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.
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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.
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