal interest in her ancestry. Her behaviour certainly challenges traditional ideas about the behaviour expected of women. To his mother Signe, Johs describes Mathilde as a woman who “’talks too much, laughs too loud, sleeps with whoever she wants, and doesn’t give a shit about facades.’”

Johs lives by tradition. Mathilde thinks of him as “’a walking family tree . . . with a full overview of [his] heritage.’” Things are done as they were done by his grandfather Johannes. The brothers even manage the farm like Johannes and his brother did. Johs believes “traditions are important” and “traditions cannot be broken.” Like his grandfather, Johs plays the fiddle and insists on telling the folktale connected to the music before he plays. He even has a tendency to judge a person based on “what he comes from”!

What is outstanding is the characterization. All characters emerge as fully developed, realistic people for whom the reader will feel sympathy but with whom he/she will also feel angry and frustrated. Mathilde, for example, lost her parents and as a result seems to suffer from abandonment issues. This situation might arouse sympathy, but it is difficult to agree with some of her choices and her refusal to take any responsibility for her choices. Johs seems trapped in a dysfunctional family between “a cold and manipulative mother” and a selfish brother. There were times I wanted to scream at him to develop a backbone.

One of the themes is the connections between the past and the present. Mathilde seems to have inherited some traits from her mother who “’had an enormous need for validation . . . almost . . . insatiable . . . [and] became almost psychotic when these men, who she didn’t even want in the first place, rejected her.’” Mathilde’s question about “’Who was driving the car?’” is so chilling! Mathilde’s inability to learn from past mistakes does not bode well: “I don’t know how to learn to stop being attracted to someone who’ll eventually reject me.” Johs lives in shadow of his mother whom he thinks is “damaged . . . I think Johannes damaged her.” But perhaps the shadow of Johannes is even bigger. Flashbacks clearly show that Johs and Andres could not escape their grandfather’s influence. A totally odious man who may even have attempted a murder, he loved to tell folktales about women who rebel against their patriarchal society and suffer tragic consequences as a result. Andres summarizes these stories as “’About unspeakably immoral, rebellious women who had to be punished. . . . Stories that say these women vanished mysteriously or dramatically, while in reality they were probably murdered or they killed themselves.’”

Tension builds slowly, but I soon realized that things would not end well because of the dark sides of the characters involved. There’s Mathilde who cannot tolerate rejection: “the feeling of unadulterated despair, the bottomless abyss opening beneath me when I think that someone is about to leave me. All my instincts demand that I fight back, I lose my sense of rationality and impulse control.” And then there’s a man whose “anxiety can make him furious – when his nerves are aglow like that, they can flare up and spark a rage so explosive.”

The book’s title is perfect since Toxic features a number of toxic characters and toxic relationships, both in the past and the present. And the ending . . . wow! Some readers will find its open-endedness unsatisfying, but I think it’s perfect. What it implies of course is very unsettling. I can well imagine the newest folktale!

This is a book I will put on my to re-read pile. There are layers and nuances I’m sure I missed. In the meantime, I will be highly recommending it.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) for over a thousand reviews.… (meer)

I had high hopes for this one, but it didn't really work for me. It's about a family - parents in their 70s and three adult children - and the parents decide to get a divorce. This completely upends the adult children and they all take a turn having sections of the novel told from their point of view. The problem, for me, is that there is an odd and off-putting amount of introspection and self-knowledge given to each of the characters. It feels over-analytical and contrived. Closer to what a psychologist would say about the situation than someone living it.… (meer)

Though the author is apparently very well-known in Norway, this is the first time I’ve encountered her writing. This novel is of such exceptional quality that Helga Flatland deserves recognition in more than just her home country.
One Last Time examines the complexities of family relationships. Anne, who lives alone since placing her husband in a nursing home because she can no longer provide the care he needs, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. When she tells her son Magnus and her daughter Sigrid about her diagnosis, a range of emotions surfaces. Sigrid in particular has had a difficult relationship with her mother, and the announcement of her mother’s impending death has her feeling fearful and guilty as she also wishes for some resolution, specifically some acknowledgement and apology from Anne for “the mistakes she made while raising Magnus and me.”

The narrative alternates between Anne and Sigrid; both provide first-person perspectives. Sometimes the point of view changes in the middle of a conversation. The obvious advantage of this narrative structure is that the reader sees both sides, two versions of events. A difficulty with style is the run-on sentences; these can sometimes be confusing though they are clearly intended to suggest, like stream-of-consciousness, the continuous flow of thoughts.

What is outstanding is the characterization. All characters emerge as fully developed, realistic people for whom the reader will feel sympathy but with whom he/she will also feel angry and frustrated. Anne, for instance, is a strong woman who cared for her husband Gustav for years, but she paid perhaps too little attention to her children. Sigrid thinks she had a terrible childhood because she felt abandoned by her mother who devoted herself to Gustav: “my upbringing had harmed me, my parents’ abandonment had damaged me . . . I had more significant spiritual wounds than anybody would expect.” One can certainly empathize with her abandonment issues, but Sigrid is also self-centred and self-pitying and is drawn to a person who accepted her narrative and “granted me long-awaited validation of my explanations and experiences.”

Seeing how Sigrid’s childhood shaped her is interesting. Because of her mother’s distant parenting, Sigrid has become a helicopter parent, especially with her daughter Mia. She resents Mia’s building a relationship with Jens, Mia’s father, who abandoned Sigrid and his daughter almost two decades earlier. As a physician, Sigrid has difficulty maintaining a professional distance from patients.

Anne and Sigrid’s fraught relationship is built on decades of misunderstandings and resentments, so a nice, tidy final resolution would be unrealistic. The two do take some tentative steps towards each other, but it is impossible to expect that years of things left unsaid can be fully expressed. Habits established over years – ending discussions in silence or deferring “to defensiveness and thereafter to attack” – are difficult to break. The ending, therefore, is perfect. It is sad yet hopeful and very authentic.

The novel certainly resonated with me because last year I lost my mother to cancer. I can identify with the devastation of a terminal cancer diagnosis and the emotions of guilt and fear experienced by Sigrid and her desire to be there to help as she also wants to escape at the same time. The book is so grounded in reality that every reader will find something that will resonate.

There is wisdom that will remain with me: one person’s “version of events [is] just as true and important as my own” and “it was ultimately meaningless who was right. Neither of us was right” and “It’s not like [memories] represent the truth of things.”

Though light on plot, this book has great depth: its characters are flawed and genuine, and its emotional realism is breath-taking. One Last Time will not be my last time reading Helga Flatland.

Note: I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).… (meer)