Kjersti A. SkomsvoldRecensioni

Great book; found myself laughing out loud on many an occasion. A fuller review is included in an essay here: https://walkingthewire.substack.com/p/confronting-the-absurd

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.
½

Herregud så rotete og kjedelig. Leste bare 20 sider men den var bare så tørr. Vil fullføre den siden det er skomsvold og den er kort, men må nok tvinge meg selv gjennom den. Virker ikke særlig kos.

Mathea Martinsen har ikke hatt mye med andre mennesker å gjøre. Nå, som gammel rammes hun av en stor sorg, og hun blir redd for å dø før noen vet at hun har levd. Mathea finner fram brudekjolen igjen, baker pikekyss og går ut blant andre.

Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold imponerer med en debutroman som er fryktelig og morsom på samme tid. Historien om Mathea Martinsen fra Haugerud i Oslo starter som en lett surrealistisk beretning om en ensom gammel dame, frivillig innestengt i leiligheten sin. Etter hvert som hun forteller mer om sin egen historie, forstår leseren at dette er en kvinne hemmet av betydelige kontaktproblemer. Langt på vei har hun levd et liv gjennom mannen sin, som hun omtaler ved kjælenavnet Epsilon. I de lange, ensomme timene hun har ventet på ham, har Mathea underholdt seg selv ved hjelp av å strikke ørevarmere og pønske ut setninger med enderim. Nå er det klart at en form for katastrofe har inntruffet i Matheas liv, hun er mer enn vanlig opptatt av dødsannonsene i avisen, og hun lager seg en tidskapsel for å fastholde det som har vært av verdi i hennes eget liv. Hun blir også tvunget til å forholde seg til omverdenen på en ny måte, noe som vekker til live en helt egen, kreativ selvoppholdelsesdrift.

Firstly, I would have rated this 3.5 stars if it were possible as I did enjoy the way it was written. This is a good first novel and is touching and amusing.

However, as other reviewers here have mentioned, it appears to me that the youth of the author impinges on her ability to write with any great credibility on death and ageing. Whilst I don't expect books dealing with these subjects to be devoid of humour, I do expect a certain weight and depth in the style and content whereas this book lacked both and ultimately came across as shallow, lightweight and frivolous.

"..even though a banana plant looks like a tree, it's really just a big plant that has flowers without sex organs and fruit without seeds. Therefore, the banana doesn't undergo fertilization and plays no role in the plant's formation, and when the banana plant has lost its fruit, it dies. It was the meaninglessness of this cycle that made Buddha love the banana plant , which he believed symbolized the hopelessness of all earthly endeavors."

This is a story of an old Norwegian woman, Mathea, who identifies with bananas and feels that her life has had no significance. Her husband (who she calls Epsilon) was more interested in the "Statistical Yearbook for the Kingdom of Norway, First Edition, 1880" than in her. Mathea spends her days knitting ear-warmers for 'Epsilon', who has prominent ears. She writes letters to him, but he doesn't read them. 'Epsilon' dies and now Mathea is getting ready to die. She has always had great anxiety about contact with other people and her attempts to interact with people in her late life always lead to failure, leaving her lonely and feeling hopeless.

During the early 1990s I looked forward to Saturday nights. I worked two full time jobs to pay off debts and found myself working six days a week. At my local pub, I assembled a writing group and for several months, it was the focal point of my week, hell, my existence. Blame it on youth but I would alternate between Guinness and espresso throughout the night, argue until I was hoarse and then go home in the wicked light of morning, clothes reeking of smoke. Most of the group's efforts I have chosen to forget. One of my own lingers. It was an attempted insight into my grandmother, who then lived in a retirement community. My grandmother Stella has been the only bookish person in my family aside from myself. I was curious what she thought of life, her husband had died a few years before and there she was. She couldn't drive and was a terrible cook: in fact, we adjusted Thanksgiving to pizza from papa Johns for a number of years before she died. We never spoke of her ambitions and what she felt at the twilight of her life.

I really tried with that one piece I wrote for the group. It mimicked the closing monologue from Ulysses which I browsed in Ellmann's biography.

My attempt was brought to bear yesterday when I bought Skomsvold's novel yesterday. It is a fairly easy novel to climb into and the truth revealed isn't pretty but it is quite real. It also might be a likely outcome for my own life. I bought myself a collection of Deanna Durbin films as my grandmother had always lauded her. I have been deliberate in my approach. I want each of them a framing distance. I think this novel will fill in some of those blank margins.

If forced, I'd give it 3.5 stars; it did bruise despite its sleight approach.

IMO, more depressing than uplifting.

Mathea Martinson has lived her whole life being invisible to the outside world. From her schooldays, when even such a dramatic event as her being struck by lightening (twice) couldn't engender the sort of interest among her school fellows that she craved, and then throughout her life she has been isolated from the world at large. 'Don't you ever get the urge to talk to someone other than me?' Her husband Epsilon asks 'But I've done that' Mathea says 'Don't you remember the time I went with you to the Christmas party? But Epsilon is only a little more comfortable in society than Mathea is herself, his main interest being studying his full collection of the Statistical Yearbooks for the Kingdom of Norway for each year from 1880, and so their lives are lived away from other people.

But in old age, when she realises that all of the people in the obituary columns of the local newspaper are actually younger than she, Mathea determines that she will not die before letting the world know that she existed. But when even talking to a neighbour is a traumatic experience how can Mathea do this? She decides that she will bury a time capsule of her life in the courtyard of her apartment block to at least bear witness to the fact that she had lived.

This is a short and slightly surreal book about a seemingly wasted life. Mathea's isolation is not just that of old age, it is how she has lived her entire life. But surprisingly the ending, without being in the slightest bit sentimental, manages to be rather uplifting.

En beskrivelse av klinisk depresjon hos eldre. Det er den deprimertes egosentrisitet som fremfor noe stenger av for kommunikasjon med omverdenen. Den skyhøye synes-synd-på-seg-selv faktoren avsløres i hovedpersonens selvfremstilling. Hovedpersonens blikk på livet er så svart og puslete at det kaller på smilet hos leseren, og selv om humoren er svart, så hold på den; Å bli overempatisk, å ha så stor gjenkjennelsesfaktor på dette stoffet at en identifiserer seg med jeg-er-alene-i-verden-stakkars-meg, er direkte helseskadelig.

Ensidig, uttrøttende (kanskje meningen, for det er en form som får frem monotoniteten som preger livet til hovedpersonen). Boka er kort, men likevel altfor lang til å kjøre hjem poenget, en deprimert eldre dame. Hovedpersonens perspektiv er for snevert og hun er utstyrt med for lite ressurser til at du som leser kan akseptere at temaet er den humane eksistensielle problemstilling. Det humane eksistensielle livsvilkår er et stort og spennende tema, og gitt til reflekterte perspektivrike personer blir det stor litteratur. Kasuistikker om klinisk deprimerte eldre er viktig, men det er ikke skjønnlitteratur.

Enda en norsk navlebeskuer, denne gangen ser vi på navlen til en deprimert eldre dame.½

This little book packs quite a message. Mathea is a Norwegian woman whose main claim to fame is her long life. She is blunt about her social shortcomings in her search to find meaning at the end of life.

Mathea comes up with the idea of leaving her legacy in a time capsule. She writes with bittersweet humor as she considers which objects should represent her life of isolation. There's the TV that is a constant companion because "you want to get your money's worth after all." And then there's the telephone that never rings, "but think--what if someone calls? What if someone actually calls?" The 'sweetness' of her story turns into bitterness as she examines her life of loneliness. I was overcome by sadness when I found out what she finally decided to put in her time capsule.

I grew up listening to the gloomy stories of my Scandinavian grandparents, so this desolate novel written as a memoir rang true to me. It's one I'll keep and return to when my inherited melancholia emerges. It will remind me that I'm blessed to have family and friends in my life. It will also remind me to pay more attention to the solitary people in our midst who seek a kind word or touch to remind them that they are not alone.½

I bought this because of Stif Saeterbakken's recommendation; he calls it a "gloomy feel-good novel." I would normally never buy a book advertised as "feel-good," but Saeterbakken knows "gloomy" better than any other novelist. The book is a mixed achievement.

On the positive side: the character, a quirky, probably autistic, incommunicative, scattered, self-involved old woman, is memorable.

On the negative side: the book relies on brief images, anecdotes, page-long stories, and jokes. Often the jokes are maudlin, pathetic, and even bathetic, and sometimes fourth-generation surrealist. Some examples:

(The context for this first example is that the narrator (the old woman) tends to rhyme compulsively, and at one point in the book she has a writing.)

"Sometimes I wrote about a friend I had when I was little, but that didn't happen often, since it was hard to make 'she buried me in anthills' rhyme with anything." (p. 85)

I imagine that a reader is supposed to laugh at this, sensing the story of pointless humiliation and social isolation that will follow. I don't find this kind of thing convincing or funny: it just short-circuits any more carefully and slowly developed sense of character. The narrator is so thoroughly, reliable, predictably socially isolated that these kinds of stories don't elicit sympathy or amusement.

The woman and her husband barely speak to one another; the husband is also apparently a social outcast, and he only communicates in mathematical examples. One scene, in which he draws a Venn diagram to show that he's interested in another woman, is affecting. Most of the time his math-speak is reciprocated by her silence, or by something irrelevant she says, ruining the conversation. This could have been effective, if we had been given longer excerpts and contexts for their truncated exchanges, but instead Skomsvold prefers brief anecdotes that are supposed to be affecting:

"I wanted to tell him how much I cared about him, but instead I told him that last year seven people had been killed by sharks and fourteen by toasters. [He] gave me a strange look and I wanted to disappear." (p. 89)

I imagine Skomsvold's imaginary reader finds this funny and painful. But the ersatz surrealism is a thin, over-used strategy. And the dynamics of this scene are repeated throughout the book, so that there's nothing but a recurring disappointment: at first it's a disappointment that the two aren't communicating; then it's a disappointment that Skovold doesn't realize that expressing a lack of communication requires something other than the repetition of a single strategy.

I might read her next novel, if it has a better sense of large-scale motions of narrative. Large-scale structures, in which characters move through time on the scale of chapters and entire novels, do not make it impossible to express stasis. That assumption might be the reason this is a book of brief vignettes. It is potentially as dark as Saeterbakken,

A look in the life of a Norwegian woman who has never been comfortable around or communicating with people. Her loneliness is more acute as she reads the obituaries in the papers and realizes that old as she is, she's still alive while those she knew are dying. Her naive comments and blunt observations more often than not confuses her audience or causes them to cringe.

With her sudden realization that her life could be at an end soon, she feels a need to participate in the world, but is unsure how to do so. She starts to wear a watch in the hopes someone will ask her for the time - no one does. The grocery clerks ignore her. She bakes buns, planning to take them to a residents' meeting in her condominium, but eats them all before building up her courage to attend.

A tragicomedy in loneliness, it's a good read and it may make readers more aware of the people who are all too often ignored.

This debut by Norwegian Kjersti Skomsvold is a sparkling jewel of a novel. At around 140 smallish pages, The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am is not much more than a novella, really, but it tackles big themes like aging, mortality, and the loneliness of the human condition. The novel’s first-person narrator, Mathea Martinsen, has outlived her peers and is fed up with being invisible to the world. Even people Mathea interacts with take no notice of her, including the grocery store clerk: "When I give him my money, I touch the palm of his hand, but he doesn't notice. ... And if I was kidnapped five minutes later, and the cops came by and showed him my picture, the boy would say he'd never seen me before in his life."

In a quest to increase her social footprint, Mathea decides to take a series of actions to force people to notice her. She starts wearing a watch in the hopes someone will ask her what time it is, but nobody does. She bakes buns for a residents' meeting at her condominium but eats them all before mustering the courage to go to the meeting. She calls information and asks for her own number because "maybe Information keeps statistics as to the most requested and most loved person in the nation ... and I shouldn't just sit here moping around because my name isn't on it."

Because Mathea has always spent most of her time sequestered at home, her personality hasn’t been dulled by the hundreds of minor social corrections most of us experience every day. Her voice is a compelling mix of naiveté, blunt observations, and dark (often unintentional) humor. While reading passages like this one, I found myself alternating between cringing and laughing out loud: "I talked Epsilon [Mathea’s husband] into buying a rabbit, but didn't tell him it was because I couldn't be alone in the apartment anymore. He wouldn't understand. ‘I just love animals,’ I said. ‘Almost as much as Hitler did.’"

The ending of The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am is beautiful, tragic, and surprising. Best of all, it just might change the way you interact with the people around you who you’ve always ignored.

This review also appears on my blog Literary License.

En sorglig och humoristisk bok om ensamhet, om att inte passa in och förstå de sociala koderna, och om att inte märkas, inte räknas. Det tog en stund innan jag fastnade för Mathea; jag tyckte till en början att boken var lite tråkig och händelselös, men sedan började jag gilla den och läsningen flöt på av sig själv.½

Mathea Martinsen nærmer seg sjels år og alder og forbereder seg på at hun snart skal dø. Men så kan hun ikke helt forsone seg med at hun ikke har satt et eneste spor etter seg i løpet av sitt liv. Ja, at hun nærmest har vært usynlig. For hvor mange spor er det egentlig mulig for et menneske å sette etter seg når man et helt liv har vært redd for det meste - for livet selv - og knapt har vært utenfor døren av sitt eget hjem?

Mathea giftet seg i sin tid med Epsilon, kanskje det eneste mennesket som noen gang har lagt merke til henne. Gjennom et helt liv har han levd og åndet for tallene sine, statistikken sin. En gang får de nesten et barn, men bare nesten. Og et ørlite forsøk fra Epsilons side på å få sin kone ut av heimen og i jobb, strandet vel egentlig før det hadde kommet ordentlig i gang. Det eneste "beviset" på at så har skjedd, er en pose med tenner som har fulgt Mathea i tykt og tynt gjennom livet.

Før Mathea kan avfinne seg med at hun snart skal dø, forsøker hun så godt det lar seg gjøre å bli bitte litte grann mer synlig. Hun beveger seg ut av blokkleiligheten sin, drar til og med på kosestund på eldresenteret. Men blir hun mer synlig av den grunn? Eller mindre ensom? Og mindre redd for dø?

Gjennom munter-triste betraktninger får vi innblikk i hvordan det er å bli gammel. Ikke bare lo jeg så tårene trillet mange ganger underveis, men jeg fikk også lyst til å sitte med gul tusj å merke ut fantastiske setninger! Den ene språklige perlen etter den andre, aforismer og ordtak er flettet inn i teksten på en strålende måte!

Her har vi en debutant som har sitt helt eget språk, som ikke ligner på noen andre forfattere jeg har lest tidligere! Mens jeg mange ganger - etter å ha lest bøker av nye forfattere - sitter og tenker at "har de gått på samme forfatterskole, hele gjengen?", var disse tankene helt fraværende denne gangen. Det er en spenst og en friskhet over teksten som jeg opplever som et aldri så lite kunststykke! Så kan man selvsagt spørre seg om boka skildrer det å bli gammel på en realistisk måte. Mitt svar til det er at må nå alt være så fordømt realistisk bestandig? Nei - denne boka bør nytes for det den er: nemlig først og fremst en humoristisk og fandenivoldsk roman om det å bli gammel! Og hvem vet om det ikke også kan være slik!? Jeg kjenner faktisk flere 70-/80-åringer som til forveksling er nettopp slik - dvs. full av humør og vidd på tross av en skrantende helse (men uten den ensomheten som ble Mathea til del)! Noe som gjør det til en fornøyelse å kjenne dem ... ! Her blir det terningkast fem! Og så gleder jeg meg allerede til å høre mer fra denne unge forfatteren!½

Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold is a Norwegian author, and this is her debut novel published in Norway in 2009. The book has been sold to publishers in the US, Germany, Sweden and Denmark.

It starts off as a surreal story about a lonely old woman, Mathea Martinsen, living in Oslo. Mathea spends most of her time at home, in her apartment, waiting for her husband Epsilon, knitting and composing little rhymes. As we get to know her story, it is easy to see that Mathea is a woman who struggles to make contact with other people, and therefore she isolates herself at home. She does not want to make any fuss, do not want to be a problem for the staff in the grocery store, all in all, she is almost invisible.

But there has been a great change in Mathea’s life. Suddenly she spends a lot of her time checking out recent deaths, and she is making a time capsule, containing everything with some value from her life. Now, as an old woman she is stricken with a large grief, and she get scared that she will die before anyone knows she has lived.
I really liked this book. It is great to see how a book can be a “feelgood” novel and yet contain so many serious topics. Social anxiety, loneliness and death are all topics either discussed or showed through Mathea’s recollection of life and in her attempts to join the outside life again. I cry for Mathea, I cheer for Mathea, and in many ways I feel so sorry for her. You cannot help but being touched, in one way or the other, by her story. It is a tragedy and a comedy, all in once. Now I want to go visit my grandparents!