BOOKS FROM DENMARKMy Work
by Olga Ravn
Tags:
Female author
Description:
From the acclaimed author of The Employees, a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood. After giving birth, Anna is utterly lost. She and her family move to the unfamiliar, snowy city of Stockholm. Anxiety threatens to completely engulf Anna, who obsessively devours online news and compulsively orders clothes she can’t afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she forces herself to read and write. My Work is a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of giving birth, mixing different literary forms—fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and letters—to explore the relationship between motherhood, work, individuality, and literature.“Olga Ravn writes dazzlingly about the work of motherhood and the work of writing. Reading Ravn’s book, you run through the whole gamut of human emotion, as though you too were a new mother: tears, laughter, anger, fear, pain, frustration. This is powerful writing that’s hard to put down.”—Politiken
Reviews:
(2 months ago) |
04 Aug, 2025
A challenging book, in both form and content, about pregnancy, birth, being a mother, and writing. It is frequently brilliant, mixing multiple forms of writing: poetry, prose in first and third person, diary entries, letters, medical notes and reports, lists, pamphlets, analyses of related texts, quotations, scripts for a play, transcripts of conversations, newspaper headlines...
I found my mind wandering a lot, maybe because it evokes personal reflections and rumination, or maybe it’s just too long for such experimental writing.
I described it to my wife as a cross between Emma Glass’ Rest and Be Thankful, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and the auto fiction of Deborah Levy. The author explicitly states it is influenced by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Lessing’s the Golden Notebook
Translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell
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