Kjersti A. Skomsvold

I bought this book as a possible present for my mum, based on the uncorked librarian's review: https://www.theuncorkedlibrarian.com/books-about-norway-norwegian-books/

'Alarmed that she might die without anyone noticing that she was even here in the first place, Mathea decides that now is the time for action. With her late husband’s watch, some sweet cakes and her old wedding dress, she heads out into the world to make her mark. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t seem to want to play along. [...] Books like this balance [the subject of becoming too old and alone] with moments of humour and philosophical reflection. It’s always satisfying to see a character grow as a person, especially if that character thought it might not be possible.'

Nice, right? A widowed woman learns to live again by getting out and having quirky adventures. Lovely idea!

F*ck you, book. This is grim miserable Literary Fiction. I think the whole thing can be summed up by the quote "' I don't think life is any good.' 'Who said life is supposed to be good? It's supposed to be hard' " The first person stream of conscious narrator is too sad and scared and out of touch with society to make anything work at all. The book is a series of anecdotes, jumping around her timestream, all of which are grim and miserable and bleak. How her childhood 'friend' used to bury her in ants and her parents didn't care. How her dog drowned in a lake. How she lost her baby. How she accidentally loses her precious jacket, made out of all the earwarmers she knitted for her deceased husband, because someone confuses it for a raffle prize and she just sits there and says nothing. It is so heartbreaking and so frustrating, and it's very well written, and it made me cry and want to throw it across the room repeatedly. She finds buying jam a struggled, and ends up eating plain bread.

The only spark of light in this poor woman's life are the stories of her husband - how she first told him she liked him with her scarf in the snow, how he got her a balloon to tempt her out to life again after the miscarriage. And even that the bloody miserable book miserably breaks, when his possessions are returned to her from work she finds out that his locker contains all her daily letters, where she'd poured her heart out, the only place she'd felt seen, mostly unopened.

And then the fucking book ends with her going out into a lake and drowning herself. Fuck this shit. I know, I know, it's a beautiful metaphor, she's talked about how she wanted to skinny dip but her husband was scared of jellyfish and they never swum, just waded naked, and now she is embracing her whole self and knows she doesn't have to fear death any longer. 'I'm more afraid of living than dying' 'I'm looking forward to giving up' 'without you I'm nothing'

Fuck you book. I hate you so much. And I hate you because you feel so true.

But you're only one part of the puzzle, not the whole truth. You're a painfully drawn portrait of one view of grief and loneliness. But you're not the whole picture.
… (meer)