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Fiction
Publisher:
The intercourse
Translator:
Inger Bråtveit
Release year:
2022
«Anxious, reflective and poetic about becoming a mother.»
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An author and mother of young children comes across a pile of papers from when she became pregnant and the first two years into her son’s life. In the aftermath of the birth, she developed anxiety, felt lonely, and began in an anxiety group without much effect. The pile of paper bears the mark of being written while this was going on.
To protect herself from the bad experience, the author of the book imagines that it is someone other than herself who is behind the words. She calls her Anna. Anna’s story about the demanding life as a mother is processed and completed in Anna’s – and Ravn’s latest book, “My Work”. The book’s author is pregnant again, and in a week’s she will round out the last day of the first trimester.
Impressive
At the same time as she detaches herself from herself in this way, the book’s author disintegrates. She tells about Anna in the third person, and due to clutter in the pile of paper, she has not managed to sort the notes chronologically.
The book is a mixture of a wide range of genres: prose, medical journal, poetry, letters, diary, drama and essay writing, which gives it a complex feel. It is impressive how well Ravn both masters each of the genres, and makes them work together.
Equally impressive is how Ravn makes great literature from something as personal as a self-experienced postpartum depression. The publisher calls the book a novel, while news headlines in Anna’s diary taken from the reader’s reality and the fact that the book’s narrator is an author, works in a publishing house and is a mother of young children just like Ravn, contribute to the book’s autobiographical color.
A candy basket of a novel
One of the letters in the book is signed “ANNA”, thus, with spaces between each letter, which reinforces the impression of the author’s feeling of not being himself. Throughout the book, she reflects on her opportunity to be a writer at the same time as being a mother. It makes it difficult to be both when she experiences her son and herself as one. One of the poems in the book states that: “he misses my hands like a skin”.
Recapture forgotten years
On the other hand, the author writes a letter to Anna, only signed «DI». The omission of the author’s name in the letters can be read as a dumb acknowledgment that Anna and the author are after all the same person, an attempt to recapture the forgotten years of the author’s life: «To collect and sort these papers and documents has to seventh and lastly, an attempt to recreate three years of life that have disappeared from my memory, and which I, in the same way as the reader, only have access to here. “
The title of the book refers to this sorting work, and to giving birth to your child, and to loving it. The author eventually makes it clear that it costs a lot to write the book. The common denominator of writing and birth in the author’s work tells us that the author experiences the writing itself as a birth. And it’s just over.
In the same body
Ravn sometimes uses the same effective grip as Hanne Ørstavik does in the novel «Ti amo», where the text is close to the environment the author writes in, and interruptions in the writing are included. The reflection on the mother’s role as animalistic and instinctive is similar to what Monica Isakstuen writes about being a mother in the novel «Be kind to the animals».
– Puts me completely out
The occasional sentence in “My Work” seems superfluous, like the comparison of a nebulizer with a breast pump, and the realization of barely noticing pregnant women before she herself became pregnant. But all in all, the book is a poetic, genre-tuned and well-translated story about a gloomy and difficult motherhood, and the question of whether a mother and a writer can live in the same body at the same time.
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