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Dager I Stillhetens Historie (2011)

by Merethe Lindstrøm(Favorite Author)

3.57 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Aschehoug

review 1: At one point in the story the narrator ( a woman in her early sixties) finds an empty snail shell in her closet. She suspects her husband to have placed it there, but to tell her what? What is the message of the shell? Her husband has withdrawn into silence (caused by dementia or depression or a willful silence, we don't quite know.) Each of them, husband and wife, has things in their life they decided to be silent about, with themselves, with each other, with their children, with others. Painful truths or just truths that seemed inconvenient to be open about. Truths that could have been accepted and shared and thus transform pain and guilt into community. The beauty and the quiet terror of this book is that you feel in your bones that it is possible in this life to wait a... morend wait to reach out, to speak what you most want to say, to wait one more day to make the connections that make life worth living, and then it is too late. It is possible to let yourself go spiritually mute, to let yourself fall into living a life that has no living flesh inside, no life, an empty shell. One of those books of simple truth, written with delicate beauty, that may, if you let it, scare you awake . . . before it is too late.
review 2: WELL GOODNESS. This book came to me with the highest of recommendations and I will pass it along in the same way. Be forewarned: this book is heartbreaking, a compilation of one grief upon another upon one sad history upon another. This book redefined my expectations of "bleak," but also of the strength of a first person narrative - almost stream of consciousness, but not quite. Open and flowing, very rarely lingering on one event long enough to finish telling the story, before moving on and telling the next. Eva, the main character and narrator, is one of the most aware narrators I've experienced in a good long while, and her telling of her life with her husband, and their parallel declines, was so incredible, I easily read this book in two volumes. less

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