Good read. Interesting story with underlying issues. Worth reading more of Bohman ( )

"Dypest sett har jeg alltid vært ensom."

En kvinne i midten av 20-årene jobber som renholder på et sykehuskjøkken i en liten industriby ved kysten i Sverige. Hun er opptatt av litteratur og kunst, og vil bli forfatter, men er stuck i en stygg liten hybel og med en dårlig betalt vikarjobb.

Ensomheten ligger som et tynt slør over livet hennes. Dette illustreres også i boka ved at det hele tiden er dårlig vær. Grått og fuktig. Klamt og kaldt.

Hun treffer Carl, en gift lege som jobber på samme sykehus og innleder et hemmelig forhold med ham. Nå får hun kjenne på en annerledes følelse av ensomhet. En følelse som forsvinner når hun er med ham, men intensiveres og blir sterkere enn noen gang når han er med familien sin. Hun kjenner også på en stor urettferdighet. Hun er misunnelig på kona hans som lever det livet hun, jeg-personen, ønsker seg: et liv sammen med Carl, med en god jobb, i et vakkert hjem.

Hun søker lindring i alkohol og tilbringer mye tid med Alex, en ny venninne med tvilsom moral, en skjult fortid og en egen grunn til å ville ødelegge for denne Carl. Jeg-personen skjønner det ikke før det er for sent, eller så bryr hun seg ikke. Uansett ender ting stygt, men jeg-personen får i hvert fall noe ut av situasjonen da Carl og kona tilbyr henne penger og en leilighet i Stockholm for å bli kvitt henne fra livene deres.

Da en mer privilegert venninne etterspør moralen i det å ta penger fra noen på den måten, svarer jeg-personen at "moral er for de som har råd." dette er en godt skrevet moderne skildring av en intelligent ung kvinne med små midler og muligheter for å realisere seg selv og oppnå sine mål, og alt det kan føre med seg av fysiske og psykiske belastninger. ( )

Den andra kvinnan är ju egentligen en standardhistoria som det säkert har skrivits 1000 tals böcker om. Ändå griper Therese Bohmans språk och gestaltning tag i mig. Hennes språk, beskrivning av tankar och dyl. gör hon riktigt bra och skiljer sig därmed från mängden. Klart läsvärd. ( )

Sometimes the title of the book gives you more than a good sense of what a book is going to be about. Therese Bohman's The Other Woman is one such title. There's no doubt that it's about an affair. What you still have to read it to uncover is the actual story though because all affairs are both alike and yet unique to the two people involved.

Our attractive, young, unnamed narrator is a working class girl taking a break from her education for lack of money. She works in the cafeteria of a hospital in the small Swedish city of Norrkoping and leads a monotonous, conventional life. But the narrator wants to write a novel and she wants to have a life worthy of being possible subject matter for that novel. The boring meaninglessness of her life, of her very existence, won't do. One day she sees an attractive, married, well dressed older doctor in the cafeteria, a man she has occasionally wondered about having an affair with and she accepts a ride home from him after missing her bus. As she is getting to know Carl and ultimately seducing him, she is also getting to know Alex, a girl her age who is exciting and friendly and who has a secret that will change everything for the narrator and have repercussions that resonate both in an out of her inevitable affair with Carl.

The novel is a slow psychological study with a selfish and often unsympathetic narrator. But for all that, she's still rather fascinating. Her pursuit of Carl and her subsequent fantasies inserting herself in his life feel predatory even though he is equally culpable in their affair. Her relationship with Carl and the jealousy she feels towards his wife and children is not the only destructive force here though. There are several depictions of power imbalances, the darkness of money and class differences, and the question of fidelity and its worth. The first person narration puts the reader directly in the narrator's head, seeing the manipulations as well as the naivete. The story is quite slow starting and very philosophical in tone. The narrator's pre-affair life is dull and no recounting of it will change that so it's a bit of a chore to get past it to the real meat of the story. Once you do though, you see that the narrator is creating a version of herself, the other woman, a writer, something more than her surface suggests. Even when her choices go from bad to worse, she is forging the identity of the woman she will become on the other side of this affair and the other side of her friendship with Alex. This is a translation from the Swedish and will appeal to readers who don't mind extended character studies, moral ambiguity, and a lot of introspection balanced with a healthy sense of self-worth. ( )

Therese Bohman has written a book that is so far from anything I've read in a long time that I hardly know how to categorize it. 'The Other Woman' is told by an unnamed narrator whom we follow in spurts throughout the book. She works as a temporary worker in a hospital cafeteria, where she meets a doctor whom she instantaneously develops a crush on. This seems all well and innocent until, as the story unfolds, we learn that he is married, has children of his own, and might not be the honest and virtuous man that we thought he was. Old enough to be her father, their lives begin to interweave and they must determine what the best course of action for their relationship might be.

Let me tell you, this is a whirlwind of a book. ...but in a good way.

Because it's not a lengthy read (approx 200 pages with large text), it's hard to tell too much without giving it away. Trust me, it's worth your time and effort because it's just so different. It took me a little while to get into - in fact, at about 40% through I was wondering if there was any point at all. But when the pace started to pick up, boy oh boy, it was all I could do to tear myself away for long enough to cook dinner.

I will tell you this, though: this was one of those books that I didn't fall in love with immediately. I found myself questioning what was going on, why the characters sometimes didn't make total sense, etc. But immediately after closing the cover and finishing....I just felt like I got it. Like all of the puzzle pieces that kept me from loving it DURING the read fit together so that I could look back upon it fondly AFTER I read it. Not to mention my love for surprise endings...

I believe that the story within this book is just the surface of what you can take away from it. It's also to teach us about perceptions - perceptions of ourselves, perceptions of others, perceptions of what we don't know, perceptions of the world. Everything that happens to us is shaped by the way we see it - sometimes even to our own detriment. They often say that "when one door closes, another one opens," but as we see in this twisted story, such is not always the case.

This book is art. It's not something that I would take to the beach as something to escape into for hours in the sun. No, this is something you spend a Saturday afternoon reading and then the rest of the next week thinking about. It was like going to a museum and seeing a painting that you don't quite get while you're staring at it, but once you look back you realize that it truly was something beautiful to behold. I can't compare it to anything else I've ever read, but that might be just another reason why I enjoyed it so much.


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