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Een Glas Melk (1984)

by Herbjørg Wassmo(Favorite Author)

3.8 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

9044511378 (ISBN13: 9789044511376)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

De Geus

review 1: At first I couldn't help but get a bit mad with all the sentences so short I'd personally prefer having at least three of them together before closing the clause. Ended up letting that one go due to the possible and very likely differences between languages, translation process and such, and carried on. That wasn't the only thing that bothered me though, and the next one can be pinpointed solely on the author, the choices that have been made considering The Protagonist. She was naive, way too naive to be a believable fifteen year-old, even taking into account that she had grown up in the country, in a small village with a religious, sad mother. It was almost like she had been raised in the cellar or something, which certainly didn't do good to the fact that the author made... more it clear she was to be Adorable to everybody that met her. Most take children (and fuzzy animals) as adorable, they're Innocent and Pure, Proper until somebody messes them up. This Protagonist's, Dorte's, young age was continuously brought up with her love of milk, the highly nutritive drink most mothers ooze out to keep their new-borns alive. The common mistake here in Northern parts of the world is that milk is good for you, that it actually prevents illnesses such as osteoporosis, which it doesn't. Taking these points to consideration it comes even clearer Dorte was knowingly restoring her strengths, with a drink that reminded her of home and made her feel she wasn't so far away and so alone. So milk was kind of a synonym to hope, I guess. Another thing the author had taken advantage of, pretty cleverly actually, a belief originating from home, was the way she juxtapositioned Virginity as being Proper and Good and Not-Virginity as being completely Messed Up and Faulty. The fact that Dorte's pureness was broken against her own will was the thing that was used most aggressively to point out that she was an innocent victim ravaged by savages. Kudos to the fact there was barely any bothersome romanticizing going on, that pain was not glamorized and that it didn't make anything better. I also loved the fact the chapters were constructed, how they might hop wildly around in time and place, from sleep to dream to reality, to memories. What made the latter even better was that this was done in almost every chapter, it was constant and just right so, and they definitely gave depth to the girl that might otherwise have felt even emptier and simpler, also.
review 2: Despite the fact that this book is rather well-written and pretty gripping (kudos to the Russian translator too!), it left me with an overwhelming sense of despair and hopelessness. In fact, it felt like a nightmare - a horrible, extremely violent nightmare, and sometimes it seemed to me I could no longer stand it. My heart ached the whole time I read this novel. All those terrible things that happened to Dorte, oh my! This book is definitely not for the faint-hearted. less

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